Thank you very much.
My name is Colleen Hardwick. I am the founder of PlaceSpeak, which is a Vancouver-based civic tech start-up that we've been developing for the last five years here.
About six years ago I was looking at the west side of Vancouver, specifically the Arbutus corridor, trying to figure out how to consult with the residents that lived along that corridor in such a way as to be able to prove it. We looked at traditional methods, such as public meetings and door-knocking and landline telephones, and quickly came to the conclusion that we weren't going to be able to get reliable and defensible data in this way.
The question then became how we could connect people's digital identities to place online, and prove it in such a way that was defensible and legitimate. This led to the development of this platform, which we have been developing with the support of the National Research Council of Canada through its industrial research assistance program, or IRAP.
We've learned over time that there is no silver bullet with identity, and that digital identity authentication in terms of citizen engagement, which is a natural part of the political process, the democratic process, is achievable. There is an organization that you may or may not be familiar with, called DIACC, the Digital ID and Authentication Council of Canada. Digital identity to authentication to place has the potential to be quite transformational broadly in democratic processes.
I missed some of the earlier discussions around Internet voting, but I wouldn't be so quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater, because there are developments that are under way where this country is actually taking a leadership and pioneering role in digital identity authentication, protection of individual privacy, and data encryption.
If we want to be engaging with people on an ongoing basis, it has to be through what we're referring to as a digital identity echo system that consists of different levels of government, banks, telecommunications and technology companies, which are all leading the way to take us to the next level of actionable feedback from individuals broadly, not just in elections, but throughout the democratic cycle, because citizen engagement and popular control is as important as the payoff of empowerment with voting.
Thank you very much.