Report by Reema Patel: “Our collective thinking about data governance is shaped by unconscious beliefs about the world. These are sometimes described as mental models. Our mental models shape our sense of what problems are noticed and what solutions to these problems are feasible and possible. They can sometimes limit our understanding of important issues such as how data can be governed and managed. Our current mental models about data are failing. The ongoing data trust deficit, public concern about data governance approaches, poor data quality, datasets with systemic bias and inequality that shape artificial intelligence, and repeated data governance systems failures. These all point to the need to dramatically reshape the way we think about data governance…
This report maps out ten different mental models of data governance. These are: data colonialism, data ownership, data control, data technocracy, data liberation, data protection, data justice, data sovereignty, data culture, and data stewardship. Understanding how we think about data governance as our mental models, I argue, is an essential first step towards moving beyond current approaches to realising a just and viable data governance future…(More)”.
