Participatory Data Governance Frameworks & Tooling
A focus for 2022.
This post is about welcoming the New Year by sharing a topic that’s been on my mind and radar in both theory and practice: data governance.
It seems obvious, right? But with all the criticism of Web2.0 platform exploitation in terms of how data is utilised and monetised, Web3.0 is yet to propose and enact models to do it better (or not do it at all).
A research sprint I participated in last year on ‘cooperative approaches to data ownership and governance’ and an ongoing research project with Protocol Labs on IPFS and Filecoin contributed to the following two papers on the topic:
1. Cooperatives and DAOs
Nabben, Kelsie and Puspasari, Novita and Kelleher, Megan and Sanjay, Sadhana, Grounding Decentralised Technologies in Cooperative Principles: What Can ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisations’ (DAOs) and Platform Cooperatives Learn from Each Other? (December 6, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3979223
2. DAOs as Data Trusts
Nabben, Kelsie, Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) as Data Trusts: A general-purpose data governance framework for decentralised data ownership, storage, and utilisation (December 20, 2021). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4009205
The next step after theorising data governance via Web3.0 infrastructure is to enact these frameworks with data governance tooling and people. I’m grateful to be working with a number of incredible people and projects to do so, and have been overwhelmed by the response to this research so far. Acknowledgments and shout-outs to some of those in the links provided.
Happy 2022.
