Number of words: 370

The key to this type of technology collaboration lies with human values and processes and not just a focus on technology. Organizations need to decide whether and how to share data, and if so, on what terms. A few principles will be foundational.

The first is concrete arrangements to protect privacy. Given the evolution of privacy concerns, this is a prerequisite both for enabling organizations to share data about people and for people to be comfortable sharing data about themselves. A key challenge will involve the development and selection of techniques to share data while protecting privacy. This will likely include new so-called “differential privacy” techniques that protect privacy in new ways, as well as providing access to aggregated or de-identified data or enabling query only access to a data set. It may also involve the use of machine learning that is trained on encrypted data. We may well see new models emerge that enable people to decide whether to share their data collectively for this type of purpose.

A second critical need will involve security. Clearly, if data is federated and accessible by more than one organization, the cyber security challenges of recent years take on an added dimension. While part of this will require continuing security enhancements, we’ll also need improvements in operational security that enable multiple organizations to manage security together.

We’ll also need practical arrangements to address fundamental questions around data ownership. We need to enable groups to share data without giving up their ownership and ongoing control of the data they share. Just as landowners sometimes enter into easements or other arrangements that allow others onto their property without losing their ownership rights, we’ll need to create new approaches to manage access to data. These must enable groups to choose collaboratively the terms on which they want to share data, including how the data can be used.

In addressing all these issues, the open-data movement can take a page from open-source trends for software. At first that effort was hampered by questions about license rights. But over time standard open-source licenses emerged. We can expect similar efforts for data.

Excerpted from pages 282 to 283 of ‘Tools and Weapons’ by Brad Smith and Carol Browne