Wanted: Data Stewards: (Re-)Defining The Roles and Responsibilities of Data Stewards for an Age of Data Collaboration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Wanted: Data Stewards: (Re-)Defining The Roles and Responsibilities of Data Stewards for an Age of Data Collaboration

Stefaan G. Verhulst, Andrew Zahuranec, Andrew Young and Michelle Winowatan at Data & Policy: “As data grows increasingly prevalent in our economy, it is increasingly clear, too, that tremendous societal value can be derived from reusing and combining previously separate datasets. One avenue that holds particular promise are data collaboratives. Data collaboratives are a new form of partnership in which data (such as data owned by corporations) or data expertise is made accessible for external parties (such as academics or statistical offices) working in the public interest. By bringing together a wide range of inter-sectoral expertise to bear on the data, collaboration can result in new insights and innovations, and can help unlock the public good potential of previously siloed data or expertise.

Yet, not all data collaboratives are successful or go beyond pilots. Based on research and analysis of hundreds of data collaboratives, one factor seems to stand out as determinative of success above all others — whether there exist individuals or teams within data-holding organizations who are empowered to proactively initiate, facilitate and coordinate data collaboratives toward the public interest. We call these individuals and teams “data stewards.”

They systematize the process of partnering, and help scale efforts when there are fledgling signs of success. Data stewards are essential for accelerating the re-use of data in the public interest by providing functional access, and more generally, to unlock the potential of our data age. Data stewards form an important — and new — link in the data value chain.

In its final report, the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Business-to-Government (B2G) Data Sharing also noted the need for data stewards to enable responsible, accountable data sharing for the public interest. In their report, they write:

“A key success factor in setting up sustainable and responsible B2G partnerships is the existence, within both public- and private-sector organisations, of individuals or teams that are empowered to proactively initiate, facilitate and coordinate B2G data sharing when necessary. As such, ‘data stewards’ should become a recognised function.”

The report goes on further to acknowledge the need to scope, design, and establish a network or a community of practice around data stewardship.

Wanted: Data Stewards

A new position paper, released by The GovLab within the context of the UN Statistical Commission High-Level Forum on Official Statistics which focused on “Data stewardship — a solution for official statistics’ predicament?” seeks to begin that work. The paper, titled “Wanted: Data Stewards: (Re-)Defining The Roles and Responsibilities of Data Stewards for an Age of Data Collaboration” tackles questions regarding the profile and potential of data stewards. It aims to provide an operational roadmap to support the implementation (or expansion) of data stewardship functions in public- and private-sector entities; and to start building a community of expertise.

Moreover, it addresses the tendency to conflate the roles of data stewards with those of individuals or groups who might better be described as chief privacy, chief data or chief security officers. This slippage is perhaps understandable, we need to redefine the role that is somewhat broader. While data management, privacy and security are key components of trusted and effective data collaboratives, the real goal is to re-use data for broader social goals (while preventing any potential harms that may result from sharing).

In particular the position paper — which captures lived experience of numerous data stewards- seeks to provide more clarity on how data stewards can accomplish these duties by:

  • Defining the responsibilities of a data steward; and
  • Identifying the roles which a data steward must fill to achieve these responsibilities…(More)”.

Reimagining Democracy: Lessons in Deliberative Democracy from the Irish Front Line

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book: “The Lawrence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal, presented by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State, recognizes outstanding individuals, groups, and organizations that produce innovations to further democracy in the United States or around the world.

2019 Brown Democracy Medal winners David M. Farrell and Jane Suiter are co-leads on the Irish Citizens’ Assembly Project, which has transformed Irish politics over the past decade. The project started in 2011 and led to a series of significant policy decisions, including successful referenda on abortion and marriage equality….(More)”.

Good process is vital for good government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrea Siodmok and Matthew Taylor at the RSA: “…‘Bad’ process is time wasting and energy sapping. It can reinforce barriers to collaboration, solidify hierarchies and hamper adaptiveness.

‘Good process’ energises people, creates spaces for different ideas to emerge, builds trust and collective capacity.

The bad and good could be distinguished along several dimensions. Here are some:

Bad process:

  • Routine/happens because it happens            
  • Limited preparation and follow through         
  • Little or no facilitation            
  • Reinforces hierarchies, excludes key voices  
  • Rigid accountability focussed on blame           
  • Always formal and mandated           
  • Low trust/transactional       

Good process:

  • Mission/goal oriented – happens because it makes a difference
  • Sees process as part of a flow of change – clear accountability
  • Facilitated by people with necessary skills and techniques 
  • Inclusive, what matters is the quality of contributions not their source
  • Collective accountability focussed on learning 
  • Mixes formal and informal settings and methods, often voluntary
  • Trust enhancing/collaborative

Why is bad process so prevalent and good process so rare?

Because bad process is often the default. In the short term, bad process is easier, less intensive-resource, and less risky than good process.

Bringing people together in inclusive processes

Bringing key actors together in inclusive processes help us both understand the system that is maintaining the status quo and building a joint sense of mission for a new status quo.

It also helps people start to identify and organise around key opportunities for change. 

One of the most positive developments to have occurred in and around Whitehall in recent years is the emergence of informal, system spanning networks of public officials animated by shared values and goals such as One Team Gov and a whole host of bottom up networks on topics as diverse as wellbeing, inclusion, and climate change….(More)”.

Facebook Ads as a Demographic Tool to Measure the Urban-Rural Divide

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Daniele Rama, Yelena Mejova, Michele Tizzoni, Kyriaki Kalimeri, and Ingmar Weber: “In the global move toward urbanization, making sure the people remaining in rural areas are not left behind in terms of development and policy considerations is a priority for governments worldwide. However, it is increasingly challenging to track important statistics concerning this sparse, geographically dispersed population, resulting in a lack of reliable, up-to-date data. In this study, we examine the usefulness of the Facebook Advertising platform, which offers a digital “census” of over two billions of its users, in measuring potential rural-urban inequalities.

We focus on Italy, a country where about 30% of the population lives in rural areas. First, we show that the population statistics that Facebook produces suffer from instability across time and incomplete coverage of sparsely populated municipalities. To overcome such limitation, we propose an alternative methodology for estimating Facebook Ads audiences that nearly triples the coverage of the rural municipalities from 19% to 55% and makes feasible fine-grained sub-population analysis. Using official national census data, we evaluate our approach and confirm known significant urban-rural divides in terms of educational attainment and income. Extending the analysis to Facebook-specific user “interests” and behaviors, we provide further insights on the divide, for instance, finding that rural areas show a higher interest in gambling. Notably, we find that the most predictive features of income in rural areas differ from those for urban centres, suggesting researchers need to consider a broader range of attributes when examining rural wellbeing. The findings of this study illustrate the necessity of improving existing tools and methodologies to include under-represented populations in digital demographic studies — the failure to do so could result in misleading observations, conclusions, and most importantly, policies….(More)”.

Decide Madrid: A Critical Analysis of an Award-Winning e-Participation Initiative

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Paper by Sonia Royo, Vicente Pina and Jaime Garcia-Rayado: “This paper analyzes the award-winning e-participation initiative of the city council of Madrid, Decide Madrid, to identify the critical success factors and the main barriers that are conditioning its performance. An exploratory case study is used as a research technique, including desk research and semi-structured interviews. The analysis distinguishes contextual, organizational and individual level factors; it considers whether the factors or barriers are more related to the information and communication technology (ICT) component, public sector context or democratic participation; it also differentiates among the different stages of the development of the initiative. Results show that individual and organizational factors related to the public sector context and democratic participation are the most relevant success factors.

The high expectations of citizens explain the high levels of participation in the initial stages of Decide Madrid. However, the lack of transparency and poor functioning of some of its participatory activities (organizational factors related to the ICT and democratic dimensions) are negatively affecting its performance. The software created for this platform, Consul, has been adopted or it is in the process of being implemented in more than 100 institutions in 33 countries. Therefore, the findings of this research can potentially be useful to improve the performance and sustainability of e-participation platforms worldwide…(More)”.

The Future of Democracy in Europe: Technology and the Evolution of Representation

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Report by Chatham House: “There is a widespread sense that liberal democracy is in crisis, but little consensus exists on the specific nature and causes of the crisis. In particular, there are three prisms through which the crisis is usually seen: the rise of ‘populism’, ‘democratic deconsolidation’, and a ‘hollowing out’ of democracy. Each reflects normative assumptions about democracy.

The exact role of digital technology in the crisis is disputed. Despite the widely held perception that social media is undermining democracy, the evidence for this is limited. Over the longer term, the further development of digital technology could undermine the fundamental preconditions for democracy – though the pace and breadth of technological change make predictions about its future impact difficult.

Democracy functions in different ways in different European countries, with political systems on the continent ranging from ‘majoritarian democracies’ such as the UK to ‘consensual democracies’ such as Belgium and Switzerland. However, no type seems to be immune from the crisis. The political systems of EU member states also interact in diverse ways with the EU’s own structure, which is problematic for representative democracy as conventionally understood, but difficult to reform.

Political parties, central to the model of representative democracy that emerged in the late 18th century, have long seemed to be in decline. Recently there have been some signs of a reversal of this trend, with the emergence of parties that have used digital technology in innovative ways to reconnect with citizens. Traditional parties can learn from these new ‘digital parties’.

Recent years have also seen a proliferation of experiments in direct and deliberative democracy. There is a need for more experimentation in these alternative forms of democracy, and for further evaluation of how they can be integrated into the existing institutions and processes of representative democracy at the local, regional, national and EU levels.

We should not think of democracy in a static way – that is, as a system that can be perfected once and for all and then simply maintained and defended against threats. Democracy has continually evolved and now needs to evolve further. The solution to the crisis will not be to attempt to limit democracy in response to pressure from ‘populism’ but to deepen it further as part of a ‘democratization of democracy’….(More)”.

Algorithms and Contract Law

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Paper by Lauren Henry Scholz: “Generalist confusion about the technology behind complex algorithms has led to inconsistent case law for algorithmic contracts. Case law explicitly grounded in the principle that algorithms are constructive agents for the companies they serve would provide a clear basis for enforceability of algorithmic contracts that is both principled from a technological perspective and is readily intelligible and able to be applied by generalists….(More)”.

The Economics of Maps

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Abhishek Nagaraj and Scott Stern in the Journal of Economic Perspectives: “For centuries, maps have codified the extent of human geographic knowledge and shaped discovery and economic decision-making. Economists across many fields, including urban economics, public finance, political economy, and economic geography, have long employed maps, yet have largely abstracted away from exploring the economic determinants and consequences of maps as a subject of independent study. In this essay, we first review and unify recent literature in a variety of different fields that highlights the economic and social consequences of maps, along with an overview of the modern geospatial industry. We then outline our economic framework in which a given map is the result of economic choices around map data and designs, resulting in variations in private and social returns to mapmaking. We highlight five important economic and institutional factors shaping mapmakers’ data and design choices. Our essay ends by proposing that economists pay more attention to the endogeneity of mapmaking and the resulting consequences for economic and social welfare…(More)”.

Corporate Capitalism's Use of Openness: Profit for Free?

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Book by Arwid Lund and Mariano Zukerfeld: “This book tackles the concept of openness (as in open source software, open access and free culture), from a critical political economy perspective to consider its encroachment by capitalist corporations, but also how it advances radical alternatives to cognitive capitalism.

Drawing on four case studies, Corporate Capitalism’s Use of Openness will add to discussion on open source software, open access content platforms, open access publishing, and open university courses. These otherwise disparate cases share two fundamental features: informational capitalist corporations base their successful business models on unpaid productive activities, play, attention, knowledge and labour, and do so crucially by resorting to ideological uses of concepts such as “openness”, “communities” and “sharing”.

The authors present potential solutions and alternative regulations to counter these exploitative and alienating business models, and to foster digital knowledge commons, ranging from co-ops and commons-based peer production to state agencies’ platforms. Their research and findings will appeal to students, academics and activists around the world in fields such as sociology, economy, media and communication, library and information science, political sciences and technology studies….(More)”.

Imagining Regulation Differently: Co-creating for Engagement

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Book edited by Morag McDermont, Tim Cole, Janet Newman and Angela Piccini: “There is an urgent need to rethink relationships between systems of government and those who are ‘governed’. This book explores ways of rethinking those relationships by bringing communities normally excluded from decision-making to centre stage to experiment with new methods of regulating for engagement.

Using original, co-produced research, it innovatively shows how we can better use a ‘bottom-up’ approach to design regulatory regimes that recognise the capabilities of communities at the margins and powerfully support the knowledge, passions and creativity of citizens. The authors provide essential guidance for all those working on co-produced research to make impactful change…(More)”.