City of The Hague new partner to ECDA’s ecosystem

In 2021 a team of data officers and other co-workers - led by Tanaquil Arduin, chief data officer of the municipality of The Hague - joined ECDA’s leadership challenge with data analytics programme. The team worked on a prototype with the objective to increase the effectiveness of the Haagse Pandbrigade (HPB), so that more violations can be tackled in a targeted manner with less money and people. The result included an advice and a proof-of-concept prototype with which the HPB can combine knowledge and human decision rules about practice with automated systems.

Privacy by design and the optimal mix between humans and machines to properly weigh up ethical dilemmas were starting points of the solution. The team was awarded as winning team in the leadership challenge with data analytics competition among participating teams (other teams included City of Rotterdam, ING and SURF). Tanaquil Arduin said: “Participation in ECDA’s leadership challenge programme helped us to strengthen our team and to understand from a scientific point of view the challenges of modern datadriven organizations. ”As part of the signed collaboration with ECDA the municipality of The Hague will continue to participate in the leadership challenge programme, to spread a data-driven way of working and thinking among the organization. Practices will be shared with other partners in ECDA’s ecosystem and joined research projects will be developed and intensified with several of ECDA’s expert practices in the context of the strategic convergence programme Resilient Delta.

The ECDA, City of Rotterdam and municipality of The Hague will also join forces in the recently launched collaboration platform ‘Grenzeloos Datalandschap’, together with the Province of South-Holland.

Finally, collaboration in the context of the Dutch AI coalition’s programme on AI for Peace, Justice and Security will be an important building block for the collaboration with the municipality of The Hague – as part of the convergence programme on data, AI & digitalization.

Dr Marcel van Oosterhout, associate executive director ECDA said “ECDA’s ambition to contribute to societal challenges such as the energy transition and creating resilient and sustainable cities only works, if we create an ecosystem where public and private partners collaborate and co-create with academics and students. We believe that data, digitalization, and AI will be important enablers for creating this societal impact. However, this is only to a small extend about technology, moreover it is about social innovation, creating trust, new ways of innovating. That is exactly what we aim for with our ecosystem of partners. We welcome the city of the Hague as Smart City frontrunner to strengthen our ecosystem!”