Ethical Risk Traceability in Smart City KPIs Assessment

ABSTRACT The interest in smart city initiatives is continuously growing, and so is the interest in measuring their smartness and sustainability. The value of a Smart City is proved by comparing its results with sustainability goals and by measuring the benefits delivered to stakeholders, citizens and city authorities. For this reason, supporting the monitoring and evolution of smart cities is a challenging and crucial task. This can be accomplished by using key performance indicators (KPIs), which, in turn, inform the decision‐making processes of smart city governance. However, ethical implications in KPIs evaluation may be hidden within the measurement process. For example, low trustworthiness of data sources used to collect KPIs input parameters can affect evaluation results without KPIs experts being aware of these implications. Ethical implications that could represent a perceived violation of an ethical value should be highlighted when KPIs results are proposed to stakeholders. In this paper, we have integrated an ethical risk traceability mechanism into MIKADO , a tool that we designed for assessing KPIs in smart cities. This mechanism involves both KPIs and ethics experts in the evaluation process, ensuring that the KPI assessment results—presented through dashboards obtained through code generation—include warnings about potential ethical issues. The extended framework has been evaluated by experts in the field during a dedicated focus group, who confirmed its usefulness in identifying ethical implications in the evaluation of smart city KPIs, with the aim of tracing ethical risks, and supporting ethics experts in carrying out this task.