Play 15 - Explore the role of public institutions and civil society actors in supporting data infrastructures in communities

Support play for intermediary organizations: Explore the role of public institutions and civil society actors in supporting data infrastructures in communities.

Intermediary organizations can examine the feasibility of public institutions hosting or supporting relational and technical data infrastructures. The plays in this playbook will require at least some human or technical resources, and some will require a lot more than what small organizations have. Public institutions might be able to support capacity building or provide technical assistance. Such an examination should seek to identify where both #trust and resources are available in a given space, whether that is a library, community hackerspace, or local university. Detroit Digital Justice Coalition’s “DiscoTechs,” or community learning spaces “where people can discover technology together, learn at their own pace, and learn from people who are accessible and understand the context of their neighborhoods and communities,”^[1] is a model for utilizing local resources, in both the talents of the community and local trusted spaces like libraries to catalyze interactions with digital justice. This model could be replicated to explore data ownership with the community and share skills and tools related to data governance.

Guiding questions for this research could be: Where are there existing social or technical public resources that may support this work in specific locales? What does data ownership look like when multiple stakeholders steward environmental data? How can we build trust in order to galvanize meaningful community interactions with public institutions? There is a rich vein of opportunity here for research that could serve communities who are exploring different forms of data ownership and governance.

🌱 Each play stems from a takeaway from an case study, workshop, or other learning source.

Takeaway: Data ownership in practice has material requirements—somewhere to house the data and someone to maintain it.
Many organizations that collect environmental data do so because they have questions that demand answers; by collecting their own data, using their own hardware and methods, they can create their own data-informed knowledge and evidence. The concept of data ownership recognizes this #knowledge creation, and underscores who has authority to use that data and in what ways. This concept is powerful, but it loses its potential without the infrastructure to store, manage, and maintain that data. While open source solutions have become more available, each of the plays below either document easy-to-implement methods to retain data ownership and store data, or present opportunities to support data stewards in finding solutions.

Source: Community Data Playbook (Full report)