ARTICLE: DATA GOVERNANCE
GETTING A GRIP ON THAT DATA In societies transformed by the digital revolution, the questions of governance revolve primarily around data — the governance of data and new forms of governance with data. By Max Craglia & Henk Scholten
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e are not sure when it started to change. In the past, governments were the main collectors of data about lands, people and resources. Today, the commercial sector collects vast amounts of real-time data and knows more about society than governments — not just at the aggregate level, but down to the behavior, preferences and real-time location of individuals. So, how does this shift in knowledge, and therefore power, among these key actors (the state, the commercial sector, people and machines) affect the governance of human society? How can we shape our futures in an increasingly fast-evolving technological, social and physical environment? More fundamentally, can we shape our future at all, or are we just passive objects of decisions taken elsewhere?
We started with these questions about four years ago with a small group of enthusiasts in setting up the Digitranscope1 project at the Centre for Advanced Studies of the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC). We have since involved more than 300 colleagues from governments, academia, industry and civil society to try and find some of the answers that we have now published in the Digitranscope Report2 on the Governance of Digitally-Transformed 1 https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/communities/en/community/digitranscope 2 https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/eur-scientific-and-technical-research-reports/digitranscope-governance-digitally-transformed-society 54 | www.gwprime.geospatialworld.net | March-April 2021
Emerging data governance models
Society. We realized very quickly that in societies transformed by the digital revolution, the questions of governance revolve primarily about data: The governance of data and new forms of governance with data.
Why is this important?
Because you will all be familiar with the increasing political and media attention given to Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is seen as a key enabling technology for the future development of societies and nations. Whilst many countries are developing their national strategies to become world-leaders in AI3, controlling the data upon which AI applications and products are developed is just as important as mastering the development of AI algorithms.
Why now?
In the past 20 years, data publication for reuse, via catalogues and portals, was seen as the end of the process of data collection, analysis and use by the (public sector) data custodian. It was often also perceived as a burden because the organization publishing the data was not a direct beneficiary of the value subsequently generated by third parties or accrued by society as a whole in terms of greater 3 See for example https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/ai-watch/ national-strategies-artificial-intelligence_en for the EU and https://oecd. ai/countries-and-initiatives for a more global perspective.
