Mozilla Data Futures Lab: 7 data governance approaches explored

Despite the troubles at Mozilla there’s good news: Mozilla’s new Data Futures Lab launches with research on data governance alternatives

The Data Futures Lab will connect and fund people around the world who are building product and service prototypes using collective data governance models

Their first publication is already a fact: Data Futures: Research to shift power through data governance. A very interesting research. Below I’ll include one of the aspects highlighted in this report:

Data for Empowerment

Something is happening in the world of data. Yes, more data is being collected, analyzed, used, and reused at practically every juncture between life and the internet. [BUT] There is hope for alternatives to help redefine how we conceive of data to address imbalances of power between data holders and data subjects.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/initiatives/data-futures/data-for-empowerment/

Key Takeaways:

  • We see genuine potential in different contexts for data stewardship to help open new paths away from the dominant approaches employed by big tech.
  • This is an emerging field. There are relatively few examples of scalable initiatives for more than a handful of data governance approaches that are frequently repeated.
  • Different data stewardship and governance approaches are not all mutually exclusive. They can be mixed and matched to accomplish a variety of goals.
  • We see clear geographic and linguistic imbalances in the discourse surrounding data stewardship, alternative data governance approaches, and related legislation.
  • There is a budding ecosystem of thought leadership and support for inspiring, incubating and testing new data governance approaches in practice.