DS@WebSci 2019 : Data Sharing - Trusts, collaboratives, co-ops. What are they and why does it matter? Workshop at ACM Web Science 2019

Open Data has been a goal pursued primarily by governments, to unlock previously inaccessible value and accelerate growth of digital businesses. This has been tremendously successful in the US as well as across Europe. In the scientific community, there has also been extensive work on the infrastructure required to support the sharing and use of vast amounts of data through Data Commons. While open data is open to all, there is also benefit in sharing data that is not public. To enable the uptake of the new opportunities arising with data sharing, new institutions are required. These should address the complications of data sharing processes, and consolidate the interests of data subjects, processors and owners. This consolidation could happen through the – still conceptual – frameworks of Data Trusts, Data Collaboratives or Data Cooperatives, which are intended to simplify the use of data by enabling an environment in which is can be shared while maintaining the trust of all parties involved. Due to their potentially central role in data sharing environments, they are also of particular interest for academics from a broad variety of fields, including Computer Science, Law, Political Science, and Sociology. There is very little published research treating data sharing institutions as an object of study in their own right and placing them in a broad socio-technological context. This workshop aims to investigate the potential for coherent multidisciplinary research into the institutional frameworks that enable the sharing of data, what their development means for society as a whole, how they might work, and why this matters.