data guardian — News — Guardian Stability

Exploring Legal Mechanisms for Data Stewardship: Considering Data Foundations

Organisations, governments and citizen-driven initiatives around the world aspire to use data to tackle major societal and economic problems, such as combating the COVID-19 pandemic. Realising the potential of data for social good is not an easy task, and from the outset efforts must be made to develop methods for the responsible management of data on behalf of individuals and groups.

The challenges of the twenty-first century demand new data governance models for collectives, governments and organisations that allow data to be shared for individual and public benefit in a responsible way, while managing the harms that may emerge.

Produced by a working group of legal, technical and policy experts, this report describes three legal mechanisms which could help collectives, organisations and governments create flexible governance responses that can respond to different elements of today’s data governance challenge, for example by empowering data subjects to more easily control decisions made about their data by setting clear boundaries on data use, assisting in promoting desirable uses, increasing confidence among organisations to share data or injecting a new democratic element into data policy.

Are you developing policies and process to share large amounts of data between lots of different organisations? If you want to reduce costs, comply with relevant legislation, and make sure that everyone’s needs are met you will need novel ways to do this. The old way is experiencing significant difficulties.

How to increase responsible data sharing is one of the most significant questions of the 21st century. Access to rich datasets benefits economies and societies by facilitating not only timely and well-informed policies and decisions, but also the development of new and improved data-based products and services. Data Foundations, as one of the new types of Data Institutions, offer some unique qualities which create the opportunity for a cost-effective and trustworthy mechanism for multiple data providers to share more data, even if they are competitors. They use specific design principles offering a data governance model which includes independent oversight, a rulebook, and the ability to represent data subjects in collective decision-making regarding the data.