Since joining Energy Sparks I've started investing time in trying to understanding the UK energy system and, in particular, the parts of its data infrastructure and broader ecosystem that we work with. It's a big, complex system so lots to wrap my head around. I looked at one part of that data ecosystem in a … Continue reading The data ecosystem for non-domestic energy consumption data in the UK
Category: The Commons
Behavioural use licensing won’t fix the negative impacts of AI
I recently read a paper called "Behavioral Use Licensing for Responsible AI" in which the authors make a case that licences can be used to create a legally enforceable way to limit the ways in which AI can be used, and in particular in-line with response AI guidelines. Here's the abstract: With the growing reliance … Continue reading Behavioural use licensing won’t fix the negative impacts of AI
A commons needs more than open licensing
When I look across the various "open" communities in which I either participate in or monitor, there's a lot of recurring issues. For example, sustainability is a common issue across open data, open source and open science. How do we ensure sustainable access to data? How do we make individual open source projects sustainable when … Continue reading A commons needs more than open licensing
Role playing data governance
There's a lot of work happening around data governance that involves piloting and testing new approaches. A few years ago the ODI piloted some data trusts. The Data Trust Initiative is running three pilots. The ODI has also been running a peer learning network as part of its data institutions programme to support a variety … Continue reading Role playing data governance
What are Data Unions?
I've been doing some research around different types of data intermediary recently and thought I'd share some things I've learned about "Data Unions". Like a lot of the terms being applied to new approaches to data governance, there's no clear definition of what constitutes a data union. A vision of collective action For example, this … Continue reading What are Data Unions?
We need the right data institutions
Popular Science have recently published three pieces of speculative fiction exploring the question of "will 'we the people' benefit from our data?". They're called "Shared data", "The Memory of Tomatoes" and "Home@Heart". Each of the pieces of fiction is followed up a response from a policy expert. I read the first of these this morning. … Continue reading We need the right data institutions
Assessing data infrastructure: the Digital Public Goods standard and registry
This is the second in a short series of posts in which I'm sharing my notes and thoughts on a variety of different approaches for assessing data infrastructure and data institutions. The first post in the series looked at The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure. In this post I want to take a look at … Continue reading Assessing data infrastructure: the Digital Public Goods standard and registry
Assessing data infrastructure: the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure
How do we create well-designed, trustworthy, sustainable data infrastructure and institutions? This is a question that I remain deeply interested in. Much of the freelance work I've been doing since leaving the ODI has been in that area. For example, I'm currently helping with a multi-year evaluation of an grant-funded data institution. I'm particularly interested … Continue reading Assessing data infrastructure: the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure
How could watermarking AI help build trust?
I've been reading about different approaches to watermarking AI and the datasets used to train them. This seems to be an active area of research within the machine learning community. But, of the papers I've looked at so far, there hasn't been much discussion of how these techniques might be applied and what groundwork needs … Continue reading How could watermarking AI help build trust?
What is Swash and is it really changing data ownership?
This is another in a very occasional series of blog posts where I look at different data initiatives, institutions or infrastructure in order to understand a bit more about how they work. And then have opinions about them. Previously I wrote about Common Voice. This time I'm looking at Swash which describes itself as "reimagining … Continue reading What is Swash and is it really changing data ownership?
Lost Boy 