Welcome to the the third issue of The Data Economy Lab (DEL) newsletter. In the last couple of months, as we move beyond theory into practice we've been actively exploring use-cases for data stewardship. Data Deliberations, our first discussion series, focused on the applicability of stewardship to: empower migrants, build safe, inclusive cities for women and gender minorities and gain a better understanding of community data rights and non personal data. We recognize data stewardship as part of the solution to re-balance the data economy - through our research, we aim to discover the relevance of this framework for different verticals and learn from those who are implementing these mechanisms on ground. Simultaneously, we continue to engage with questions around policy in India and globally with the aim to find synergies in conversation and outcomes.
Recap: Aapti's Data Deliberations
In August, we convened with experts to explore existing and new approaches to sharing data. If you missed it, watch the videos here.
DEL Round-up: Papers, Blogs, Articles and Videos
EXPLORING USE CASES FOR DATA STEWARDSHIP
The Case for Community Data Governance Aditi Ramesh
Drawing from Ostrom's philosophy of managing the commons and more recent theory of Data Justice, this piece explores and complicates our understanding of community data governance. Through the lens of stewardship, it argues a community-led bottom up structure can help vulnerable communities, such as migrants, reclaim agency and power in their relationships with technology.
Stewarding Data for Safe & Inclusive Cities Suha Mohamed
Data has emerged as a tool to surface challenges that women and gender minorities face in navigating cities however, it remains limited in its collection. Where accessible, stakeholders are either unavailable to derive value from it or it fails to be safeguarded, potentially magnifying existing, often gendered, privacy risks. The paper outlines existing approaches to data collection and sharing for women's safety and proposes principles for a data steward to guide the responsible collection and management of data for safer cities.
Trust Law, Fiduciaries, and Data Trusts Siddharth Manohar
The ‘trust’ framing of responsibility has emerged as a popular one in discussing the necessary safeguards and governance measures in data sharing for public good. This paper examines the basis for its popularity, the opportunities that it presents, and the warnings shared by some thinkers on the challenges of applying a fiduciary framework to steward functions over data sharing.
Following our earlier piece on the 'Role of data stewards in enhancing accountability', this piece delves further to imagine a set of standards to reinforce and strengthen existing accountability mechanisms, relevant when governing sensitive data.
This blog provides an overview of various principles and factors behind prevalent data-sharing and data governance practices, how they square with the idea of data-sharing for public good, and how we can establish a shared terminology and foundations to make for a fruitful discussion on data stewardship as a regulatory choice.
Amidst a data economy that centres almost entirely around user-data - how much agency does this individual really hold? This piece explores current power structures in the data economy - from users’ relationship with data controllers, the opacity and the imbalances to related implications for both individuals and communities. It considers how this power can be redistributed, and whether data stewardship can fulfill a sizeable piece of the ‘equitable data governance’ puzzle.
Providing examples of emerging models globally, this piece posits that a robust ecosystem of data stewardship requires the existence of various frameworks (Personal Data Stores, Cooperatives and Trusts) that vary in the level of control, governance, security benefits and degree of fiduciary responsibilities. To arrive at this, foundational and functional questions remain on how communities can be defined in context of data and recognizing existing power imbalances, how the value of data can be communicated.
Reframing privacy as a collective rights question presents opportunities for people to pool data rights and create mechanisms or governance frameworks that allow for collective bargaining on issues of privacy. This piece considers how a communitarian perspective on privacy must be considered in the quest to rebalance the data economy.
In conversation with Sharad Sharma (Co-founder, iSPIRT Foundation) and Udbhav Tiwari (Public Policy Advisor, Mozilla), Astha Kapoor (Co-founder, Aapti Institute) discussed what the implementation of data trusts would look like in India, from conceptualizing an effective institutional design to addressing regulatory challenges.
In our response to the Non-Personal Data Governance Framework report, we raise a number of important concerns from it's broad definition of 'public interest' to its tendency to define governance in a top down (which allows for significant State overreach) rather than a community driven approach.
Our response to the draft Health Data Management Policy for the National Digital Health Mission grapples with purpose and framing of consent managers and concerns around user privacy and governance over access permissions.
