Paper by Jed Sundwall: “The COVID-19 pandemic revealed a striking lack of global data coordination among public institutions. While national governments and the World Health Organization struggled to collect and share timely information, a small team at Johns Hopkins University built a public dashboard that became the world’s most trusted source of COVID-19 data. Their work showed that planetary-scale data infrastructure can emerge quickly when practitioners act, even without formal authority. It also exposed a deeper truth: we cannot build global coordination on data without shared standards, yet it is unclear who gets to define what those standards might be.
This paper examines how the World Wide Web has created the conditions for useful data standards to emerge in the absence of any clear authority. It begins from the premise that standards are not just technical artefacts but the “connective tissue” that enables collaboration across institutions. They extend language itself, allowing people and systems to describe the world in compatible terms. Using the history of the web, the paper traces how small, loosely organised groups have repeatedly developed standards that now underpin global information exchange…(More)”.
