In this blog post, the Open North Team shares some reflections on their recent workshop during MozFest 2023, titled Exploring Data Governance As A Community
For Open North’s first appearance at Mozfest, we wanted to do something quite special that really captured our work and thinking around data governance. We have been publicly displaying different aspects of our approach in different networks and fora for the last year or so, launching a free online learning module, publishing several blog posts to contextualize and deepen the module, and conducting a series of one-one-one and one-to-many workshops on the subject. In addition to pushing to expand thinking on the content of data governance, we’ve also been experimenting with methodological innovation. While the learning module and the blogs are unidirectional and didactic in that they use classically pedagogical principles in a theory-forward way, with the workshops we merged that approach with a strong structural emphasis on experience, professional practice, and learning through mutual exchange and engagement. This worked very well with our audience of mostly municipal employees; however, data governance is equally important for residents and engaged communities. So, for MozFest 2023 we decided to experiment with a highly practical, contextualized, pragmatic, and above all deeply inclusive and participatory approach to data governance. The MozFest audience was a natural fit for our experiment – participants included engaged and very knowledgeable members of civil society and residents from a variety of places.
The session was designed to be very simple to maximize accessibility of a topic that can easily be prohibitively technical, while still providing space for participants to engage in depth if they wanted to. To that end, rather than starting off with a definition of data governance, we gave the participants the following scenario, and then moved them directly into breakout rooms to discuss:
Imagine you are all neighbours. The local council announces that they want to collect cell phone location data in your neighbourhood to improve urban planning. The council wants you to figure out how to make sure the project is run well.
You agree. What do you need to consider?
The scenario was deliberately vague and deliberately includes many potential areas of contention. We wanted to simulate, as best we could, a realistic situation, and from there explore how residents and a community can and should react. And did they ever react! The participants’ responses were extensive, critical, and unflinchingly engaged. Rather than attempt to summarize and so dilute their responses, we’ve just reordered their bullet points by topic area so the unerring precision of their responses is on full display:
- Why? More explanation of “urban planning”
- Assumption: everybody has a cell phone
- How will the data help the projects?
- Duration of time for when the data is going to be held, how long, and how many projects they are going to draw from
- Finding out the back end of what data they are collecting, approvals
- Effort to make these questions and data themselves accessible for people
- Cost? (for citizens? for the urban planners? for the public?)
- How was the local neighborhood involved?
- Enable the community to have decision power, involvement of the community in decision-making
- Consent
- Do people agree with the development / use of data
- Several stakeholders involved in the data life cycles
- Which data they’re going to collect
- What other data they’re collecting, intentionally or unintentionally
- How they plan to collect it
- How will the data be collected? (Proprietary app?)
- How much data is needed? Is participation going to be voluntary?
- Where they’re storing it
- Assurances on data security – break in?
- If they’re going to own the data or if it still belongs to the people who provided the data
- Will it be open data?
- Ownership of data, collected by cell phones: cellphone firms own rights?
- Who has access to what form of the data, for what, how to hold them accountable
- What is the opt out process, what does it look like?
This list is a remarkably comprehensive compilation of crucial data governance issues, and, amongst many things, underscores why thinking about data governance beyond questions of legal compliance or security is crucial. These are the issues to which residents rightly demand answers, and almost all go beyond the corporate definition of data governance. This is exactly why we have been advocating through capacity building efforts, applied research and different collaborative projects for more expansive, inclusive thinking on the subject. Data governance is about thinking through and redesigning the social contract in light of the datafication of society.
What the points shared by our workshop participants during MozFest also show is that issues of data governance are deeply interlocking. You cannot answer questions about purpose with answering questions about community engagement; community engagement raises questions about consent and privacy; and consent and privacy similarly intersect with issues of control and ownership. Data governance for corporate efficiency may be technically difficult, but it is conceptually simple; data governance for a community’s common good is conceptually complex too. In a democratic society we seek to actively engage with tensions and enable constructive debate around disagreements: in addition to establishing quality, security, and legal standards, data governance, we argue, is also about providing a framework through which all stakeholders may have a say and democratically decide how their data is used.
In the second half of the workshop, we asked our participants to engage with this complexity. We wanted to map what a bottom-up perspective on the issues would be, and so began developing accessible and inclusive tools to support residents in establishing their agency on this topic. MozFest with its global participation and diverse backgrounds is a perfect forum to engage in this kind of participatory, exploratory conversation and identify how to support diverse communities in thinking through and approaching a situation like this one.
We brought them back from their discussion and provided a brief presentation on Open North’s more comprehensive stance on the range of data governance and its importance for thinking through a better social contract. The key slides are included here. Then, armed with this framework, we sent them back to consider the difficulties around developing principles, governance, and public engagement for and with a community.
Their responses got to the heart of key tensions that are inherent to data governance. Moreover, these responses are the very reason why data governance needs to exist as a framework through which to grapple with these tensions. Here is a summary of the discussion, following by a brief diagram to better illustrate the intersecting lines of questioning:
- Participants identified the multilayered ambivalence around the risks of both data inclusion and exclusion. What data is collected, who benefits, who might be overlooked and thus omitted from the resultant analyses, but who might also be put at risk through inclusion – and can the data be made open while also mitigating these risks? There is no obvious solution to this problem, and its discussion led to the next tension around control.
- There was a strong claim throughout the responses that residents should have control, even ownership, of any such data. However, it was also pointed out that such control cannot mean access that would compromise privacy. Forms of data stewardship were mooted as a resolution to this tension – but who gets to be a steward, and how?
- That question connected with difficult discussions around inclusivity and public participation in the design and launch of a project. Who gets to design and initiate fundamental goals and principles of a project? How and when should broader engagement be undertaken? What is the ethical process to launch a project? An interesting response to this tension was to prototype the project and its governance first with synthetic data, test its functioning, and only once it is deemed adequate should the real project be moved forward.
- However, an intersecting tension was brought into the conversation around not just the right to participate, but the practical capacity to do so. Digital technology and data-driven projects can be prohibitively technical; public participation needs to be designed in such a way as to encourage non-experts to participate across the challenging digital divide. Visualizations of how data could be used and controlled, leveraging libraries as spaces of community collaboration, and proactive involvement of communities across the digital divide were all put forward as ideas.
This set of interconnected tensions and questions can also be diagrammed as seen below. The outline highlights the interrelated nature of data governance issues, and underscored the importance of a comprehensive, framework-based approach to thinking through the broader social, political, and economic implication of data and its governance in today’s datafied society.
This MozFest workshop brought more exceptional thinking to the fore than we could ever have hoped for. Both exercises produced crucial questions, ideas, and connections that underscore the importance of thinking about data governance as comprehensively as we are. More importantly it has also shown that ‘doing’ data governance is not just the mundane day-to-day of enacting the framework (sometimes called data management), but it is also a constant and iterative process of assessing the system of governance behind data as well. In addition, this workshop shows that both the design and the assessment of what’s designed can be taken on in an inclusive and participatory methodology, and so made accessible to the very people it is intended to serve.
Open North will continue to work on these issues, experiment with our methods, publish about them as we make advances, and produce tools to support communities and governments everywhere. If you are interested in participating in our communities of practice and contributing to more collaborative co-development, or would like to speak to us one on one, we would be thrilled to hear from you! You can reach the facilitators of this session at lauriane@opennorth.ca, christian@opennorth.ca, and thomas@opennorth.ca or through our general inquiries address info@opennorth.ca.