This report captures an overview of the existing data deficit and the value and impact of big data for sustainable development.

The authors of the report focus on four main priorities towards a sustainable data revolution: commercial incentives and trusted agreements with public- and private-sector actors; the development of shared policy frameworks, legal protections and impact assessments; capacity building activities at the institutional, community, local and individual level; and lastly, recognizing individuals as both produces and consumers of data.

This research has developed a monitoring framework to assess the effects of open (private) data using a case study of a Dutch energy network administrator Liander.

Focusing on the potential impacts of open private energy data – beyond ‘smart disclosure’ where citizens are given information only about their own energy usage – the authors identify three attainable strategic goals:

• Continuously optimize performance on services, security of supply, and costs;
• Improve management of energy flows and insight into energy consumption;
• Help customers save energy and switch over to renewable energy sources.

The authors propose a seven-step framework for assessing the impacts of Liander data, in particular, and open private data more generally:

• Develop a performance framework to describe what the program is about, description of the organization’s mission and strategic goals;
• Identify the most important elements, or key performance areas which are most critical to understanding and assessing your program’s success;
• Select the most appropriate performance measures;
• Determine the gaps between what information you need and what is available;
• Develop and implement a measurement strategy to address the gaps;
• Develop a performance report which highlights what you have accomplished and what you have learned;
• Learn from your experiences and refine your approach as required.

While the authors note that the true impacts of this open private data will likely not come into view in the short term, they argue that, “Liander has successfully demonstrated that private energy companies can release open data, and has successfully championed the other Dutch network administrators to follow suit.”

The paper presents a research study conducted on the basis of the mobile calls records shared with researchers in the framework of the Data for Development Challenge by the mobile operator Orange.

The study discusses the data analysis approach in relation to developing a situation of Ebola diffusion built around “the interactions of multi-scale models, including viral loads (at the cellular level), disease progression (at the individual person level), disease propagation (at the workplace and family level), societal changes in migration and travel movements (at the population level), and mitigating interventions (at the abstract government policy level).”

The authors argue that the use of their population, mobility, and simulation models provide more accurate simulation details in comparison to high-level analytical predictions and that the D4D mobile datasets provide high-resolution information useful for modeling developing regions and hard to reach locations.

This piece articulates a set of key lessons learned during a session at the International Data Responsibility Conference focused on identifying emerging practices, opportunities and challenges confronting data collaboratives.

The authors list a number of privately held data sources that could create positive public impacts if made more accessible in a collaborative manner, including:

• Data for early warning systems to help mitigate the effects of natural disasters;
• Data to help understand human behavior as it relates to nutrition and livelihoods in developing countries;
• Data to monitor compliance with weapons treaties;
• Data to more accurately measure progress related to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

To the end of identifying and expanding on emerging practice in the space, the authors describe a number of current data collaborative experiments, including:

• Trusted Intermediaries: Statistics Netherlands partnered with Vodafone to analyze mobile call data records in order to better understand mobility patterns and inform urban planning.
• Prizes and Challenges: Orange Telecom, which has been a leader in this type of Data Collaboration, provided several examples of the company’s initiatives, such as the use of call data records to track the spread of malaria as well as their experience with Challenge 4 Development.
• Research partnerships: The Data for Climate Action project is an ongoing large-scale initiative incentivizing companies to share their data to help researchers answer particular scientific questions related to climate change and adaptation.
• Sharing intelligence products: JPMorgan Chase shares macro economic insights they gained leveraging their data through the newly established JPMorgan Chase Institute.

In order to capitalize on the opportunities provided by data collaboratives, a number of needs were identified:

• A responsible data framework;
• Increased insight into different business models that may facilitate the sharing of data;
• Capacity to tap into the potential value of data;
• Transparent stock of available data supply; and
• Mapping emerging practices and models of sharing.

The authors of this Overseas Development Institute report highlight the need for good quality, relevant, accessible and timely data for governments to extend services into underrepresented communities and implement policies towards a sustainable “data revolution.”

The report explores solutions focused on capacity-building activities of national statistical offices (NSOs), alternative sources of data (including shared corporate data) to address gaps, and building strong data management systems.

The essay refers to data collaboratives as a new form of collaboration involving participants from different sectors exchanging data to help solve public problems. These forms of collaborations can improve people’s lives through data-driven decision-making; information exchange and coordination; and shared standards and frameworks for multi-actor, multi-sector participation.

The essay cites four activities that are critical to accelerating data collaboratives: documenting value and measuring impact; matching public demand and corporate supply of data in a trusted way; training and convening data providers and users; experimenting and scaling existing initiatives.

This essay, included in the Harvard Berkman Center’s 2014 Internet Monitor, describes a taxonomy of current corporate data sharing practices for public good: research partnerships; prizes and challenges; trusted intermediaries; application programming interfaces (APIs); intelligence products; and corporate data cooperatives or pooling.

Examples of data collaboratives discussed in the piece include: Yelp Dataset Challenge, the Digital Ecologies Research Partnerhsip, BBVA Innova Challenge, Telecom Italia’s Big Data Challenge, NIH’s Accelerating Medicines Partnership and the White House’s Climate Data Partnerships.

The authors highlight important questions to consider towards a more comprehensive mapping of these activities.

The authors of this report provide a “systematic literature of potential barriers to public health data sharing.” These twenty potential barriers are classified in six categories: “technical, motivational, economic, political, legal and ethical.” In this taxonomy, “the first three categories are deeply rooted in well-known challenges of health information systems for which structural solutions have yet to be found; the last three have solutions that lie in an international dialogue aimed at generating consensus on policies and instruments for data sharing.”

The authors suggest the need for a “systematic framework of barriers to data sharing in public health” in order to accelerate access and use of data for public good.

This journal article describes how privately held data – namely “digital traces” of consumer activity – “are becoming seen by policymakers and researchers as a potential solution to the lack of reliable statistical data on lower-income countries.”

They focus especially on three categories of data collaborative use cases:

• Mobile data as a predictive tool for issues such as human mobility and economic activity;
• Use of mobile data to inform humanitarian response to crises; and
• Use of born-digital web data as a tool for predicting economic trends, and the implications these have for LMICs.

They note, however, that a number of challenges and drawbacks exist for these types of use cases, including:

• Access to private data sources often must be negotiated or bought, “which potentially means substituting negotiations with corporations for those with national statistical offices;”
• The meaning of such data is not always simple or stable, and local knowledge is needed to understand how people are using the technologies in question
• Bias in proprietary data can be hard to understand and quantify;
• Lack of privacy frameworks; and
• Power asymmetries, wherein “LMIC citizens are unwittingly placed in a panopticon staffed by international researchers, with no way out and no legal recourse.”

This working paper acknowledges the growing body of work on how different types of data (e.g, telecom data, social media, sensors and geospatial data, etc.) can address data gaps relevant to National Statistical Offices (NSOs).

Four models of public-private interaction for statistics are describe: in-house production of statistics by a data-provider for a national statistics office (NSO), transfer of data-sets to NSOs from private entities, transfer of data to a third party provider to manage the NSO and private entity data, and the outsourcing of NSO functions.

The paper highlights challenges to public-private partnerships involving data (e.g., technical challenges, data confidentiality, risks, limited incentives for participation), suggests deliberate and highly structured approaches to public-private partnerships involving data require enforceable contracts, emphasizes the trade-off between data specificity and accessibility of such data, and the importance of pricing mechanisms that reflect the capacity and capability of national statistic offices.

Case studies referenced in the paper include:

• A mobile network operator’s (MNO Telefonica) in house analysis of call detail records;
• A third-party data provider and steward of travel statistics (Positium);
• The Data for Development (D4D) challenge organized by MNO Orange; and
• Statistics Netherlands use of social media to predict consumer confidence.

This paper discusses the concept of a “boundary organization” in relation to industry-academic partnerships driven by data. Boundary organizations perform mediated revealing, allowing firms to disclose their research problems to a broad audience of innovators and simultaneously minimize the risk that this information would be adversely used by competitors.

The authors identify two especially important challenges for private firms to enter open data or participate in data collaboratives with the academic research community that could be addressed through more involvement from boundary organizations:

• First is a challenge of maintaining competitive advantage. The authors note that, “the more a firm attempts to align the efforts in an open data research programme with its R&D priorities, the more it will have to reveal about the problems it is addressing within its proprietary R&D.”
• Second, involves the misalignment of incentives between the private and academic field. Perkmann and Schildt argue that, a firm seeking to build collaborations around its opened data “will have to provide suitable incentives that are aligned with academic scientists’ desire to be rewarded for their work within their respective communities.”

This report describes the impact of using mobile data in order to understand the impact of disasters and improve disaster management. The report was conducted in the Mexican state of Tabasco in 2009 as a multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder consortium involving the UN World Food Programme (WFP), Telefonica Research, Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Digital Strategy Coordination Office of the President of Mexico, and UN Global Pulse.

Telefonica Research, a division of the major Latin American telecommunications company, provided call detail records covering flood-affected areas for nine months. This data was combined with “remote sensing data (satellite images), rainfall data, census and civil protection data.” The results of the data demonstrated that “analysing mobile activity during floods could be used to potentially locate damaged areas, efficiently assess needs and allocate resources (for example, sending supplies to affected areas).”

In addition to the results, the study highlighted “the value of a public-private partnership on using mobile data to accurately indicate flooding impacts in Tabasco, thus improving early warning and crisis management.”

This Medium post from Gideon Mann, the Head of Data Science at Bloomberg, shares his prepared remarks given at a lecture at the City College of New York. Mann argues for the potential benefits of increasing access to private sector data, both to improve research and academic inquiry and also to help solve practical, real-world problems. He also describes a number of initiatives underway at Bloomberg along these lines.

Mann argues that data generated at private companies “could enable amazing discoveries and research,” but is often inaccessible to those who could put it to those uses. Beyond research, he notes that corporate data could, for instance, benefit:

• Public health – including suicide prevention, addiction counseling and mental health monitoring.
• Legal and ethical questions – especially as they relate to “the role algorithms have in decisions about our lives,” such as credit checks and resume screening.

Mann recognizes the privacy challenges inherent in private sector data sharing, but argues that it is a common misconception that the only two choices are “complete privacy or complete disclosure.” He believes that flexible frameworks for differential privacy could open up new opportunities for responsibly leveraging data collaboratives.

This journal article explores the benefits and, in particular, the risks related to large-scale biomedical databases bringing together health information from a diversity of sources across sectors. Some data collaboratives examined in the piece include:

• MedMining – a company that extracts EHR data, de-identifies it, and offers it to researchers. The data sets that MedMining delivers to its customers include ‘lab results, vital signs, medications, procedures, diagnoses, lifestyle data, and detailed costs’ from inpatient and outpatient facilities.
• Explorys has formed a large healthcare database derived from financial, administrative, and medical records. It has partnered with major healthcare organizations such as the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and Summa Health System to aggregate and standardize health information from ten million patients and over thirty billion clinical events.

Hoffman and Podgurski note that biomedical databases populated have many potential uses, with those likely to benefit including: “researchers, regulators, public health officials, commercial entities, lawyers,” as well as “healthcare providers who conduct quality assessment and improvement activities,” regulatory monitoring entities like the FDA, and “litigants in tort cases to develop evidence concerning causation and harm.”

They argue, however, that risks arise based on:

• The data contained in biomedical databases is surprisingly likely to be incorrect or incomplete;
• Systemic biases, arising from both the nature of the data and the preconceptions of investigators are serious threats the validity of research results, especially in answering causal questions;
• Data mining of biomedical databases makes it easier for individuals with political, social, or economic agendas to generate ostensibly scientific but misleading research findings for the purpose of manipulating public opinion and swaying policymakers.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of industry-led efforts and cross-sector collaborations in data sharing by pharmaceutical companies to inform clinical practice.

The article details the types of data being shared and the early activities of GlaxoSmithKline (“in coordination with other companies such as Roche and ViiV”); Medtronic and the Yale University Open Data Access Project; and Janssen Pharmaceuticals (Johnson & Johnson). The article also describes the range of involvement in data sharing among pharmaceutical companies including Pfizer, Novartis, Bayer, AbbVie, Eli Llly, AstraZeneca, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

This paper proposes a decision model for data sharing of public and private data based on literature review and three case studies in the logistics sector.

The authors identify five categories of the barriers to data sharing and offer a decision model for identifying potential interventions to overcome each barrier:

• Ownership. Possible interventions likely require improving trust among those who own the data through, for example, involvement and support from higher management
• Privacy. Interventions include “anonymization by filtering of sensitive information and aggregation of data,” and access control mechanisms built around identity management and regulated access.
• Economic. Interventions include a model where data is shared only with a few trusted organizations, and yield management mechanisms to ensure negative financial consequences are avoided.
• Data quality. Interventions include identifying additional data sources that could improve the completeness of datasets, and efforts to improve metadata.
• Technical. Interventions include making data available in structured formats and publishing data according to widely agreed upon data standards.

Using Ebola as a case study, the authors describe the value of using private telecom data for uncovering “valuable insights into understanding the spread of infectious diseases as well as strategies into micro-target outreach and driving update of health-seeking behavior.”

The authors highlight the absence of a common legal and standards framework for “sharing mobile phone data in privacy-conscientious ways” and recommend “engaging companies, NGOs, researchers, privacy experts, and governments to agree on a set of best practices for new privacy-conscientious metadata sharing models.”

This Chatham House report provides an overview on public health surveillance data sharing, highlighting the benefits and challenges of shared health data and the complexity in adapting technical solutions from other sectors for public health.

The report describes data sharing processes from several perspectives, including in-depth case studies of actual data sharing in practice at the individual, organizational and sector levels. Among the key lessons for public health data sharing, the report strongly highlights the need to harness momentum for action and maintain collaborative engagement: “Successful data sharing communities are highly collaborative. Collaboration holds the key to producing and abiding by community standards, and building and maintaining productive networks, and is by definition the essence of data sharing itself. Time should be invested in establishing and sustaining collaboration with all stakeholders concerned with public health surveillance data sharing.”

Examples of data collaboratives include H3Africa (a collaboration between NIH and Wellcome Trust) and NHS England’s care.data programme.

This article describes collaborative arrangements that include public and private organizations working together and proposes a model for understanding an emergent form of public-private interaction informed by 137 diverse cases of collaborative governance.

The article suggests factors significant to successful partnering processes and outcomes include:

• Shared understanding of challenges,
• Trust building processes,
• The importance of recognizing seemingly modest progress, and
• Strong indicators of commitment to the partnership’s aspirations and process.

The authors provide a ‘’contingency theory model’’ that specifies relationships between different variables that influence outcomes of collaborative governance initiatives. Three “core contingencies’’ for successful collaborative governance initiatives identified by the authors are:

• Time (e.g., decision making time afforded to the collaboration);
• Interdependence (e.g., a high degree of interdependence can mitigate negative effects of low trust); and
• Trust (e.g. a higher level of trust indicates a higher probability of success).

This white paper, produced by “a group of activists, researchers and data experts” explores the potential of big data to improve development outcomes and spur positive social change in low- and middle-income countries. Using examples, the authors discuss four areas in which the use of big data can impact development efforts:

• Advocating and facilitating by “opening[ing] up new public spaces for discussion and awareness building;
• Describing and predicting through the detection of “new correlations and the surfac[ing] of new questions;
• Facilitating information exchange through “multiple feedback loops which feed into both research and action,” and
• Promoting accountability and transparency, especially as a byproduct of crowdsourcing efforts aimed at “aggregat[ing] and analyz[ing] information in real time.

The authors argue that in order to maximize the potential of big data’s use in development, “there is a case to be made for building a data commons for private/public data, and for setting up new and more appropriate ethical guidelines.”

They also identify a number of challenges, especially when leveraging data made accessible from a number of sources, including private sector entities, such as:

• Lack of general data literacy;
• Lack of open learning environments and repositories;
• Lack of resources, capacity and access;
• Challenges of sensitivity and risk perception with regard to using data;
• Storage and computing capacity; and
• Externally validating data sources for comparison and verification.

• In light of the significant challenges and opportunities presented by sharing clinical trial data, the IOM assembled a team of ad-hoc experts to create guiding principles for data sharing intended to maximize the scientific value of data sharing while also protecting the privacy of those involved.
• All stakeholders - including participants, sponsors, regulators, investigators, research institutions, journals, and professional societies - have a role and responsibility to ensure that data is shared responsibly and in accordance with ethical values.
• The report has four main recommendations for stakeholders that will share data: 1) that stakeholders should encourage and foster a professional environment in which the responsible sharing of data is the norm; 2) that data should be shared within certain timeframes specified within the report; 3) that stakeholders should employ operational strategies designed to mitigate risk and maximize benefits; and 4) that the sponsors of the IOM study ought to take the lead in creating an international framework and infrastructure related to responsible sharing of clinical trial data.

In this article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Stefaan Verhulst analyses how an increasing number of companies are using their data for social good, evidence for a new concept of “data responsibility” where data and information is used to reach positive public ends. Data Responsibility is defined as steps companies can take to open their proprietary data to external bodies, who can use this information to confront humanitarian emergencies and public problems. Central to this is the creation of “Data Collaboratives”—data-sharing models between corporations and public institutions, NGOs, and academic bodies. The article goes on to detail the “Three Pillars of Data Responsibility” which include: • Share: the duty for data-holders to share their data. • Protect: the need to protect data through adequate anonymization techniques. • Act: the need for policy makers and leaders to act upon the information and data shared. The article ends by calling on a “culture shift” to incorporate concepts of data responsibility into day-to-day company activities, and outlying four practical steps to make this happen.

This articles provides non profits with three guiding principles on how to effectively incorporate data science into their operations. (1) Collaborate with data science experts to define your project. (2) Collaborate across your organization to “build with, not for.” (3) Collaborate across your sector to move the needle.

– “The report reviews the challenges the field is currently facing and discusses a range of issues preventing mobile data from being used for social good. – It continues by providing a set of recommendations intended to move beyond short-term and ad hoc projects to more systematic and institutionalized implementations that are scalable, replicable, sustainable and focused on impact. – Finally, the report proposes a roadmap for 2018 calling all stakeholders to work on developing a scalable and impactful demonstration project that will help to establish the value of mobile data for social good. – The report includes examples of innovation projects and ways in which mobile data is already being used to inform development and humanitarian work. It is intended to inspire social impact organizations and mobile network operators (MNOs) to collaborate in the exploration and application of new data sources, methods and technologies.”

– “The report seeks to provide insights about why companies share data with academic researchers, how they make that data available for research, the perceived risks from sharing data, and the strategies that companies employ to address those risks. – Participants that provided information for the report came from 19 companies across diverse sectors, such as high-tech manufacturing, workforce, education, healthcare, telecommunucations, real estate, ecommerce, data-related services, transportation, consumer genetics testing, and online services. – Future of Privacy Forum researchers use the insights gathered from interviews with these companies to identify opportunities for private data sharing. Some recommendations include the potential to enhance a positive public profile of a company sharing data, to increase peer-to-peer knowledge sharing networks, to create a clearinghouse to match academics to companies with the research that they need, and to develop safeguards to mitigate perceived risks.”

Purpose In “data collaboratives”, private and public organizations coordinate their activities to leverage data to address a societal challenge. This paper aims to focus on analyzing challenges and coordination mechanisms of data collaboratives.

Design/methodology/approach This study uses coordination theory to identify and discuss the coordination problems and coordination mechanisms associated with data collaboratives. The authors also use a taxonomy of data collaborative forms from a previous empirical study to discuss how different forms of data collaboratives may require different coordination mechanisms.

Findings The study analyzed data collaboratives from the perspective of organizational and task levels. At the organizational level, the authors argue that data collaboratives present an example of the bazaar form of coordination. At the task level, the authors identified five coordination problems and discussed potential coordination mechanisms to address them, such as coordination by negotiation, by third party, by standardization, to name a few.

Research limitations/implications This study is one of the first few to systematically analyze the phenomenon of “data collaboratives”.

Practical implications This study can help practitioners better understand the coordination challenges they may face when initiating a data collaborative and to develop successful data collaboratives by using coordination mechanisms to mitigate these challenges.

Originality/value Data collaboratives are a novel form of data-driven initiatives which have seen rapid experimentation lately. This study draws attention to this concept in the academic literature and highlights some of the complexities of organizing data collaboratives in practice.

The mission of the academic social sciences is to understand and ameliorate society’s greatest challenges. The data held by private companies holds vast potential to further this mission. Yet, because of its interaction with highly politicized issues, customer privacy, proprietary content, and differing goals of firms and academics, these data are often inaccessible to university researchers. We propose here a new model for industry-academic partnerships that addresses these problems via a novel organizational structure: Respected scholars form a commission which, as a trusted third party, receives access to all relevant firm information and systems, and then recruits independent academics to do research in specific areas following standard peer review protocols organized and funded by nonprofit foundations. We also report on a partnership we helped forge under this model to make data available about the extremely visible and highly politicized issues surrounding the impact of social media on elections and democracy. In our partnership, Facebook will provide privacy-preserving data and access; seven major politically and substantively diverse nonprofit foundations will fund the research; and the Social Science Research Council will oversee the peer review process for funding and data access.

• Seabold and Coppola obtained the consumer price data from the statistical office of each country, and also Google Trends data on a number of search keywords and found that the Google Trends data improved nowcasts of price, compared to an ARMA model and other respective benchmarks
• They conclude by saying that “the study of the manifestation of consumer sentiment via Internet search behavior is very much still in its infancy. It certainly presents a number of challenges, but the potential insights and use cases are varied and exciting. It may be tempting to dismiss this excitement as hype. All the same, it is difficult to deny the possible benefits of real-time consumer sentiment to future economics research and forecasting studies.”

The purpose of this Staff Working Document is “to provide a toolbox for companies that are data holders, data users, or both at the same time. For this purpose, it contains a “How to” guide on legal, business and technical aspects of data sharing that can be used in practice when considering and preparing data transfers between companies coming from the same or different sectors.”

This Staff Working Document defines the following principles to ensure fair markets: transparency, shared value creation, respect for each other’s commercial interests, ensure undistorted competition, minimised data lock-in.

Additionally, it also provides a guide of data sharing for businesses and a guide on how to make data sharing successful and fruitful.

In building towards a common data space, which is “a seamless digital area with the scale that will enable the development of new products and services based on data,” the European Commission proposes the following steps:

• “a proposal for a review of the Directive on the re-use of public sector information (PSI Directive);
• “an update of the Recommendation on access to and preservation of scientific information; and
• “guidance on sharing private sector data.”

• Big data has demonstrated to provide useful insights that can be used to address problems ranging from health, disaster, mobility, and many others. This paper suggests that data sharing needs to be formalize in order for it to be beneficial for the wider public.
• This paper seeks to answer “how to best “institutionalize” data sharing for public good within the private sector and in collaboration with public sector and philanthropic actors?”
• It also argues that not sharing data poses more risks than sharing, and that we should ponder on the risks of not treating data as a public good.
• It proposes an approach called “stewardship”, which is “intended to convey a fiduciary level of responsibility toward the data” and uses the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as a good example of framework that can be use to regulate data sharing practices.

The CDE has created a platform for both public and private organizations to sell and purchase data in an effort to create a data exchange between the two sectors. One of the datasets in highest demand is what they call people movement patterns data, which is how people in a given area move around at different times and places.

In this article, Popkin examines a number of examples of technology companies initiating data collaboratives, including:

• “Facebook would fund one of his graduate students to use the company’s technology to study how economic data from public surveys correlated with the visual characteristics of buildings represented in the satellite data. Facebook, in turn, could potentially gain a sharper view of the socio-economic characteristics of rural areas, whose residents are least likely to have Internet connections.”
• “Microsoft’s AI for Earth, which launched in late 2017, has enabled more than 60 research groups from more than 20 countries to analyse remote-sensing data sets from Esri, a mapping and geospatial-analysis company in Redlands, California, using Microscoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and computing power.”
• “Amazon Web Services, the cloud-computing branch of the e-commerce giant Amazon, started hosting the Landsat archive in early 2015. In September 2016, the company launched its Earth on AWS programme, through which it hosts around 15 data sets, including imagery, weather data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and air-quality data from the non-profit organization OpenAQ in Washington DC. Although anyone can pay to analyse the data using Amazon’s computers, scientists can apply for donations of computing time; applications must include a description of the research problem and plans for dissemination of the results.”
• “Google now hosts more than 600 public satellite, weather, population and other Earth and environmental data sets through its Earth Engine platform. More than 70,000 users — most of them researchers — have created free accounts on the platform, says Rebecca Moore, Earth Engine’s director of engineering.”

From the abstract: “This research explores and explains why the private sector participates in crisis response data collaboratives.

“Through secondary literature analysis, and primary survey and interview analysis of three case studies, this research provides new insights into data collaborative objectives, the private sector’s activities, the incentives and risks these collaboratives present for the private sector, and how it mitigates such risks.

“The research concludes that the private sector enters crisis response data collaboratives to help the public sector address one or more of its obstacles to creating datadriven solutions to societal problems, and occasionally to achieve additional objectives for the public good.

“Although the private sector is motivated by various incentives, sufficient mitigation of presented risks, especially risks to data subjects’ privacy and security, is a precondition to joining a crisis response data collaborative.”

In this report, the authors examine social media data to study migration patterns:

• “Innovative sources offer data that are timely, have a wide coverage, can be accessible at limited cost, and can potentially include information that may not always be provided by traditional migration data sources. As of April 2018, the Facebook Network (i.e. Facebook,Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network) reported more than 2.15 billion monthly active users. The digital traces that Internet users are actively or passively generating can potentially be exploited for studying migration-related phenomena.”
• “The potential of new data sources (e.g.Facebook) to provide policy-relevant information on international migration is currently being explored by international bodies and initiatives such as the Big Data for Migration Alliance (BD4M), recently launched by the European Commission Knowledge Centre on Migration and Demography (KCMD) and IOM’s Global Migration Data Analysis Centre (GMDAC), following a dedicated workshop on the topic.
• “The inherent bias of social media data described above, coupled with the risk of a lack of control on how the data are derived and processed cause uncertainties regarding the possibility of effectively using such data for demographic research. This requires the development of appropriate methods for quantifying and mitigating such bias as well as the active collaboration with the social media companies themselves.”
• “The paper shows that social media applications can be a timely, low-cost, and almost globally available data source for estimating stocks of international migrants, based on estimates of users who are classified as ‘expats.’ In the European context, it can be used for quantifying intra-EU mobility patterns of specific demographic groups, such as students,as well as for measuring migration movements that may not be captured in as timely a fashion by official statistics.”

From the abstract: “Much of the recent excitement around data, especially ‘Big Data,’ focuses on the potential commercial or economic value of data. How that data will affect people isn’t much discussed. People know that smart cities will deploy Internet-based monitoring and that flows of the collected data promise to produce new values. Less considered is that smart cities will be sites of new forms of citizen action—enabled by an ‘economy’ of data that will lead to new methods of collectivization, accountability, and control which, themselves, can provide both positive and negative values to the citizenry. Therefore, smart city design needs to consider not just measurement and publication of data but also the implications of city-wide deployment, data openness, and the possibility of unintended consequences if data leave the city.”

• The authors point out that the high penetration of mobile phone creates an abundance of data which can be useful in informing policymaking process, but also poses privacy risk to individuals that the data is associated with.
• The authors argue that standard de-identification methodology for data analysis is “not sufficient to prevent users from being re-identified in mobile phone data”.
• Furthermore, “[th]hese privacy concerns are, in our opinion, due to the failures of the traditional de-identification model and the lack of a modern and agreed upon framework for the privacy-conscientious use of mobile phone data by third-parties especially in the context of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).”
• In this paper, the authors propose four models for the privacy-conscientious use of mobile phone data to address this issue.

Full abstract: “Driven by the technological capabilities that ICTs offer, data enable new ways to generate value for both society and the parties that own or offer the data. This article looks at the idea of data collaboratives as a form of cross-sector partnership to exchange and integrate data and data use to generate public value. The concept thereby bridges data-driven value creation and collaboration, both current themes in the field. To understand how data collaboratives can add value in a public governance context, we exploratively studied the qualitative longitudinal case of an infomobility platform. We investigated the ability of a data collaborative to produce results while facing significant challenges and tensions between the goals of parties, each having the conflicting objectives of simultaneously retaining control whilst allowing for generativity. Taken together, the literature and case study findings help us to understand the emergence and viability of data collaboratives. Although limited by this study’s explorative nature, we find that conditions such as prior history of collaboration and supportive rules of the game are key to the emergence of collaboration. Positive feedback between trust and the collaboration process can institutionalise the collaborative, which helps it survive if conditions change for the worse.”

• The author points out the increasingly vast amount of data being collected, stashed, and reused for deeper analysis by tech companies, driven by the rise of the Internet of Things.
• These companies own the control of data and restrict access to it on legal as well as technical grounds, rendering inefficiency and preventing innovation which might be useful for the society.
• In other instance, companies may share data with each other in order to “exclude competitors or to abuse their market position.”
• “This article will discuss what implications combining data in data pools by firms might have on competition, and when competition law should be applicable. It develops the idea that data pools harbour great opportunities, whilst acknowledging that there are still risks to take into consideration, and to regulate.”

Abstract:

Data platform companies (such as Facebook, Google, or Twitter) amass and process immense amounts of data that is generated by their users. These companies primarily use the data to advance their commercial interests, but there is a growing public dismay regarding the adverse and discriminatory impacts of their algorithms on society at large. The regulation of data platform companies and their algorithms has been hotly debated in the literature, but current approaches often neglect the value of data collection, defy the logic of algorithmic decision-making, and exceed the platform companies’ operational capacities.

This Article suggests a different approach — an open, collaborative, and incentives-based stance toward data platforms that takes full advantage of the tremendous societal value of user-generated data. It contends that this data shall be recognized as a “global commons,” and access to it shall be made available to a wide range of independent stakeholders — research institutions, journalists, public authorities, and international organizations. These external actors would be able to utilize the data to address a variety of public challenges, as well as observe from within the operation and impacts of the platforms’ algorithms.

After making the theoretical case for the “global commons of data,” the Article explores the practical implementation of this model. First, it argues that a data commons regime should operate through a spectrum of data sharing and usage modalities that would protect the commercial interests of data platforms and the privacy of data users. Second, it discusses regulatory measures and incentives that can solicit the collaboration of platform companies with the commons model. Lastly, it explores the challenges embedded in this approach.

• This paper presents a legal-technical framework that will ensure that accountability and transparency that are acquired through data sharing do not harm individual privacy.
• This proposed solution seeks to address the challenge often faced when a set of data is too sensitive to be “open”, hindering the creation of a more effective research and policy that affect the public.
• The authors propose a “third-party public-private data trust”, which will act as an intermediary who will ensure “a) strong privacy guarantees, b) removal of signals that could expose competitive advantage for the data providers, and c) removal of biases that could reinforce discriminatory policies”.

• The authors posit that governments are looking to balance the interest of the public and private individuals surrounding the use of data, but the mechanism is yet to be developed.
• The authors propose ‘data trust’, a concept which repurposes the term ‘fiduciary trust’, which has been “used to govern and maintain shared resources such as public lands [and] pension funds.”
• Further “[w]hen used for governance, data trusts can steward, maintain and manage how data is used and shared — from who is allowed access to it, and under what terms, to who gets to define the terms, and how. They can involve a number of approaches to solving a range of problems, creating different structures to experiment with governance models and solutions in an agile way.”

Abstract: “Thanks to appropriate data algorithms, firms, especially those on-line, are able to extract detailed knowledge about consumers and markets. This raises the question of the essential facility character of data. Moreover, the features of digital markets lead to a concentration of this core input in the hands of few big “superstars” and arouse legitimate economic and societal concerns. In a more and more data-driven society, one could ask if data openness is a solution to deal with power derived from data concentration. We conclude that only a case-by-case approach should be followed. Mandatory open data policy should be conditioned on an ex-ante cost-benefit analysis proving that the benefits of disclosure exceed its costs.”

Abstract:

“Background: India is home to 20% of the world’s suicide deaths. Although statistics regarding suicide in India are distressingly high, data and cultural issues likely contribute to a widespread underreporting of the problem. Social stigma and only recent decriminalization of suicide are among the factors hampering official agencies’ collection and reporting of suicide rates.

“Objective: As the product of a data collaborative, this paper leverages private-sector search engine data toward gaining a fuller, more accurate picture of the suicide issue among young people in India. By combining official statistics on suicide with data generated through search queries, this paper seeks to: add an additional layer of information to more accurately represent the magnitude of the problem, determine whether search query data can serve as an effective proxy for factors contributing to suicide that are not represented in traditional datasets, and consider how data collaboratives built on search query data could inform future suicide prevention efforts in India and beyond.

“Methods: We combined official statistics on demographic information with data generated through search queries from Bing to gain insight into suicide rates per state in India as reported by the National Crimes Record Bureau of India. We extracted English language queries on “suicide,” “depression,” “hanging,” “pesticide,” and “poison”. We also collected data on demographic information at the state level in India, including urbanization, growth rate, sex ratio, internet penetration, and population. We modeled the suicide rate per state as a function of the queries on each of the 5 topics considered as linear independent variables. A second model was built by integrating the demographic information as additional linear independent variables.

“Results: Results of the first model fit (R2) when modeling the suicide rates from the fraction of queries in each of the 5 topics, as well as the fraction of all suicide methods, show a correlation of about 0.5. This increases significantly with the removal of 3 outliers and improves slightly when 5 outliers are removed. Results for the second model fit using both query and demographic data show that for all categories, if no outliers are removed, demographic data can model suicide rates better than query data. However, when 3 outliers are removed, query data about pesticides or poisons improves the model over using demographic data.

“Conclusions: In this work, we used search data and demographics to model suicide rates. In this way, search data serve as a proxy for unmeasured (hidden) factors corresponding to suicide rates. Moreover, our procedure for outlier rejection serves to single out states where the suicide rates have substantially different correlations with demographic factors and query rates.”

Abstract: “In their report on the development of the UK AI industry, Wendy Hall and Jérôme Pesenti recommend the establishment of data trusts, “proven and trusted frameworks and agreements” that will “ensure exchanges [of data] are secure and mutually beneficial” by promoting trust in the use of data for AI. This paper defends the following thesis: A data trust works within the law to provide ethical, architectural and governance support for trustworthy data processing. Data trusts are therefore both constraining and liberating. They constrain: they respect current law, so they cannot render currently illegal actions legal. They are intended to increase trust, and so they will typically act as further constraints on data processors, adding the constraints of trustworthiness to those of law. Yet they also liberate: if data processors are perceived as trustworthy, they will get improved access to data. The paper addresses the areas of: trust and trustworthiness; ethics; architecture; legal status.”

• The Ontario Brain Institute (OBI) developed Brain-CODE, which is a platform that “supports the capture, storage, federation, sharing, and analysis of different data types across several brain disorders.”
• The platform is made possible by “a robust and scalable data governance structure which allows for the flexibility to advance scientific understanding, while protecting the privacy of research participants.”
• This paper presents key of lessons learned from the implementation of this initiative.

From the introduction: “Coming out of ten months of applied, participatory, and multidisciplinary research, this journal presents:

A. “One case study developed to document and explain how the program was conceived, designed, and implemented, with the goal of offering lessons for scalability at New Lab and replicability in other cities around the world. The key questions explored in the case study are:

• “What is The Circular City?
• “What is Circular City Data?
• “How might we build, scale-up, and replicate a circular city data program for smarter economic development, mobility, and resilience and sustainability?

B. “Three research papers developed to investigate three urban challenges:

• “What is the value of this program for economic development in New York City?
• “What is the value of this program for mobility in New York City?
• “What is the value of this program for resilience and sustainability in New York City?
• “What are the conditions of success for this value creation?
• “What are the risks and the corresponding mitigation strategies?”

• The author argues that the “system of federal economic statistics developed in the 20th century has served the country well, but the current methods for collecting and disseminating these data products are unsustainable. These statistics are heavily reliant on the great 20th century measurement innovation: sample surveys. Recently, however, response rates for both household and business surveys have declined, increasing costs and threatening quality.”
• He further points out that existing “statistical measures, many developed decades ago, may also miss important aspects of our rapidly evolving economy; moreover, they may not be sufficiently accurate, timely, or granular to meet the increasingly complex needs of data users. Meanwhile, the rapid proliferation of online data and more powerful computation make privacy and confidentiality protections more challenging.”
• He concludes that “current measurement programs are not keeping pace with the changing economy, and current methods for collecting and disseminating statistical information are not sustainable. A process is underway in which government statisticians will take greater advantage of the proliferation of new data sources that can be utilized for economic measurement, as well as new tools for processing, analyzing, and publishing improved economic statistics.”

“This paper argues that new institutions—an ecosystem of trust—are needed to ensure that uses of data are trusted and trustworthy. It advocates the creation of different kinds of data trust to fill this gap. It argues:

• “That we need, but currently lack, institutions that are good at thinking through, discussing, and explaining the often complex trade-offs that need to be made about data.
• “That the task of creating trust is different in different fields. Overly generic solutions will be likely to fail.
• “That trusts need to be accountable—in some cases to individual members where there is a direct relationship with individuals giving consent, in other cases to the broader public.
• “That we should expect a variety of types of data trust to form—some sharing data; some managing synthetic data; some providing a research capability; some using commercial data and so on. The best analogy is finance which over time has developed a very wide range of types of institution and governance.”

Abstract: “Indigenous communities and scholars have been influencing a shift in participation and inclusion in academic and agency research over the past two decades. As a response, Indigenous peoples are increasingly asking research questions and developing their own studies rooted in their cultural values. They use the study results to rebuild their communities and to protect their lands. This process of Indigenous-driven research has led to partnering with academic institutions, establishing research review boards, and entering into data sharing agreements to protect environmental data, community information, and local and traditional knowledges.Data sharing agreements provide insight into how Indigenous nations are addressing the key areas of data collection, ownership, application, storage, and the potential for data reuse in the future. By understanding this mainstream data governance mechanism, how they have been applied, and how they have been used in the past, we aim to describe how Indigenous nations and communities negotiate data protection and control with researchers.

“The project described here reviewed publicly available data sharing agreements that focus on research with Indigenous nations and communities in the United States. We utilized qualitative analysis methods to identify specific areas of focus in the data sharing agreements, whether or not traditional or cultural values were included in the language of the data sharing agreements, and how the agreements defined data. The results detail how Indigenous peoples currently use data sharing agreements and potential areas of expansion for language to include in data sharing agreements as Indigenous peoples address the research needs of their communities and the protection of community and cultural data.”

• The authors point out that “health and genetic data are considered special categories of personal data and are subject to relatively stringent rules for processing.”
• Furthermore, according to the GDPR, “personal data may be collected only for specific, explicit, and legitimate purposes. The GDPR considers further use of these data for scientific research purposes to be compatible with the original rationale for collection. Yet, it also recognizes the right of study participants to object to this use of their data, to withdraw consent if they wish, and to be informed of any data breaches. To exercise their rights, individuals must be informed about the processing of their data in the research repository. However, the way some repositories are set up might make it difficult for researchers to comply with the law. One such challenge centers on the oversight of data access.”
• The authors propose that developing “solutions that support data deposition while ensuring legal compliance is necessary for research. Adopting the right solutions will lead to greater transparency and accountability in data sharing, as well as a more efficient and equitable scientific practice.”

• In his testimony before NYC COPIC, Stefaan Verhulst pointed out that the challenges facing communities in the 21st century “need not only new solutions but also new methods for arriving at solutions.”
• Verhulst argued for the potential use of data to address these problems, by posing four key questions: “First, why should NYC care about data and data sharing? Second, if you build a data-sharing framework, will they come? Third, how can we best engage the private sector when it comes to sharing and using their data? And fourth, is technology the main (or best) answer?”

• According to this paper, of “the 232 SDG indicators, only 93 are classified as Tier 1, meaning that the indicator is conceptually clear, has internationally established methodology and standards, and data are regularly compiled for at least 50 per cent of the countries. The remaining indicators are Tier 2 (72 indicators) meaning the indicator is conceptually clear but the data are not regularly produced by countries or Tier 3 (62 indicators), meaning that no internationally established methodology or standards are yet available.”
• The author points out that the potential of big data has generated much excitement and argument, but it also has many legal, ethical, technical, and reputational risks.
• According to the author many “big data are proprietary, that is, data that are commercially or privately owned and not publicly available. Consequently, many big data are not currently accessible by NSOs, either because costs are prohibitive or proprietary ownership makes it impossible. For example, data generated from the use of credit cards, search engines, social media, mobile phones, and store loyalty cards are all proprietary and are often not accessible. In many cases there are also legal impediments to accessing big data. MacFeely and Barnat (2017) have argued that to futureproof statistical legislation, changes may be required to give NSOs or NSSs access to big data sources.”
• Two challenges arise from this problem: one technical and one of perception. “The technical challenge arises from the availability of large, linkable datasets which make anonymization of individual data very difficult. … The changing nature of perception is arguably a trickier problem. … There appear to be inter-generational differences in opinion vis-a-vis privacy and confidentiality, where those ‘born digital’ (roughly those born since 1990) are less concerned about disclosing personal information than older generations (European Commission, 2011).”

From the abstract:

• “The problem of unicity and reidentifiability of records in large-scale databases has been studied in different contexts and approaches, with focus on preserving privacy or matching records from different data sources.
• “With an increasing number of service providers nowadays routinely collecting location traces of their users on unprecedented scales, there is a pronounced interest in the possibility of matching records and datasets based on spatial trajectories.
• “Extending previous work on reidentifiability of spatial data and trajectory matching, we present the first large-scale analysis of user matchability in real mobility datasets on realistic scales, i.e. among two datasets that consist of several million people’s mobility traces, coming from a mobile network operator and transportation smart card usage.
• “We extract the relevant statistical properties which influence the matching process and analyze their impact on the matchability of users.
• “We show that for individuals with typical activity in the transportation system (those making 3-4 trips per day on average), a matching algorithm based on the co-occurrence of their activities is expected to achieve a 16.8% success only after a one-week long observation of their mobility traces, and over 55% after four weeks.
• “We show that the main determinant of matchability is the expected number of co-occurring records in the two datasets. Finally, we discuss different scenarios in terms of data collection frequency and give estimates of matchability over time.
• “We show that with higher frequency data collection becoming more common, we can expect much higher success rates in even shorter intervals.”

Recommendations:

1. Improve funder policies: 1a. Align on policies for data sharing in PHEs to require sharing of quality assured interim and fi nal data in real time (wherever feasible). 1b. Where policies cannot be altered, align grant/contract conditions to require sharing of quality assured interim and fi nal data in real time. 1c. Define appropriate thresholds for activation of rapid data sharing. 1d. Align funding policies to ensure that data sets and pre-publications are all included within assessment of researcher outputs (in accordance with the San Francisco Declaration).
2. Align tools and strengthen capacity: 2a. Align to improve guidance for Data Management Plans in grant applications. 2b. Support the development and uptake of standardised tools and approaches to support international research collaborations & data sharing, including MOUs, MTAs & DTAs, data standards & data collection templates. 2c. Fund capacity strengthening in data management and analysis (linked to 3a to enable equity).
3. Build trust 3a. Fund improved equitable, multi-disciplinary, multinational, disease networks in advance of PHEs (linked to 2c. and 4a.) with real time external data sharing requirements (aligned with 1.). 3b. Facilitate coordination between established research networks.
4. Influence 4a. Collaborate within GloPID-R to align with and influence other stakeholders: national funders, Ministries of Health, Ministries of Science & Technology, commercial companies, publishers, university hierarchy, policy makers (especially WHO) & humanitarian sector. 4b. Communicate the PH benefits of data sharing. Continue to publish and advocate on the benefits.
5. Strengthen systems 5a. Support existing and expanded data sharing platforms for priority pathogens with agreed governance mechanisms and data security systems. 5b. Support an overarching unifi ed governance structure for international data sharing within which existing platforms can be embedded and through which platforms for novel pathogens can be developed.

The report argues that data sharing can “increase the value of data to the data holder, and even more so to secondary data users, with additional positive spill-over benefits for country economies and society at large.”

However, several challenges need to be addressed so that the public can harness the benefit of data sharing. Such challenges such as balancing “the benefits of enhancing data “openness” with the risks, while considering legitimate private, national and public interests.”

Examining over 200 policy initiatives across 37 countries, the report finds several trends, such as “few countries have policy initiatives to faciliate data sharing within the private sector.”

Finally, the report proposes that policy makers employ several strategies involving contractual agreements, open data, data portability, and restricted data-sharing agreement to address the major challenges.

Abstract: “This article examines the legitimacy attached to different types of multi-stakeholder data partnerships occurring in the context of sustainable development. We develop a framework to assess the democratic legitimacy of two types of data partnerships: open data partnerships (where data and insights are mainly freely available) and closed data partnerships (where data and insights are mainly shared within a network of organizations). Our framework specifies criteria for assessing the legitimacy of relevant partnerships with regard to their input legitimacy as well as their output legitimacy. We demonstrate which particular characteristics of open and closed partnerships can be expected to influence an analysis of their input and output legitimacy.”

• “Many companies and governments are interested in sharing more of their data with each other; however, right now the process of sharing is very time consuming and can pose great risks since it often involves sharing full data sets with another entity.
• “We need intermediaries to design safe environments to facilitate data sharing in the low-trust and politically sensitive context of companies and governments. These safe environments would exist outside the government, be transparent to the public, and use modern technologies and techniques to allow only statistical uses of data through temporary linkages in order to minimize the risk to individuals’ privacy.
• “Governments must lead the way in sharing more data by re-evaluating laws that limit sharing of data, and must embrace new technologies that could allow the private sector to receive at least some value from many sensitive data sets.
• “By decreasing the cost and risks of sharing data, more data will be freed from their silos, and we will move closer to what we deserve—that our data are used for the greatest societal benefit.”

“As the operator of the world’s largest professional network and the Economic Graph, LinkedIn’s Data team is constantly working on scaling its infrastructure to meet the demands of our ever-growing big data ecosystem. As the data grows in volume and richness, it becomes increasingly challenging for data scientists and engineers to discover the data assets available, understand their provenances, and take appropriate actions based on the insights. To help us continue scaling productivity and innovation in data alongside this growth, we created a generalized metadata search and discovery tool, DataHub.

“As a result, we decided to expand the scope of the project to build a fully generalized metadata search and discovery tool, DataHub, with an ambitious vision: connecting LinkedIn employees with data that matters to them.

“We broke the monolithic WhereHows stack into two distinct stacks: a Modular UI frontend and a Generalized Metadata Architecture backend. The new architecture enabled us to rapidly expand our scope of metadata collection beyond just datasets and jobs. At the time of writing, DataHub already stores and indexes tens of millions of metadata records that encompass 19 different entities, including datasets, metrics, jobs, charts, AI features, people, and groups. We also plan to onboard metadata for machine learning models and labels, experiments, dashboards, microservice APIs, and code in the near future.”

Abstract:

“This rapid expert consultation provides insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the data on the COVID-19 pandemic by applying five criteria to seven types of data available to support decision making. It was produced through the Societal Experts Action Network (SEAN), an activity of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. SEAN links researchers in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences with decision makers to respond to policy questions arising from the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Abstract:

“Mobile phone data have been extensively used to study urban mobility. However, studies based on gender-disaggregated large-scale data are still lacking, limiting our understanding of gendered aspects of urban mobility and our ability to design policies for gender equality. Here we study urban mobility from a gendered perspective, combining commercial and open datasets for the city of Santiago, Chile. We analyze call detail records for a large cohort of anonymized mobile phone users and reveal a gender gap in mobility: women visit fewer unique locations than men, and distribute their time less equally among such locations. Mapping this mobility gap over administrative divisions, we observe that a wider gap is associated with lower income and lack of public and private transportation options. Our results uncover a complex interplay between gendered mobility patterns, socio-economic factors and urban affordances, calling for further research and providing insights for policymakers and urban planners.”

Abstract:

“In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, data has never been more salient. COVID has generated new data demands and increased cross-sector data collaboration. Yet, these data collaborations require careful planning and evaluation of risks and opportunities, especially when sharing sensitive data. Data sharing agreements (DSAs) are written agreements that establish the terms for how data are shared between parties and are important for establishing accountability and trust. However, negotiating DSAs is often time consuming, and collaborators lacking legal or financial capacity are disadvantaged. Contracts for Data Collaboration (C4DC) is a joint initiative between SDSN TReNDS, NYU’s GovLab, the World Economic Forum, and the University of Washington, working to strengthen trust and transparency of data collaboratives. The partners have created an online library of DSAs which represents a selection of data applications and contexts. This report introduces C4DC and its DSA library. We demonstrate how the library can support the data community to strengthen future data collaborations by showcasing various DSA applications and key considerations. First, we explain our method of analyzing the agreements and consider how six major issues are addressed by different agreements in the library. Key issues discussed include data use, access, breaches, proprietary issues, publicization of the analysis, and deletion of data upon termination of the agreement. For each of these issues, we describe approaches illustrated with examples from the library. While our analysis suggests some pertinent issues are regularly not addressed in DSAs, we have identified common areas of practice that may be helpful for entities negotiating partnership agreements to consider in the future.”

Abstract:

“Tracking human activity in real time and at fine spatial scale is particularly valuable during episodes such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we discuss the suitability of smartphone data for quantifying movement and social contact. We show that these data cover broad sections of the US population and exhibit movement patterns similar to conventional survey data. We develop and make publicly available a location exposure index that summarizes county-to-county movements and a device exposure index that quantifies social contact within venues. We use these indices to document how pandemic-induced reductions in activity vary across people and places.”

Abstract:

“This paper provides the humanitarian community with an automated tool that can detect a disaster using tweets posted on Twitter, alongside a portal to identify local and regional Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) that are best-positioned to provide support to people adversely affected by a disaster. The proposed disaster detection tool uses a linear Support Vector Classifier (SVC) to detect man-made and natural disasters, and a density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm to accurately estimate a disaster’s geographic location. This paper provides two original contributions. The first is combining the automated disaster detection tool with the prototype portal for NGO identification. This unique combination could help reduce the time taken to raise awareness of the disaster detected, improve the coordination of aid, increase the amount of aid delivered as a percentage of initial donations and improve aid effectiveness. The second contribution is a general framework that categorises the different approaches that can be adopted for disaster detection. Furthermore, this paper uses responses obtained from an on-the-ground survey with NGOs in the disaster-hit region of Uttar Pradesh, India, to provide actionable insights into how the portal can be developed further.”

Abstract:

“Preservation of data privacy and protection of sensitive information from potential adversaries constitute a key socio‐technical challenge in the modern era of ubiquitous digital transformation. Addressing this challenge needs analysis of multiple factors: algorithmic choices for balancing privacy and loss of utility, potential attack scenarios that can be undertaken by adversaries, implications for data owners, data subjects, and data sharing policies, and access control mechanisms that need to be built into interactive data interfaces. Visualization has a key role to play as part of the solution space, both as a medium of privacy‐aware information communication and also as a tool for understanding the link between privacy parameters and data sharing policies. The field of privacy‐preserving data visualization has witnessed progress along many of these dimensions. In this state‐of‐the‐art report, our goal is to provide a systematic analysis of the approaches, methods, and techniques used for handling data privacy in visualization. We also reflect on the road‐map ahead by analyzing the gaps and research opportunities for solving some of the pressing socio‐technical challenges involving data privacy with the help of visualization.”

Abstract:

“Data sharing anchors reproducible science, but expectations and best practices are often nebulous. Communities of funders, researchers and publishers continue to grapple with what should be required or encouraged. To illuminate the rationales for sharing data, the technical challenges and the social and cultural challenges, we consider the stakeholders in the scientific enterprise. In biomedical research, participants are key among those stakeholders. Ethical sharing requires considering both the value of research efforts and the privacy costs for participants. We discuss current best practices for various types of genomic data, as well as opportunities to promote ethical data sharing that accelerates science by aligning incentives.”

Abstract:

“This work introduces the concept of data-driven Mobility Functional Areas (MFAs) as geographic zones with high degree of intra-mobility exchanges. Such information, calculated at European regional scale thanks to mobile data, can be useful to inform targeted reescalation policy responses in cases of future COVID-19 outbreaks (avoiding large-area or even national lockdowns). In such events, the geographic distribution of MFAs would define territorial areas to which lockdown interventions could be limited, with the result of minimising socio-economic consequences of such policies. The analysis of the time evolution of MFAs can also be thought of as a measure of how human mobility changes not only in intensity but also in patterns, providing innovative insights into the impact of mobility containment measures. This work presents a first analysis for 15 European countries (14 EU Member States and Norway).”

Abstract:

“The phenomenon of big data does not only deeply affect current societies but also poses crucial challenges to social research. This article argues for moving towards a sociology of social research in order to characterize the new qualities of big data and its deficiencies. We draw on the neopragmatist approach of economics of convention (EC) as a conceptual basis for such a sociological perspective. This framework suggests investigating processes of quantification in their interplay with orders of justifications and logics of evaluation. Methodological issues such as the question of the “quality of big data” must accordingly be discussed in their deep entanglement with epistemic values, institutional forms, and historical contexts and as necessarily implying political issues such as who controls and has access to data infrastructures. On this conceptual basis, the article uses the example of health to discuss the challenges of big data analysis for social research. Phenomena such as the rise of new and massive privately owned data infrastructures, the economic valuation of huge amounts of connected data, or the movement of “quantified self” are presented as indications of a profound transformation compared to established forms of doing social research. Methodological and epistemological, but also institutional and political, strategies are presented to face the risk of being “outperformed” and “replaced” by big data analysis as they are already done in big US American and Chinese Internet enterprises. In conclusion, we argue that the sketched developments have important implications both for research practices and methods teaching in the era of big data”

“This paper attempts to examine why stores of personal data (data troves) held by private firms became a national security problem in the United States and compares the US response to that of Canada and Germany. Citizens in all three countries rely on many of the same data-driven services and give personal information to many of the same companies. German and Canadian policy makers and scholars have also warned of potential national security spillovers of large data troves.”

Abstract:

” In this discussion paper, we outline the motivations and the main principles of the Trusted Smart Statistics (TSS) concept that is under development in the European Statistical System. TSS represents the evolution of official statistics in response to the challenges posed by the new datafied society. Taking stock from the availability of new digital data sources, new technologies, and new behaviors, statistical offices are called nowadays to rethink the way they operate in order to reassert their role in modern democratic society. The issue at stake is considerably broader and deeper than merely adapting existing processes to embrace so-called Big Data. In several aspects, such evolution entails a fundamental paradigm shift with respect to the legacy model of official statistics production based on traditional data sources, for example, in the relation between data and computation, between data collection and analysis, between methodological development and statistical production, and of course in the roles of the various stakeholders and their mutual relationships. Such complex evolution must be guided by a comprehensive system-level view based on clearly spelled design principles. In this paper, we aim at providing a general account of the TSS concept reflecting the current state of the discussion within the European Statistical System.”

Abstract:

“Since social distancing is the primary strategy for slowing the spread of many diseases, understanding why U.S. counties respond differently to COVID-19 is critical for designing effective public policies. Using daily data from about 45 million mobile phones to measure social distancing we examine how counties responded to both local COVID-19 cases and statewide shelter-in-place orders. We find that social distancing increases more in response to cases and official orders in counties where individuals historically (1) engaged less in community activities and (2) demonstrated greater willingness to incur individual costs to contribute to social objectives. Our work highlights the importance of these two features of social capital—community engagement and individual commitment to societal institutions—in formulating public health policies.”

Abstract:

“Big data technologies have both benefits and costs which can influence their adoption and moral acceptability. Prior studies look at people’s evaluations in isolation without pitting costs and benefits against each other. We address this limitation with a conjoint experiment (N = 979), using six domains (criminal investigations, crime prevention, citizen scores, healthcare, banking, and employment), where we simultaneously test the relative influence of four factors: the status quo, outcome favorability, data sharing, and data protection on decisions to adopt and perceptions of moral acceptability of the technologies. We present two key findings. (1) People adopt technologies more often when data is protected and when outcomes are favorable. They place equal or more importance on data protection in all domains except healthcare where outcome favorability has the strongest influence. (2) Data protection is the strongest driver of moral acceptability in all domains except healthcare, where the strongest driver is outcome favorability. Additionally, sharing data lowers preference for all technologies, but has a relatively smaller influence. People do not show a status quo bias in the adoption of technologies. When evaluating moral acceptability, people show a status quo bias but this is driven by the citizen scores domain. Differences across domains arise from differences in magnitude of the effects but the effects are in the same direction. Taken together, these results highlight that people are not always primarily driven by self-interest and do place importance on potential privacy violations. The results also challenge the assumption that people generally prefer the status quo.”

SPecifically, the position paper seeks to outline the roles and responsibilites of the emergent data steward profession. It is intended to support data-holding businesses and public institutions to create and promote data stewards in the public and private sectors; and to establish a network of these data stewards—as recently recommended by the High Level Expert Group to the European Commission on Business-to-Government Data Sharing.

Abstract:

“The European Data Portal publishes its study “The Economic Impact of Open Data: Opportunities for value creation in Europe”. It researches the value created by open data in Europe. It is the second study by the European Data Portal, following the 2015 report. The open data market size is estimated at €184 billion and forecast to reach between €199.51 and €334.21 billion in 2025. The report additionally considers how this market size is distributed along different sectors and how many people are employed due to open data. The efficiency gains from open data, such as potential lives saved, time saved, environmental benefits, and improvement of language services, as well as associated potential costs savings are explored and quantified where possible. Finally, the report also considers examples and insights from open data re-use in organisations.”

“The rise of the open data movement means that a growing amount of data is today being broken out of information silos and released or shared with third parties.”

“Data collaboratives, when designed responsibly (Alemanno, 2018), can help to address such shortcomings. They draw together otherwise siloed data – such as, for example, telecom data, satellite imagery, social media data, financial data – and a dispersed range of expertise. In the process, they help match supply and demand, and ensure that the appropriate institutions and individuals are using and analyzing data in ways that maximize the possibility of new, innovative social solutions (de Montjoye, Gambs, Blondel, et al., 2018).”

Abstract:

“Data sharing plays a fundamental role in providing data resources for geographic modeling and simulation. Although there are many successful cases of data sharing through the web, current practices for sharing data mostly focus on data publication using metadata at the file level, which requires identifying, restructuring and synthesizing raw data files for further usage. In hydrology, because the same hydrological information is often stored in data files with different formats, modelers should identify the required information from multisource data sets and then customize data requirements for their applications. However, these data customization tasks are difficult to repeat, which leads to repetitive labor. This paper presents a data sharing method that provides a solution for data manipulation based on a structured data description model rather than raw data files. With the structured data description model, multisource hydrological data can be accessed and processed in a unified way and published as data services using a designed data server. This study also proposes a data configuration manager to customize data requirements through an interactive programming tool, which can help in using the data services. In addition, a component-based data viewer is developed for the visualization of multisource data in a sharable visualization scheme. A case study that involves sharing and applying hydrological data is designed to examine the applicability and feasibility of the proposed data sharing method.”

Abstract:

“The Japanese government has initiated lifelong learning policies to promote lifelong learning to a super-aging society. It is said that lifelong learning contributes to a richer and more fulfilling life. It is within this context that public libraries have been identified as ideal facilities for promoting lifelong learning. To support lifelong learning successfully, libraries must accurately grasp citizens’ needs, all while working within limited budgets. To understand citizens’ learning needs, this study uses public library circulation data. This study is significant because such data use is often unavailable in Japan. This data was used to clarify citizens’ learning interests. Circulation data was compared from two libraries in Japan: Koto District Library in Tokyo and Tahara City Library in Aichi Prefecture. The data was used to identify general learning needs while also accounting for regional differences. The methodology and results of this research are significant for the development of lifelong learning policy and programming.”

Abstract:

“Amid the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, there has been a call to use innovative digital tools for the purpose of protecting public health. There are a number of proposals to embed digital solutions into the regulatory strategies adopted by public authorities to control the spread of the coronavirus more effectively. They range from algorithms to detect population movements by using telecommunications data to the use of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing power to detect patterns in the spread of the virus. However, the use of a mobile phone application for contact tracing is certainly the most popular.”

From the abstract:

Methods “We performed a unique descriptive case study into the conditions for data sharing as specified for datasets participating in BigData@Heart. Principle investigators of 56 participating databases were contacted via e-mail with the request to send any kind of documentation that possibly specified the conditions for data sharing. Documents were qualitatively reviewed for conditions pertaining to data sharing and data access.”

Results “Qualitative content analysis of 55 relevant documents revealed overlap on the conditions: (1) only to share health data for scientific research, (2) in anonymized/coded form, (3) after approval from a designated review committee, and while (4) observing all appropriate measures for data security and in compliance with the applicable laws and regulations.”

Conclusions “Despite considerable overlap, prespecified conditions give rise to challenges for data sharing. At the same time, these challenges inform our thinking about the design of an ethical governance framework for data sharing platforms. We urge current data sharing initiatives to concentrate on: (1) the scope of the research questions that may be addressed, (2) how to deal with varying levels of de-identification, (3) determining when and how review committees should come into play, (4) align what policies and regulations mean by “data sharing” and (5) how to deal with datasets that have no system in place for data sharing.”

Summary:

“The Atlas of Inequality is a research initiative led by scientists at the MIT Media Lab and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. It is a project within the larger Human Dynamics research initiative at the MIT Media Lab, which investigates how computational social science can improve society, government, and companies. Using multiple big data sources, MIT Media Lab researchers seek to understand how people move in urban spaces and how that movement influences or is influenced by income. Among the datasets used in this initiative was location data provided by Cuebiq, through its Data for Good initiative. Cuebiq offers location-intelligence services to approved research and nonprofit organizations seeking to address public problems. To date, the Atlas has published maps of inequality in eleven cities in the United States. Through the Atlas, the researchers hope to raise public awareness about segregation of social mobility in United States cities resulting from economic inequality and support evidence-based policymaking to address the issue.

“Data Collaborative Model: Based on the typology of data collaborative practice areas developed by The GovLab, the use of Cuebiq’s location data by MIT Media Lab researchers for the Atlas of Inequality initiative is an example of the research and analysis partnership model of data collaboration, specifically a data transfer approach. In this approach, companies provide data to partners for analysis, sometimes under the banner of “data philanthropy.” Access to data remains highly restrictive, with only specific partners able to analyze the assets provided. Approved uses are also determined in a somewhat cooperative manner, often with some agreement outlining how and why parties requesting access to data will put it to use.

“Data Stewardship Approach: Through its Data for Good initiative, Cuebiq provided access to location data that supported the Atlas’s development. The Data for Good initiative is an example of how active data stewardship can help data-holding companies find public utility in their data beyond their day-to-day business. Such utility includes the creation of scientific and public value by securely providing academic researchers and nonprofit organizations access to Cuebiq’s data assets. These collaborations involve a licensing agreement between Cuebiq and its partners, where all the parties pledge to adhere to certain privacy and data-handling standards to prevent potential risks that may arise, such as data breach and misuse. Further, Cuebiq also created the Director of Research Partnership and Data for Good role to carry out various data stewards functions, including internal coordination, partnership building, and risk assessment. This approach can serve as a good model for how companies can practice responsible data-sharing. Indeed, in early 2020, the MIT Media Lab team began using Cuebiq data to study the effectiveness of social distancing policies in New York City in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

From the abstract:

“This result is obtained by estimating the impact of public data transparency on sovereign spreads conditional on the country’s level of institutional quality and public and external debt. While improving data transparency alone reduces the external borrowing costs for a country, the return is much higher when combined with stronger institutional quality and lower public and external debt. Similarly, the returns on investing in data transparency are higher when a country’s integration to the global economy deepens, as captured by trade and financial openness. Estimation of an instrumental variable regression shows that Sub-Saharan African countries could have saved up to 14.5 basis points in sovereign bond spreads and decreased their external debt burden by US$405.4 million (0.02 percent of gross domestic product) in 2018, if their average level of data transparency was that of a country in the top quartile of the upper-middle-income country category. At the country level, Angola could have reduced its external debt burden by around US$73.6 million.”

Abstract:

“Building on an illustrative case of a systemic environmental threat and its multi‐stakeholder response, this paper draws attention to the changing political impacts of corporations in the digital age. Political Corporate Social Responsibility (PCSR) theory suggests an expanded sense of politics and corporations, including impacts that may range from voluntary initiatives to overcome governance gaps, to avoiding state regulation via corporate political activity. Considering digitalization as a stimulus, we explore potential responsibilities of corporations toward public goods in contexts with functioning governments. We show that digitalization—in the form of transparency, surveillance, and data‐sharing—offers corporations’ scope for deliberative public participation. The starry sky beetle infestation endangering public and private goods is thereby used to illustrate the possibility of expanding the political role of corporations in the digital sphere. We offer a contribution by conceptualizing data‐deliberation as a Habermasian variation of PCSR, defined as the (a) voluntary disclosure of corporate data and its transparent, open sharing with the public sector (b) along with the cooperation with governmental institutions on data analytics methods for examining large‐scale datasets (c) thereby complying with existing national and international regulations on data protection, in particular with respect to privacy and personal data.”

Summary:

“Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP) is a cross-sector data-sharing partnership in the United States between the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), multiple biopharmaceutical and life science companies, as well as non-profit organizations that seeks to improve the efficiency of developing new diagnostics and treatments for several types of disease. To achieve this goal, the partnership created a pre-competitive collaborative ecosystem where the biomedical community can pool data and resources that are relevant to the prioritized disease areas. A key component of the partnership is to make biomarkers data available to the medical research community through online portals.”

Data Collaboratives Model: “Based on our typology of data collaborative models, AMP is an example of the data pooling model of data collaboration, specifically a public data pool. Public data pools co-mingle data assets from multiple data holders — in this case pharmaceutical companies — and make those shared assets available on the web. Pools often limit contributions to approved partners (as public data pools are not crowdsourcing efforts), but access to the shared assets is open, enabling independent re-uses.”

Data Stewardship Approach: “Data stewardship is built into the partnership through the establishment of an executive committee, which governs the entire partnership, and a steering committee for each disease area, which governs each of the sub-projects within AMP. These committees consist of representatives from the institutional partners involved in AMP and perform data stewards function including enabling inter-institutional engagement as well as intra-institutional coordination, data audit and assessment of value and risk, communication of findings, and nurture the collaboration to sustainability.”

One of the main findings of the analysis concerns eight key themes, which are:

• “Privacy. Principles under this theme stand for the idea that AI systems should respect individuals’ privacy, both in the use of data for the development of technological systems and by providing impacted people with agency over their data and decisions made with it. Privacy principles are present in 97% of documents in the dataset.
• “Accountability. This theme includes principles concerning the importance of mechanisms to ensure that accountability for the impacts of AI systems is appropriately distributed, and that adequate remedies are provided. Accountability principles are present in 97% of documents in the dataset.
• “Safety and Security. These principles express requirements that AI systems be safe, performing as intended, and also secure, resistant to being compromised by unauthorized parties. Safety and Security principles are present in 81% of documents in the dataset.
• “Transparency and Explainability. Principles under this theme articulate requirements that AI systems be designed and implemented to allow for oversight, including through translation of their operations into intelligible outputs and the provision of information about where, when, and how they are being used. Transparency and Explainability principles are present in 94% of documents in the dataset.
• “Fairness and Non-discrimination. With concerns about AI bias already impacting individuals globally, Fairness and Non-discrimination principles call for AI systems to be designed and used to maximize fairness and promote inclusivity. Fairness and Non-discrimination principles are present in 100% of documents in the dataset.
• “Human Control of Technology. The principles under this theme require that important decisions remain subject to human review. Human Control of Technology principles are present in 69% of documents in the dataset.
• “Professional Responsibility. These principles recognize the vital role that individuals involved in the development and deployment of AI systems play in the systems’ impacts, and call on their professionalism and integrity in ensuring that the appropriate stakeholders are consulted and long-term effects are planned for. Professional Responsibility principles are present in 78% of documents in the dataset.
• “Promotion of Human Values. Finally, Human Values principles state that the ends to which AI is devoted, and the means by which it is implemented, should correspond with our core values and generally promote humanity’s well-being. Promotion of Human Values principles are present in 69% of documents in the dataset.”

“This article drew together research investigating Craigslist’s online rental housing market and, using new analyses, theorized the impacts of technology platform- mediated housing search. It described the uneven quantity and quality of online information correlated with neighborhood demographics, creating unequal housing information supplies based on where you search. This calls into question the ability of technology platforms to serve as utopian, democratizing, equalizing forces when they rely on human content creation and preexisting sociospatial relations.”

The authors find that “online platforms with user generated content do not automatically smooth information exchange, reduce information asymmetries, or attenuate entrenched sociospatial inequalities. Craigslist data do not capture all neighborhoods—nor the experiences of all renters—equally well. Importantly, Craigslist data alone do not allow policymakers to fully understand the experiences of renters searching for housing in lower income or minority neighborhoods.”

Summary:

“Summary: Global Fishing Watch, originally set up through a collaboration between Oceana, SkyTruth and Google, is an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing responsible stewardship of our oceans through increased transparency in fishing activity and scientific research. Using big data processing and machine learning, Global Fishing Watch visualizes, tracks, and shares data about global fishing activity in near-real time and for free via their public map. To date, the platform tracks approximately 65,000 commercial fishing vessels globally. These insights have been used in a number of academic publications, ocean advocacy efforts, and law enforcement activities.

“Data Collaborative Model: Based on the typology of data collaborative practice areas, Global Fishing Watch is an example of the data pooling model of data collaboration, specifically a public data pool. Public data pools co-mingle data assets from multiple data holders — including governments and companies — and make those shared assets available on the web. This approach enabled the data stewards and stakeholders involved in Global Fishing Watch to bring together multiple data streams from both public- and private-sector entities in a single location. This single point of access provides the public and relevant authorities with user-friendly access to actionable, previously fragmented data that can drive efforts to address compliance in fisheries and illegal fishing around the world.

“Data Stewardship Approach: Global Fishing Watch also provides a clear illustration of the importance of data stewards. For instance, representatives from Google Earth Outreach, one of the data holders, played an important stewardship role in seeking to connect and coordinate with SkyTruth and Oceana, two important nonprofit environmental actors who were working separately prior to this initiative. The brokering of this partnership helped to bring relevant data assets from the public and private sectors to bear in support of institutional efforts to address the stubborn challenge of illegal fishing.”

The authors argue that adaptive governance is “a suitable regulatory style for big data health research by proposing six governance principles to foster the development of appropriate structures and processes to handle critical aspects of big data health research.”

The six principles are adaptivity, flexibility, inclusiveness, responsiveness, reflexivity, and monitoring (AFIRRM).

To encourage adoption of these principles the authors “have advanced AFIRRM as a viable model for the creation of regulatory tools in the space of big data health research. [Their] model is based on a careful analysis of regulatory scholarship vis-à-vis the key attributes of this type of research. [They] are currently undertaking considerable efforts to introduce AFIRRM to regulators, operators and organizations in the space of research or health policy.”

Abstract:

“Ethical considerations and governance approaches of AI are at a crossroads. Either one tries to convey the impression that one can bring back a status quo ante of our given “onlife”-era [1,2], or one accepts to get responsibly involved in a digital world in which informational self-determination can no longer be safeguarded and fostered through the old fashioned data protection principles of informed consent, purpose limitation and data economy [3,4,6]. The main focus of the talk is on how under the given conditions of AI and machine learning, data sovereignty (interpreted as controllability [not control (!)] of the data subject over the use of her data throughout the entire data processing cycle [5]) can be strengthened without hindering innovation dynamics of digital economy and social cohesion of fully digitized societies. In order to put this approach into practice the talk combines a presentation of the concept of data sovereignty put forward by the German Ethics Council [3] with recent research trends in effectively applying the AI ethics principles of explainability and enforceability [4-9].”

The authors conclude that:

“The integration of expertise from behavioural science and computer science is essential to making algorithmic systems interpretable by a wide range of stakeholders, allowing people to exercise agency and ultimately building trust. Individuals and groups who distrust algorithms may be less likely to harness the potential benefits of new technology, and, in this sense, interpretability intimately relates to equity. Education is an integral part of making explanations effective. Recent studies found that individuals who are more familiar with AI fear it less, and are more optimistic about its potential societal impacts24. We share this cautious optimism, but predicate it on helping different stakeholders move beyond the extremes of unbounded techno-optimism and techno-criticism, and into a nuanced and productive conversation about the role of technology in society.”

The author examines existing data valuation framework and finds some gap in this practice, which are:

“Task-specificness: The value of data depends on the task it helps to fulfill. For instance, if Alice’s medical record indicates that she has disease A, then her data will be more useful to predict disease A as opposed to other diseases.

“Fairness: The quality of data from different sources varies dramatically. In the worst-case scenario, adversarial data sources may even degrade model performance via data poisoning attacks. Hence, the data value should reflect the efficacy of data by assigning high values to data which can notably improve the model’s performance.

“Efficiency: Practical machine learning tasks may involve thousands or billions of data contributors; thus, data valuation techniques should be capable of scaling up.

Based on this observation, the author discusses “a principled notion of data value and computationally efficient algorithms for data valuation.”

Abstract:

The expression ‘open data’ relates to a system of informative and freely accessible databases that public administrations make generally available online in order to develop an informative network between institutions, enterprises and citizens. On this topic, using the semantic network analysis method, the research aims to investigate the communication structure and the governance of open data in the Twitter conversational environment. In particular, the research questions are: (1) Who are the main actors in the Italian open data infrastructure? (2) What are the main conversation topics online? (3) What are the pros and cons of the development and use (reuse) of open data in Italy? To answer these questions, we went through three research phases: (1) analysing the communication network, we found who are the main influencers; (2) once we found who were the main actors, we analysed the online content in the Twittersphere to detect the semantic areas; (3) then, through an online focus group with the main open data influencers, we explored the characteristics of Italian open data governance. Through the research, it has been shown that: (1) there is an Italian open data governance strategy; (2) the Italian civic hacker community plays an important role as an influencer; but (3) there are weaknesses in governance and in practical reuse.

Abstract:

Starting with the assumption that under certain conditions also mandatory solutions for access to privately held data can be necessary, this paper analyses the legal and regulatory instruments for the implementation of such data access solutions. After an analysis of advantages and problems of horizontal versus sectoral access solutions, the main thesis of this paper is that focusing only on data access solutions is often not enough for achieving the desired positive effects on competition and innovation. An analysis of the two examples access to bank account data (PSD2: Second Payment Service Directive) and access to data of the connected car shows that successful data access solutions might require an entire package of additional complementary regulatory solutions (e.g. regarding interoperability, standardisation, and safety and security), and therefore the analysis and regulatory design of entire data governance systems (based upon an economic market failure analysis). In the last part important instruments that can be used within data governance systems are discussed, like, e.g. data trustee solutions.

Abstract:

In the current data access and sharing debate, data interoperability is widely proclaimed as being key for efficiently reaping the economic welfare enhancing effects of further data re-use. Although, we agree, we found that the current law and policy framework pertaining data interoperability was missing a groundworks analysis. Without a clear understanding of the notions of interoperability, the role of data standards and application programming interfaces (APIs) to achieve this ambition, and the IP and trade secrets protection potentially hindering it, any regulatory analysis within the data access discussion will be incomplete. Any attempt at untangling the role of data interoperability in the access and sharing regimes requires a thorough understanding of the underlying technology and a common understanding of the different notions of data interoperability. The paper firstly explains the technical complexity of interoperability and its enablers, namely data standards and application programming interfaces. It elaborates on the reasons data interoperability counts with different levels and puts emphasis on the fact that data interoperability is indirectly tangled to the data access right. Since data interoperability may be part of the legal obligations correlating to the access right, the scope of interoperability is and has already been subject to courts’ interpretation. While this may give some manoeuvre for balanced decision-making, it may not guarantee the ambition of efficient re-usability of data. This is why data governance market regulation under a public law approach is becoming more favourable. Yet, and this is elaborated in a second step, the paper builds on the assumption that interoperability should not become another policy on its own. This is followed by a competition economics assessment, taking into account that data interoperability is always a matter of degree and a lack of data interoperability does not necessarily lead to a market foreclosure of competitors and to causing harm to consumer welfare. Additionally, parts of application programming interfaces (APIs) may be protected under IP rights and trade secrets, which might conflict with data access rights. Instead of further solving the conflicting regimes within the respective legal regimes of the exclusive rights the paper concludes by suggesting that (sector-specific) data governance solutions should deal with this issue and align the different interests implied. This may provide for better, practical and well-balanced solutions instead of impractical and dysfunctional exceptions and limitations within the IP and trade secrets regimes.

Abstract:

To prevent the outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), numerous countries around the world went into lockdown and imposed unprecedented containment measures. These restrictions progressively produced changes to social behavior and global mobility patterns, evidently disrupting social and economic activities. Here, using maritime traffic data, collected via a global network of Automatic Identification System (AIS) receivers, we analyze the effects that the COVID-19 pandemic and the containment measures had on the shipping industry, which accounts alone for more than 80% of the world trade. We introduce the notion of a “maritime mobility index,” a synthetic composite index, to quantitatively assess ship mobility in a given unit of time. The mobility index calculation used in this study, has a worldwide extent and is based on the computation of cumulative navigated miles (CNM) of all ships reporting their position and navigational status via AIS. We compare 2020 mobility levels to those of previous years assuming that an unchanged growth rate would have been achieved, if not for COVID-19. Following the outbreak, we find an unprecedented drop in maritime mobility, across all categories of commercial shipping. The reduced activity is observable from March to June, when the most severe restrictions were in force, producing a variation of mobility quantified between -5.62% and -13.77% for container ships, between +2.28% and -3.32% for dry bulk, between -0.22% and -9.27% for wet bulk, and between -19.57% and -42.77% for passenger shipping. The presented study is unprecedented for the uniqueness and completeness of the employed AIS dataset, which comprises a trillion AIS messages broadcast worldwide by 50000 ships, a figure that closely parallels the documented size of the world merchant fleet.

Abstract

MIT CISR research has found that interorganizational data sharing is a top concern of companies; leaders often find data sharing costly, slow, and risky. Interorganizational data sharing, however, is requisite for new value creation in the digital economy. Digital opportunities require data sharing 2.0: cross-company sharing of complementary data assets and capabilities, which fills data gaps and allows companies, often collaboratively, to develop innovative solutions. This briefing introduces three sets of practices—curated content, designated channels, and repeatable controls—that help companies accelerate data sharing 2.0.

Abstract

This chapter introduces OpenStreetMap—a crowd-sourced, worldwide mapping project and geospatial data repository—to illustrate its usefulness in quickly and easily analyzing and visualizing planning and design outcomes in the built environment. It demonstrates the OSMnx toolkit for automatically downloading, modeling, analyzing, and visualizing spatial big data from OpenStreetMap. We explore patterns and configurations in street networks and buildings around the world computationally through visualization methods—including figure-ground diagrams and polar histograms—that help compress urban complexity into comprehensible artifacts that reflect the human experience of the built environment. Ubiquitous urban data and computation can open up new urban form analyses from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives.

A shocking increase in violence against women and girls has been reported in many countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, amounting to what UN Women calls a “shadow pandemic.”

The jarring facts are:

• Globally 243 million women and girls have been subjected to sexual and/or physical violence by an intimate partner in the past 12 months.
• The UNFPA estimates that the pandemic will cause a one-third reduction in progress towards ending gender-based violence by 2030;
• UNFPA predicts an additional 15 million cases of gender-based violence for every three months of lockdown.
• Official data captures only a fraction of the true prevalence and nature of gender-based violence.

The response to these new challenges were discussed at a meeting in July with a community-led response delivered through local actors highlighted as key. This means that timely, disaggregated, community-level data on the nature and prevalence of gender-based violence has never been more important. Data collected within communities can play a vital role to fill the gaps and ensure that data-informed policies reflect the lived experiences of the most marginalized women and girls.

Policymakers, experts and the general public heavily rely on the data that are being reported in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. Daily data releases on confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths provide information on the course of the pandemic. The same data are also essential for the estimation of indicators such as the reproduction rate and for the evaluation of policy interventions that seek to slow down the pandemic.

Together with the proliferation of data, however, a number of pitfalls have arisen with regard to the interpretation of the data and the conclusions that can be drawn from them. The aim of this paper is to highlight the most common among these pitfalls given that they have the potential to intentionally or unintentionally mislead the public debate and thereby the course of future policy actions.

The list of pitfalls presented is non-exhaustive. In fact, as the supply of data has increased since the beginning of the pandemic, new pitfalls have emerged in parallel, while others have decreased in relevance; a tendency that seems likely to continue into the future. Beyond explaining some of the current pitfalls, this paper will serve as a more general caveat regarding the interpretation of data in the context of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Excerpt -

“A lack of data on groundwater is impeding water management and could jeopardize climate resilience efforts in some places, according to recent research by WaterAid and the HSBC Water Programme.

Groundwater is found underground in gaps between soil, sand, and rock. Over 2.5 million people are thought to depend on groundwater — which has a higher tolerance to droughts than other water sources — for drinking.

The report looked at groundwater security and sustainability in Bangladesh, Ghana, India, Nepal, and Nigeria, where collectively more than 160 million people lack access to clean water close to home. It found that groundwater data tends to be limited — including on issues such as overextraction, pollution, and contamination — leaving little evidence for decision-makers to consider for its management.”

Excerpt – 

“Achieving most, if not all, of the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) will require the use of data from multiple public and private sources. In this sense, the SDGs are the embodiment of what we call “data mega-use-cases”: complex problems and opportunities affecting many different individuals, companies, organizations, and governments. Financial inclusion, crisis response, resource conservation, public health, and climate change are all examples of data mega-use-cases encompassed by the SDGs. But data can only contribute to the solution of these problems if it is readily available and shared.”

From the summary:

“Our families are being turned into data, as the digital traces we leave are shared, sold, and commodified. Children are datafied even before birth, with pregnancy apps and social media postings, and then tracked through childhood with learning apps, smart home devices, and medical records. In Child Data Citizen, Veronica Barassi examines the construction of children into data subjects, describing how their personal information is collected, archived, sold, and aggregated into unique profiles that can follow them across a lifetime. Children today are the very first generation of citizens to be datafied from before birth, and Barassi points to critical implications for our democratic futures.

Barassi draws on a three-year research project with parents in London and Los Angeles, which included the collection of fifty in-depth interviews, a digital ethnography of “sharenting” activities on social media by eight families over the course of eight months, and a two-year exploration of the datafication of her own family. She complements her ethnographic findings with a platform analysis of four social media platforms, ten health tracking apps, four home hubs, and four educational platforms, investigating the privacy policies, business models, and patent applications that enable the mining of children’s data. Barassi considers the implications of building a society where data traces are made to speak for and about citizens across a lifetime. What should we do when we realize that the narratives that algorithms construct about individuals are inaccurate and biased?”

Abstract –

“There is a rumbling debate over the impact of gentrification: presumed gentrifiers have been the target of protests and attacks in some cities, while they have been welcome as generators of new jobs and taxes in others. Census data fails to measure neighborhood change in real-time since it is usually updated every ten years. This work shows that Airbnb data can be used to quantify and track neighborhood changes. Specifically, we consider both structured data (e.g. number of listings, number of reviews, listing information) and unstructured data (e.g. user-generated reviews processed with natural language processing and machine learning algorithms) for three major cities, New York City (US), Los Angeles (US), and Greater London (UK). We find that Airbnb data (especially its unstructured part) appears to nowcast neighborhood gentrification, measured as changes in housing affordability and demographics. Overall, our results suggest that user-generated data from online platforms can be used to create socioeconomic indices to complement traditional measures that are less granular, not in real-time, and more costly to obtain.”

Abstract –

“Scholars and policy makers are giving increasing attention to how young people are involved in politics and their confidence in the current democratic system. In a context of a global trust crisis in the European Union, this paper examines if open government data, a promising governance strategy, may help to boost Millennials’ and Generation Z trust in public institutions and satisfaction with public outcomes. First, results from our preliminary analysis challenge some popular beliefs by revealing that younger generations tend to trust in their institutions notably more than the rest of the European citizens. In addition, our findings show that open government data is a trust-enabler for Millennials and Generation Z, not only through a direct link between both, but also thanks to the mediator role of citizens’ satisfaction. Accordingly, public officers are encouraged to spread the implementation of open data strategies as a way to improve younger generations’ attachment to democratic institutions.”

Abstract – 

“While digital trace data from sources like search engines hold enormous potential for tracking and understanding human behavior, these streams of data lack information about the actual experiences of those individuals generating the data. Moreover, most current methods ignore or under-utilize human processing capabilities that allow humans to solve problems not yet solvable by computers (human computation). We demonstrate how behavioral research, linking digital and real-world behavior, along with human computation, can be utilized to improve the performance of studies using digital data streams. This study looks at the use of search data to track prevalence of Influenza-Like Illness (ILI). We build a behavioral model of flu search based on survey data linked to users’ online browsing data. We then utilize human computation for classifying search strings. Leveraging these resources, we construct a tracking model of ILI prevalence that outperforms strong historical benchmarks using only a limited stream of search data and lends itself to tracking ILI in smaller geographic units. While this paper only addresses searches related to ILI, the method we describe has potential for tracking a broad set of phenomena in near real-time.”

The paper cites trust and privacy, transaction costs, competitive concerns, and lost financial opportunities as the four main barriers to data sharing. The authors further explain each barrier as follows:

1. Trust and Privacy.
2. Transaction Costs.
3. Competitive Concerns.
4. Lost Financial Opportunity.

To address these concerns, the analysts provide six rules that can simplify data sharing, which are: Rule 1. Understand what people really do. Rule 2. Reinforce the integrators. Rule 3. Increase the total quantity of power. Rule 4. Increase reciprocity. Rule 5. Expand the shadow of the future. Rule 6. Reward those who cooperate.

The use of data and technology in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about a range of new questions around how data should or should not be used; intellectual property rights; limitations on data re-use; how long data should be used for; and ultimately what should happen to collected data once the pandemic is over.

“The brief is divided into four substantive parts and is rounded-off with concluding thoughts. Part I introduces sunset clauses as legislative tools, highlighting a number of examples of how they have been used in both COVID-19 related and other contexts. It also shows their potential value as a tool to eventually wind down the use of sensitive data to trace and track individuals. Part II discusses sunset provisions in the context of data sharing agreements and attempts to explain the complex interrelationship between data ownership, intellectual property, and sunset provisions. Building on this, Part III identifies some key issues policymakers should consider when assessing the utility and viability of sunset provisions within their data sharing agreements and arrangements. Finally, Part IV highlights the value of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) as a viable vehicle for sunset provisions in contexts where data sharing agreements are either non-existent or not regularly used.”

The three main findings of the paper are: • Sunset clauses could be effectively used in existing emergency power legislation to limit the risk of governments using sensitive data beyond the end of the pandemic. • There is an opportunity to introduce sunset provisions into legally binding agreements around data sharing as part of the COVID-19 response to help safeguard rights and limit the future use of personal data. • In contexts where data sharing agreements are not routinely used to set terms for data sharing, a memorandum of understanding between parties engaged in data sharing during the COVID-19 pandemic could be used to stipulate how sharing can be wound down.

Excerpts:

“Contracts for Data Collaboration (C4DC) is a partnership between the Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s Thematic Research Network on Data and Statistics (SDSN TReNDS), the University of Washington’s (UW) Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the Governance Lab at New York University (“the GovLab”).

“The project aims to shed light on the opportunities and challenges inherent to data collaboratives. GovLab has worked to document the experiences of data collaboratives, specifically practices that involve the exchange of data or other data-related actions taking place between public and private entities (GovLab 2015). These exchanges and other data actions take place in various ways, from the informal sharing of insights and data-handling practices that don’t involve the sharing of raw data, through to more formal and legally-binding data sharing agreements (DSAs).

“The project is directed towards a number of audiences. These span government data and information management professionals, statisticians, and policymakers, through to development and humanitarian organizations that rely on data to carry out their programs of work. Businesses, data producers, and data stewards considering sharing their data for public good and researchers and academics exploring the use and potential of data sharing agreements are also intended audiences. In this way, the C4DC partnership spans the data supply-and-demand landscape.

“The project aims to provide these groups and others with a range of tools to facilitate understanding of the opportunities and challenges related to formalized data sharing that is underpinned by written agreements. Project outputs will include an online repository of DSAs, together with an analytical framework that will help to demystify these types of agreements for non-legal professionals, raising their understanding of the issues involved in data sharing and related actions. In the medium-term, the project hopes to also produce and publish a series of case studies explaining when and how DSAs are, and should be, most effectively applied for maximum impact and with minimum risk in the public interest.”

Abstract:

“A data collaboration in 2018 between the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), Vodafone Ghana, and Flowminder, enabled the GSS to access insights from mobile phone data to plan public health and sustainable development policies. This case study demonstrates how a government and a private company were able to work with an intermediary partner to gain insights from sensitive data. As part of the collaboration, Vodafone Ghana provided access to pseudonymized telecommunications data free of charge, and Flowminder aggregated and analyzed the data on behalf of GSS. Initially, the parties had planned to form a non-binding agreement, but national regulators requested a formal agreement that addressed various data concerns. From the initial draft of the agreement provided by Vodafone Ghana to the final approval, negotiations took some 13 months. The negotiations were made especially challenging because GSS did not have its own legal counsel, and the process overlapped with the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Among other issues, the agreement addresses how the data will be aggregated, the parameters for the exchange of the data between the parties, data use limitations, data deletion, and the publication of analysis results. After signing the agreement in December 2018, the parties have since enjoyed a successful collaboration, and the mobile data being used by GSS has proven especially valuable during the current Covid-19 pandemic to document the impact of restriction measures in Ghana.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in new demands for data, and many countries are engaging in emergency data sharing arrangements to understand different dimensions of the health crisis. In particular, there is growing interest in the use of mobile network operator (MNO) data for tracking population movement. As described by Digital Impact Alliance, MNO data can be used to understand mobility patterns, predict new COVID-19 hotspots, model social distancing targets, and monitor health services. The inherent sensitivity of MNO data, however, raises privacy concerns, among other questions. GSMA - an international body representing the interests of more than 750 MNOs - has published COVID-19 privacy guidelines that address how its members can maintain trust while meeting requests from governments. The group Privacy International is also recording the ways that countries around the world are employing MNO data during the pandemic, and it has reported on situations where some of this data use might be illegal, such as the way Pakistan apparently accessed patients’ registered mobile numbers without consent. Even under emergency conditions, MNO data sharing will have to be managed thoughtfully to realize the potential benefits without creating avoidable harm.

Abstract:

“In 2013, the Government of Moldova and Development Gateway worked together to create an aid management platform to collect data from different development actors across the country. To accompany the platform, a data management plan (DMP) was established to provide guidelines for data submissions. The plan was first drafted by the government and Development Gateway, and it later incorporated feedback from various development actors and data providers. Most important, the plan was written as a flexible living document and supported by an accompanying law that increased the incentives for submitting data electronically. The DMP has proven effective for project implementation in Moldova, with development actors continuing to regularly submit data.”

Abstract:

“In 2018, UN Environment and Google teamed up to create a global indicator of surface water that has now been incorporated into official Sustainable Development Goal reporting. The collaboration built on satellite derived measures of surface water produced by Google and the European Commission Joint Research Center, filling important data gaps for UN Environment. Although the collaboration involved publicly available data, the partners decided to form a memorandum of understanding, in part to show countries that the data was created through a partnership, and also to secure a long-term commitment to data sharing between Google and UN Environment. The agreement was kept general to provide flexibility, but it served to define the intent of the collaboration, commit to make data products publicly available, and indicate areas of primary responsibility, as well as to clarify the duration of the collaboration and to explain that there was no preferential treatment involved. The project was also enabled by a mutual spirit of cooperation and a collaboratively-developed work plan.”

Excerpt:

“Contracts for Data Collaboration (C4DC) (UNSDSN 2019) aims to shed light on the opportunities and challenges inherent to data sharing practices. The project will work to provide policy makers, development and humanitarian organisations, and private companies with a range of tools for them to better understand formalized data sharing practices that are underpinned by written agreements. Project outputs will include an online repository of data sharing agreements (DSAs) by the end of 2019, together with an analytical framework explaining the relevance of each part of a DSA. In the mediumterm, the project hopes to also produce and publish a series of case studies documenting when and how DSAs are, and can be, most effectively applied for maximum impact and with minimum risk within development and humanitarian contexts. This insight report draws extensively on interviews with partners and key stakeholders. It aims to break down the complexities and opacity of DSAs as much as possible and to raise awareness of their value and potential, using terms from project partners and development and humanitarian professionals.”

From Abstract:

This paper argues that the Global Indicator Framework required to support the 2030 Agenda Sustainable Development Goals will not be successfully populated, using only existing approaches and mechanisms. Official statistical systems must adapt and consider new approaches if only partial success is to be averted. This paper presents a proposal to accredit unofficial statistics as official for the purposes of compiling sustainable development goal indicators. While there may be some reluctance, and there are certainly risks with this proposal, the arguments put forward highlight the potential for collaboration. Keywords: 2030 Agenda, accreditation, risk management, fundamental principles of official statistics.

Abstract:

Big data can help fill these data gaps when traditional data is lacking or unavailable by providing unique insights into a wide range of issues affecting women and girls.

Researchers from the Center on Gender Equity and Health at the University of California at San Diego (UC San Diego) have undertaken a series of briefs that analyze big data — such as, Twitter data and Google Trends — to highlight key gendered issues during the pandemic within select country contexts and to offer a “how-to” section for replication of these analyses in any country context. For each brief in the series, researchers provide reproducible codes along with a description of the methodology. Briefs will be published once a month. This work was supported by a grant to UC San Diego from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Abstract:

Rough sleeping is a chronic experience faced by some of the most disadvantaged people in modern society. This paper describes work carried out in partnership with Homeless Link (HL), a UK-based charity, in developing a data-driven approach to better connect people sleeping rough on the streets with outreach service providers. HL’s platform has grown exponentially in recent years, leading to thousands of alerts per day during extreme weather events; this overwhelms the volunteer-based system they currently rely upon for the processing of alerts. In order to solve this problem, we propose a human-centered machine learning system to augment the volunteers’ efforts by prioritizing alerts based on the likelihood of making a successful connection with a rough sleeper. This addresses capacity and resource limitations whilst allowing HL to quickly, effectively, and equitably process all of the alerts that they receive. Initial evaluation using historical data shows that our approach increases the rate at which rough sleepers are found following a referral by at least 15% based on labeled data, implying a greater overall increase when the alerts with unknown outcomes are considered, and suggesting the benefit in a trial taking place over a longer period to assess the models in practice. The discussion and modeling process is done with careful considerations of ethics, transparency, and explainability due to the sensitive nature of the data involved and the vulnerability of the people that are affected.

Excerpt:

“To prevent market tipping, which inhibits innovation, there is an urgent need to mandate sharing of user information in data-driven markets. Existing legal mechanisms to impose data sharing under EU competition law and data portability under the GDPR are not sufficient to tackle this problem. Mandated data sharing requires the design of a governance structure that combines elements of economically efficient centralization with legally necessary decentralization.”

Abstract:

“Urban planning and morphology have relied on analytical cartography and visual communication tools for centuries to illustrate spatial patterns, conceptualize proposed designs, compare alternatives, and engage the public. Classic urban form visualizations – from Giambattista Nolli’s ichnographic maps of Rome to Allan Jacobs’s figure-ground diagrams of city streets – have compressed physical urban complexity into easily comprehensible information artifacts. Today we can enhance these traditional workflows through the Smart Cities paradigm of understanding cities via user-generated content and harvested data in an information management context. New spatial technology platforms and big data offer new lenses to understand, evaluate, monitor, and manage urban form and evolution. This paper builds on the theoretical framework of visual cultures in urban planning and morphology to introduce and situate computational data science processes for exploring urban fabric patterns and spatial order. It demonstrates these workflows with OSMnx and data from OpenStreetMap, a collaborative spatial information system and mapping platform, to examine street network patterns, orientations, and configurations in different study sites around the world, considering what these reveal about the urban fabric. The age of ubiquitous urban data and computational toolkits opens up a new era of worldwide urban form analysis from integrated quantitative and qualitative perspectives.”

Abstract:

“The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the “phase 2” of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raises concerns about citizens’ privacy and needlessly strong digital surveillance, thus alerting us to the need to minimize personal data collection and avoiding location tracking. We advocate the conceptual advantage of a decentralized approach, where both contact and location data are collected exclusively in individual citizens’ “personal data stores”, to be shared separately and selectively (e.g., with a backend system, but possibly also with other citizens), voluntarily, only when the citizen has tested positive for COVID-19, and with a privacy preserving level of granularity. This approach better protects the personal sphere of citizens and affords multiple benefits: it allows for detailed information gathering for infected people in a privacy-preserving fashion; and, in turn this enables both contact tracing, and, the early detection of outbreak hotspots on more finely-granulated geographic scale. The decentralized approach is also scalable to large populations, in that only the data of positive patients need be handled at a central level. Our recommendation is two-fold. First to extend existing decentralized architectures with a light touch, in order to manage the collection of location data locally on the device, and allow the user to share spatio-temporal aggregates—if and when they want and for specific aims—with health authorities, for instance. Second, we favour a longer-term pursuit of realizing a Personal Data Store vision, giving users the opportunity to contribute to collective good in the measure they want, enhancing self-awareness, and cultivating collective efforts for rebuilding society.”

Excerpt:

“Data responsibility in humanitarian action is the safe, ethical and effective management of personal and non-personal data for operational response. It is a critical issue for the humanitarian system to address and the stakes are high. Ensuring we ‘do no harm’ while maximizing the benefits of data requires collective action that extends across all levels of the humanitarian system. Humanitarians must be careful when handling data to avoid placing already vulnerable individuals and communities at further risk. This is especially important in contexts where the urgency of humanitarian needs drives pressure for fast, sometimes untested, data solutions, and the politicization of data can have more extreme consequences for people.”

Excerpt:

“Personalized medicine (PM) operates with biological data to optimize therapy or prevention and to achieve cost reduction. Associated data may consist of large variations of informational subtypes e.g. genetic characteristics and their epigenetic modifications, biomarkers or even individual lifestyle factors. Present innovations in the field of information technology have already enabled the procession of increasingly large amounts of such data (‘volume’) from various sources (‘variety’) and varying quality in terms of data accuracy (‘veracity’) to facilitate the generation and analyzation of messy data sets within a short and highly efficient time period (‘velocity’) to provide insights into previously unknown connections and correlations between different items (‘value’).”

Excerpt:

“Collaborative efforts between public and private entities such as academic institutions, governments, and pharmaceutical companies form an integral part of scientific research, and notable instances of such initiatives have been created within the life science community. Several examples of alliances exist with the broad goal of collaborating toward scientific advancement and improved public welfare. Such collaborations can be essential in catalyzing breaking areas of science within high-risk or global public health strategies that may have otherwise not progressed”

Excerpt:

“The Government of Canada introduced the concept of “data trust” into the Canadian privacy law modernization discussion through Canada’s Digital Charter in Action: A Plan by Canadians, for Canadians, to “enable responsible innovation.” At a high level, a data trust may be defined, according to the Open Data Institute, as a legal structure that is appropriate to the data sharing it is meant to govern and that provides independent stewardship of data.

Bill C-11, known as the Digital Charter Implementation Act, 2020, and tabled on November 17, 2020, lays the groundwork for the possibility of creating data trusts for private organizations to disclose de-identified data to specific public institutions for “socially beneficial purposes.” In her recent article “Replacing Canada’s 20-Year-Old Data Protection Law,” Teresa Scassa provides a superb overview and analysis of the bill.

Another instrument for privacy protective innovation is referred to as the “regulatory sandbox.” The United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) provides a regulatory sandbox service that encourages organizations to submit innovative initiatives without fear of enforcement action. From there, the ICO sandbox team provides advice related to privacy risks and how to embed privacy protection.

Both governance measures may hold the future of privacy and innovation, provided that we accept this equation: De-identified data may no longer be considered irrevocably anonymous and therefore should not be released unconditionally, but the risk of re-identification is so remote that the data may be released under a governance structure that mitigates the residual privacy risk.”

Abstract:

” In this chapter we argue that discourses on AI must transcend the language of ‘ethics’ and engage with power and political economy in order to constitute ‘Good Data’. In particular, we must move beyond the depoliticised language of ‘ethics’ currently deployed (Wagner 2018) in determining whether AI is ‘good’ given the limitations of ethics as a frame through which AI issues can be viewed. In order to circumvent these limits, we use instead the language and conceptualisation of ‘Good Data’, as a more expansive term to elucidate the values, rights and interests at stake when it comes to AI’s development and deployment, as well as that of other digital technologies. Good Data considerations move beyond recurring themes of data protection/privacy and the FAT (fairness, transparency and accountability) movement to include explicit political economy critiques of power. Instead of yet more ethics principles (that tend to say the same or similar things anyway), we offer four ‘pillars’ on which Good Data AI can be built: community, rights, usability and politics. Overall we view AI’s ‘goodness’ as an explicly political (economy) question of power and one which is always related to the degree which AI is created and used to increase the wellbeing of society and especially to increase the power of the most marginalized and disenfranchised. We offer recommendations and remedies towards implementing ‘better’ approaches towards AI. Our strategies enable a different (but complementary) kind of evaluation of AI as part of the broader socio-technical systems in which AI is built and deployed.”

Excerpt:

“Mobile phone surveys have been rapidly deployed by the World Bank to measure the impact of COVID-19 in nearly 100 countries across the world. Previous posts on this blog have discussed the sampling and implementation challenges associated with these efforts, and coverage errors are an inherent problem to the approach. The survey methodology literature has shown mobile phone survey respondents in the poorest countries are more likely to be male, urban, wealthier, and more highly educated. This bias can stem from phone ownership, as mobile phone surveys are at best representative of mobile phone owners, a group which, particularly in poor countries, may differ from the overall population; or from differential response rates among these owners, with some groups more or less likely to respond to a call from an unknown number. In this post, we share our experiences in trying to improve representativeness and boost sample sizes for the poor in Papua New Guinea (PNG).”

Abstract:

“Data are considered to be key for the functioning of the data economy as well as for pursuing multiple public interest concerns. Against this backdrop this book strives to device new data access rules for future legislation. To do so, the contributions first explain the justification for such rules from an economic and more general policy perspective. Then, building on the constitutional foundations and existing access regimes, they explore the potential of various fields of the law (competition and contract law, data protection and consumer law, sector-specific regulation) as a basis for the future legal framework. The book also addresses the need to coordinate data access rules with intellectual property rights and to integrate these rules as one of multiple measures in larger data governance systems. Finally, the book discusses the enforcement of the Government’s interest in using privately held data as well as potential data access rights of the users of connected devices.”

Excerpt:

“In this piece, we argue these (and many other limitations necessitate additional improvements to accelerate the re-use of data to unleash the public good potential of the digital era. We reflect on the potential of what we call the “Third Wave of Open Data.” We 1discuss both what we see as the emerging elements of this wave and the actions several players have taken that may contribute to its realization. In doing so, we propose actions for how policy makers and data practitioners might address the limitations of previous waves and outline a set of actions that could accelerate data re-use and collaboration.”

Excerpt:

“The core output of the Data Assembly is a Responsible Data Re-Use Framework, which seeks to inform decision-makers on how best to re-use data to solve public problems, such as COVID-19. This framework, presented below seeks to inform if, when and how the re-use personal data can be aligned with people’s expectations and societal values. While the initial focus of the Data Assembly falls on data re-use for COVID-19 measures in New York City, the framework is intended to be applicable to policymaking and data re-use project design in other contexts.”

Excerpt:

“This toolkit is the result of several months of research and conversations with data practitioners from around the world during the Summer of Open Data. These discussions revealed significant barriers that prevented organizations from scaling open data and data collaboratives. Many of these barriers were organizational and contributed to a broader data ecosystem that replicated challenges writ large.This toolkit aims to help organizations deal with these challenges so they can foster more data re-use within their organizations and encourage broader responsible access across the domains they work. It achieves this goal by offering a framework to think about data re-use, one that starts from central questions about how data is created before expanding outward. It also offers eight actions data stewards to foster re-use and specific ways they can change their day-to-day operations to make these actions possible.”

Excerpt:

“The initial response to the Covid-19 pandemic was one of mass collaboration. New networks, initiatives, partnerships and working groups made up of governments, businesses, academia and more were born. Many of these collaborative approaches had data and data sharing at their core.

Through our research we have taken a closer look at how mobility data is being collected, used and shared in order to help understand the spread of the pandemic and plan the response to it. To further this research, in October 2020, the ODI announced a call for proposals to review public–private mobility data sharing in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The primary objective of this work was to explore how mobility data has been shared between organisations in the private and public sectors, during the Covid-19 pandemic. What are the success stories? Where has this failed? What are the barriers? What tangible effects or impacts have there been from sharing, or not sharing, between the public and private sectors? What decision making has been made possible from these sectors successfully sharing their mobility data?”

Excerpt:

“Data sharing, by definition, involves multiple parties that tend to coalesce around ecosystems. As these ecosystems grow, they share more types of data, and more detailed data, among the members of an expanding community. They also develop solutions that address an expanding range of use cases, some of which were totally unforeseen when the data was originally generated or shared. Each of these factors introduces its own set of risk-value tradeoffs. The extent of the tradeoffs depends on the specific data-sharing capabilities of the underlying platform.”

Abstract:

Global cities are facing an almost unprecedented challenge of change. As they re-emerge from the Covid 19 pandemic and get ready to face climate change and other, potentially existential threats, they need to look for new ways to support wealth and wellbeing creation – leveraging Big Data and AI and suing them into their physical reality and to become greener, more inclusive and resilient, hence sustainable.

This book describes how new digital technologies could be used to design digital and physical twins of cities that are able to feed into each other to optimize their working and ability to create new wealth and wellbeing. The book also describes how to increase cities’ social and economic resilience during crisis time and addressing their almost fatal weaknesses – as it became all too obvious during the recent COVID 19 crisis. Also, the book presents a framework for a critical discussion of the concept of “smart-city”, suggesting its development into a “cyber” and “meta” one – meaning, not only digital systems can allow physical ones (e.g. cities, citizens, households and companies) to become “smarter”, but also the vice versa is true, as off line data and real life behaviours can support the optimization and development of virtual brains as a sum of big data and artificial intelligence apps all sitting “over the cloud”. An analysis of the fundamental dynamics of this emerging “info-telligence” economy, and of the potential role of big digital players like Amazon, Google and Facebook is then paving the way to discuss a few strategic forays on how traditional sectors such as financial services, real estate, TMT or health could also evolve, leveraging Big Data and AI in a cyber-physical integrated setting. Finally, a number of thought provoking use cases that could be designed around individuals, and to improve the success and the resilience of households and companies living and working in urban areas are discussed, as an example of one of the most exciting future markets to come: the one of global, sustainable cities.

Abstract:

The paper presents and discusses the method adopted by Compagnia di San Paolo, one of the largest European philanthropic institutions, to monitor the advancement, despite the COVID-19 situation, in providing specific input to the decision-making process for dedicated projects. An innovative approach based on the use of daily open data was adopted to monitor the metropolitan area with a multidimensional perspective. Several open data indicators related to the economy, society, culture, environment, and climate were identified and incorporated into the decision support system dashboard. Indicators are presented and discussed to highlight how open data could be integrated into the foundation’s strategic approach and potentially replicated on a large scale by local institutions. Moreover, starting from the lessons learned from this experience, the paper analyzes the opportunities and critical issues surrounding the use of open data, not only to improve the quality of life during the COVID-19 epidemic but also for the effective regulation of society, the participation of citizens, and their well-being.

Abstract:

Data are considered to be key for the functioning of the data economy as well as for pursuing multiple public interest concerns. Against this backdrop this book strives to device new data access rules for future legislation. To do so, the contributions first explain the justification for such rules from an economic and more general policy perspective. Then, building on the constitutional foundations and existing access regimes, they explore the potential of various fields of the law (competition and contract law, data protection and consumer law, sector-specific regulation) as a basis for the future legal framework. The book also addresses the need to coordinate data access rules with intellectual property rights and to integrate these rules as one of multiple measures in larger data governance systems. Finally, the book discusses the enforcement of the Government’s interest in using privately held data as well as potential data access rights of the users of connected devices. The authors Prof. Dr. Josef Drexl, LL.M. (UC Berkeley); Prof. Dr. Thomas Fetzer, LL.M. (Vanderbilt); Prof. Dr. Michael Grünberger, , LL.M. (NYU); Jörg Hoffmann; Prof. Dr. Ruth Janal, LL.M. (New South Wales); Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Kerber; Christine Lambrecht; Prof. Dr. Matthias Leistner, LL.M. (Cambridge); Bertin Martens, Ph.D.; Prof. Dr. Axel Metzger, LL.M. (Harvard); Christian Reimsbach-Kounatze; Dr. Heiko Richter, LL.M. (Columbia); Prof. Dr. Heike Schweitzer, LL.M. (Yale); Prof. Dr. Louisa Specht-Riemenschneider; Prof. Dr. Indra Spiecker gen. Döhmann, LL.M. (Georgetown Univ.) und Robert Welker.

Abstract:

Data conveys significant social, economic, and political power. Unequal control over data — a pervasive form of digital inequality — is a problem for economic development, human agency, and collective self-determination that needs to be addressed. This paper takes some steps in this direction by analyzing the extent to which law facilitates unequal control over data and by suggesting ways in which legal interventions might lead to more equal control over data. By unequal control over data, we not only mean having or not having data, but also having or not having power over deciding what becomes and what does not become data. We call this the power to datafy. We argue that data inequality is in turn a function of unequal control over the infrastructures that generate, shape, process, store, transfer, and use data. Existing law often regulates data as an object to be transferred, protected, and shared and is not always attuned to the salience of infrastructural control over data. While there are no easy solutions to the variegated causes and consequences of data inequality, we suggest that retaining flexibility to experiment with different approaches, reclaiming infrastructural control, systematically demanding enhanced transparency, pooling of data and bargaining power, and differentiated and conditional access to data mechanisms may help in confronting data inequality more effectively going forward.

Excerpt:

The data always travels, creating new possibilities for judging and predicting human lives. We might call it control creep: data-driven technologies tend to be pitched for a particular context and purpose, but quickly expand into new forms of control. Although we often think about data use in terms of trade-offs or bargains, such frameworks can be deeply misleading. What does it mean to “trade” personal data for the convenience of, say, an Amazon Echo, when the other side of that trade is constantly arranging new ways to sell and use that data in ways we cannot anticipate? As technology scholars Jake Goldenfein, Ben Green and Salomé Viljoen argue, the familiar trade-off of “privacy vs. X” rarely results in full respect for both values but instead tends to normalize a further stripping of privacy.

Abstract:

The COVID-19 crisis presents a monumental opportunity to engender a widespread data culture in our societies. Since early 2020, the emergence of popular data sites like Worldometer2 have promoted interest and attention in data-driven tracking of the pandemic. “R values”, “flattening the curve” and “exponential increase” have seeped into everyday lexicon. Social media and news outlets have filled the public consciousness with trends, rankings and graphs throughout multiple waves of COVID-19.

Yet, the crisis also reveals a critical lack of data literacy amongst citizens in many parts of the world. The lack of a data literate culture predates the pandemic. The supply of statistics and information has significantly outpaced the ability of lay citizens to make informed choices about their lives in the digital data age.

Today’s fragmented datafied information landscape is also susceptible to the pitfalls of misinformation, post-truth politics and societal polarisation – all of which demand a critical thinking lens towards data. There is an urgent need to develop data literacy at the level of citizens, organisations and society – such that all actors are empowered to navigate the complexity of modern data ecosystems.

The paper identifies three key take-aways. It is crucial to

• forge a common language around data literacy
• adopt a demand-driven approach and participatory approach to doing data literacy
• move from ad-hoc programming towards sustained policy, investment and impact

Abstract:

Cities in the US have started to enact data-sharing rules and programs to access some of the data that technology companies operating under their jurisdiction – like short-term rental or ride hailing companies - collect. This information allows cities to adapt too to the challenges and benefits of the digital information economy. It allows them to understand what their impact is on congestion, the housing market, the local job market and even the use of public spaces. It also empowers them to act accordingly by, for example, setting vehicle caps or mandating a tailored minimum pay for gig-workers. These companies, however, sometimes argue that sharing this information attempts against their users’ privacy rights and their privacy rights, because this information is theirs; it’s part of their business records. The question is thus what those rights are, and whether it should and could be possible for local governments to access that information to advance equity and sustainability, without harming the legitimate privacy interests of both individuals and companies. This Article argues that within current Fourth Amendment doctrine and privacy law there is space for data-sharing programs. Privacy law, however, is being mobilized to alter the distribution of power and welfare between local governments, companies, and citizens within current digital information capitalism to extend those rights beyond their fair share and preempt permissible data-sharing requests. The Article warns that if the companies succeed in their challenges, privacy law will have helped shield corporate power from regulatory oversight, while still leaving individuals largely unprotected and submitting local governments further to corporate interests.

“Abstract:

“In January 2020, our first publication presented Authorized Public Purpose Access (APPA), a new data governance model that aims to strike a balance between individual rights and the interests of data holders and the public interest. It is proposed that the use of personal data for public-health purposes, including fighting pandemics, be subject to appropriate and balanced governance mechanisms such as those set out the APPA approach. The same approach could be extended to the use of data for non-medical public-interest purposes, such as achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This publication proposes a systematic approach to implementing APPA and to pursuing public-interest goals through data use. The approach values practicality, broad social agreement on appropriate goals and methods, and the valid interests of all stakeholders.”

Description:

The increasing popularity of data science has resulted in numerous well-publicized cases of bias, injustice, and discrimination. The widespread deployment of “Black box” algorithms that are difficult or impossible to understand and explain, even for their developers, is a primary source of these unanticipated harms, making modern techniques and methods for manipulating large data sets seem sinister, even dangerous. When put in the hands of authoritarian governments, these algorithms have enabled suppression of political dissent and persecution of minorities. To prevent these harms, data scientists everywhere must come to understand how the algorithms that they build and deploy may harm certain groups or be unfair.

Responsible Data Science delivers a comprehensive, practical treatment of how to implement data science solutions in an even-handed and ethical manner that minimizes the risk of undue harm to vulnerable members of society. Both data science practitioners and managers of analytics teams will learn how to:

• Improve model transparency, even for black box models
• Diagnose bias and unfairness within models using multiple metrics
• Audit projects to ensure fairness and minimize the possibility of unintended harm

Perfect for data science practitioners, Responsible Data Science will also earn a spot on the bookshelves of technically inclined managers, software developers, and statisticians.

Abstract:

“Never has there been a more exciting time to be an official statistician. The data revolution is responding to the demands of the CoVID-19 pandemic and a complex sustainable development agenda to improve how data is produced and used, to close data gaps to prevent discrimination, to build capacity and data literacy, to modernize data collection systems and to liberate data to promote transparency and accountability. But can all data be liberated in the production and communication of official statistics? This paper explores the UN Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics in the context of eight new and big data sources. The paper concludes each data source can be used for the production of official statistics in adherence with the Fundamental Principles and argues these data sources should be used if National Statistical Systems are to adhere to the first Fundamental Principle of compiling and making available official statistics that honor citizen’s entitlement to public information.”

Abstract: This document provides an update for selected articles of the GDPR Commentary published in 2020 by Oxford University Press. It covers developments between the last date of coverage of the Commentary (1 August 2019) and 1 January 2021 (with a few exceptions when later developments are taken into account). Edited by Christopher Kuner, Lee A. Bygrave, Chris Docksey, Laura Drechsler, and Luca Tosoni, it covers 49 articles of the GDPR, and is being made freely accessible with the kind permission of Oxford University Press. It also includes two appendices that cover the same period as the rest of this update: the first deals with judgments of the European courts and some selected judgments of particular importance from national courts, and the second with EDPB papers. Full reference to it should be made if it is quoted from or paraphrased, as follows: C. Kuner, L.A. Bygrave and C. Docksey (eds.), The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): A Commentary – 2021 Update (OUP 2021).

Abstract:

“The recent surge of data-driven methods in social policy have created new opportunities to assess existing poverty programs. The expectation is that the combination of advanced methods and more data can calculate the effectiveness of public interventions more accurately and tailor local initiatives accordingly. Specifically, nonmonetary indicators are increasingly being measured at micro levels in order to target social exclusion in combination with poverty. However, the multidimensional character of poverty, local context, and data matching pose challenges to data-driven analyses. By linking Dutch household-level data with policy-initiative-specific data at local level, we present an explorative study on the uptake of a local poverty pass. The goal is to unravel pass usage in terms of household income and location as well as the age of users. We find that income and age play a role in whether the pass is used, and usage differs per neighborhood. With this, the paper feeds into the discourse on how to operationalize and design data matching work in the multidimensional space of poverty and nonmonetary government initiatives.”

From text:

“Every child is different, with unique identities and their capacities and circumstances evolve over their lifecycle. Children are more vulnerable than adults and are less able to understand the long-term implications of consenting to their data collection. For these reasons, children’s data deserve to be treated differently.

While responsible data use can underpin many benefits for children, ensuring that children are protected, empowered and granted control of their data is still a challenge.

To maximise the benefits of data use for children and to protect them from harm requires a new model of data governance that is fitting for the 21st century.

UNICEF has worked with 17 global experts to develop a Manifesto that articulates a vision for a better approach to children’s data.

This Manifesto includes key action points and a call for a governance model purposefully designed to deliver on the needs and rights of children. It is the first step in ensuring that children’s rights are given due weight in data governance legal frameworks and processes as they evolve around the world.”

Abstract

Background Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) is a well-established technique to elicit individual preferences, but it has rarely been used to elicit governance preferences for health data sharing.

Objectives The aim of this article was to describe the process of identifying attributes for a DCE study aiming to elicit preferences of citizens in Sweden, Iceland and the UK for governance mechanisms for digitally sharing different kinds of health data in different contexts.

Methods A three-step approach was utilised to inform the attribute and level selection: 1) Attribute identification, 2) Attribute development and 3) Attribute refinement. First, we developed an initial set of potential attributes from a literature review and a workshop with experts. To further develop attributes, focus group discussions with citizens (n = 13), ranking exercises among focus group participants (n = 48) and expert interviews (n = 18) were performed. Thereafter, attributes were refined using group discussion (n = 3) with experts as well as cognitive interviews with citizens (n = 11).

Results The results led to the selection of seven attributes for further development: 1) level of identification, 2) the purpose of data use, 3) type of information, 4) consent, 5) new data user, 6) collector and 7) the oversight of data sharing. Differences were found between countries regarding the order of top three attributes. The process outlined participants’ conceptualisation of the chosen attributes, and what we learned for our attribute development phase.

Conclusions This study demonstrates a process for selection of attributes for a (multi-country) DCE involving three stages: Attribute identification, Attribute development and Attribute refinement. This study can contribute to improve the ethical aspects and good practice of this phase in DCE studies. Specifically, it can contribute to the development of governance mechanisms in the digital world, where people’s health data are shared for multiple purposes.

Principled Data Access: Building Public-private Data Partnerships for Better Official Statistics by Claudia Biancotti, Oscar Borgogno, and Giovanni Veronese in the Bank of Italy Occasional Paper Series argues for the need for greater transparency and access to official statistics, and proposes “a set of principles under which the public and the private sector can form partnerships to leverage the potential of new-generation data in the public interest.”

“The framework should foster collaboration and experimentation by the local ecosystems’ stakeholders to co-develop advanced data-driven applications and services as well as enable scaling up of practices in local data sharing between cities across Europe. It should promote and support data quality culture in the public sector and especially in city governments to increase the efficiency of public services.”

The news item describes a new requirement by the US National Institutes of Health that funded organizations include a data-management plan in their grant applications. The author describes the move as one that could “set a global standard for biomedical research.”