Blog by Stefaan Verhulst and Adam Zable: “The world’s relationship to data is changing rapidly. Artificial intelligence has generated significant excitement for its potential to help solve public problems, improve decision-making, and create new forms of economic and social value. At the same time, it has intensified longstanding debates around access, ownership, attribution, privacy, labor rights, security, and the responsible reuse of public-interest data. Questions that once sat at the margins of data policy have moved to the center.
Governments, international organizations, civil society groups, and companies are responding with a growing range of governance approaches, from executive orders and regulatory frameworks to international agreements, industry standards, and new institutional models. Yet it remains difficult to distinguish short-term developments from deeper structural shifts. While discussion often focuses on the latest AI breakthrough, the more important question for policymakers is how these technologies are reshaping the systems, assumptions, and governance models that determine how data is accessed, shared, and used.
To better understand these changes, The GovLab convened two forecasting studios bringing together experts working in data governance, digital policy, open science, AI governance, and public-sector innovation. Participants explored emerging trends in data access, governance, and reuse, examined the forces driving those trends, and considered what they may mean for the future of open data and public-interest data ecosystems.
The discussions identified seven signals that point to significant changes already underway. These signals suggest that the future of data governance will be shaped by advances in AI alongside evolving expectations around trust, stewardship, infrastructure, sovereignty, reciprocity, and public value. They offer a starting point for understanding how data policy may need to evolve in the years ahead. A longer version of this analysis, with a full list of studio participants and more detailed discussion of each signal, will be published separately…(More)”.
