A New Fund for Data Empowerment

By Andreas Pawelke and Michael Cañares

The Omidyar Network, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, and the Open Collective Foundation recently launched the Data Empowerment Fund, a new initiative aimed at enabling greater individual agency or community control over data.

As long-time data empowerment practitioners, researchers and observers, we are excited about this new Fund. We have been writing about data empowerment for a long time and the Data Empowerment Fund might take the discourse to the next level as it will provide much-needed resources to organizations and initiatives working to empower individuals and communities.

What’s more, the Fund’s view on data empowerment aligns closely with our own perspective on different pathways to data empowerment that are eligible for funding:

• participatory processes or tools that enable individuals or communities to collect, use or share data, or otherwise shape how it’s used;
• new institutions to foster greater individual or community control over data, such as data cooperatives or data trusts;
• legal mechanisms to empower individuals or communities to shape how data is used;
• new approaches to running public dialogues or other deliberative processes.

The right fund at the right time

The launch of the Data Empowerment Fund comes at a time of increasing recognition of the importance of giving people more agency over their personal data.

In an era of ubiquitous data collection, there are growing concerns about privacy, security, and the consolidation of power in the hands of a few corporations. However, despite all the investments in research, piloting and testing of alternative models of data governance, from personal data stores to data cooperative and data trusts, we have yet to see widespread adoption of any of these models.

The reasons are manifold.

At a conceptual level, experts disagree on whether ownership or (collective) control of data best enables empowerment. There are also debates around whether the road to data empowerment is individual, collective or intermediated, or any combination of those three. What’s more, there is confusion and ambiguity around concepts like data commons, data cooperatives, and data trusts, with people using them in more than one way and with multiple meanings.

For any alternative data governance model to be effective, a number of key questions across various critical domains need to be addressed, including actors and their roles, data access and use, the rules and rule-setting mechanisms and legal and regulatory frameworks. As AI systems become more powerful and pervasive, these questions become even more urgent.

Balancing experimentation and scalability

We believe that access to data and the ability to use it effectively is crucial for individuals and communities to make informed decisions and advocate for their needs.

The Fund has the potential to catalyze significant progress in data empowerment. By providing resources and support to innovative projects and initiatives, it can help accelerate the development and adoption of new approaches and technologies for data empowerment.

However, the Data Empowerment Fund faces the formidable challenge of balancing the need for experimentation with the aim of developing scalable models. With its funding approach of dispersing small grants of USD 50,000 and USD 100,000 and the short time for implementation, it risks spreading its resources and not being able to support initiatives to a point where they can demonstrate real impact.

In addition, funders increasingly recognize the need for a systemic approach to funding, moving away from investing in single projects, technologies or organizations to adopting a systems lens to societal problems looking at the broader context in which these initiatives operate, understanding the interplay between different factors, and making multiple investments to create an enabling environment for alternative data governance models to thrive.

The way the Data Empowerment Fund operates is unlikely to achieve such foundational system-wide change, but some grantees could well succeed in developing innovative processes, tools or blueprints that could result in ripple effects and inspire others to adopt them and thereby create change beyond individual projects.

Inspiring broader investments

The long-term success of the Data Empowerment Fund will depend on its ability to identify and support initiatives with the potential to transform how data is collected, used, and governed and that can serve as exemplars and catalysts for change in how we govern and share data. By providing resources and visibility to organizations at the forefront of data governance innovation, the Fund could play an important role in shaping a more equitable and fair data future.

The Fund therefore represents an important step forward in recognizing the importance of data empowerment and investing in its future. We hope that this initiative will inspire other funders and organizations to prioritize data empowerment in their work.

We are eager to follow the work of the funded organizations. We hope they will make their stories and lessons learned widely available, so we can all learn from their experiences and build on their learnings.