Rethinking data and rebalancing power: building a digital ecosystem that works for people and society

The Ada Lovelace Institute’s ‘Rethinking data and rebalancing digital power’ project began with the question: What is a more ambitious vision for data use and regulation that can deliver a positive shift in the digital ecosystem towards people and society?

Our work recognised an urgent need for a comprehensive and transformative vision for data that can serve as a ‘North Star’: directing our collective efforts and encouraging us to think bigger and move further away from the current digital landscape, which is characterised by:

• Exploitative data practices that fail to capture the potential social value of data, and fail to protect individual rights and serve communities
• Short-sighted political and institutional visions for the role of data.
• A lack of agency over how data is generated and used, with stark power imbalances between people, corporations and states.

Our report – Rethinking data and rebalancing digital power – proposes four cross-cutting interventions across infrastructure, governance, institution and democratic participation that can enable a richer set of possibilities for the digital ecosystem, re-centre people and society and contest the increasingly entrenched systems of digital power.

We’re offering these interventions as a starting point for critical reflection, testing and further development into concrete solutions capable of achieving transformative change. We’ll be exploring each of the four interventions in more depth in a dedicated event series in 2023.

This first event aimed to catalyse discussion around future-looking visions for data by inviting like-minded initiatives – the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, Omidyar’s Future of Data Challenge and Mozilla Foundation’s Data Futures Lab – to share their reflections on building a positive future that would centre governance, regulation and use of data on the needs of people and society, and contest the increasingly entrenched systems of digital power.

Some of the questions the event explored were:

• What are the top features you envision for a more ambitious data future?
• What are the key learnings and insights from your initiative?
• What does it take for more radical visions to emerge?
• How can we align efforts and work towards a common path for transformative change?

You can watch a recording of the event below.

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