The Brixham Data trust shares insights on creating a new form of civic institution, for community benefit, that arises from exploring data in a coastal community in South Devon, UK.

Bottom-up approaches to data stewardship are already being used to tackle the climate crisis. In this guest blog, the Aapti institute and ODI report on the feasibility of data trusts for climate action and identify potential contexts where they could work.

Participatory practice around data involves innovation in so far as it explores citizen voice in a relatively new domain, with novel configurations of technology and power to unpack, technology can offer a range of new participatory tools. Tim Davies from Connected by Data explores designing for effective engagement.

Dr Jessica Bell explores how data trusts might operate in the health research context, specifically in birth cohorts and longitudinal studies that aim to engage participants over their lifetime with data trusts as a model for increased participation. 

One unique feature of Québec’s trust law occurs in the form of social trusts: a purpose-trust without designated beneficiaries. This blog underlines how social trusts are well designed for imagining and creating data trusts and how to implement data governance mechanisms into this legal framework.

Today the holders of the vast majority of mobility data are private service providers such as ride-sharing companies. Urban Data Trusts position themselves as an intermediary between the city and its people offering access to mobility data and more efficient use of data privacy rights vs private companies who do not necessarily take into consideration the common good.

At first sight, Data trusts and Personal Data Stores (PDSs) may look incompatible. But they could prove complementary, with PDSs providing infrastructure for Trusts to work much more efficiently and effectively.

With both our understanding of how to operationalise data trusts and our technical capabilities changing at pace, part of the challenge today is to really pin down how the technologies we have map onto the functions that data trusts need to deliver.

Taking the data trust pillars that were the basis of our research agenda – community dialogue, technical systems, legal mechanisms, business models, and use cases – as a starting point, they point to an emerging framework for operationalising data trusts. With the aim of helping create a pathway to real-world implementation, we’ve started mapping these insights into the operational framework.

What role should government play in supporting data trusts? The UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport is currently seeking views about the policy interventions needed to encourage trustworthy data use through data intermediaries. Drawing lessons from recent work on data trusts, this post suggests three areas for action.

Data trusts are a promising concept for enabling data use while maintaining data privacy. In this blog, Aline Blankertz, explores what regulation for data trusts should look like and how we can make new models possible.

Last week, the Data Trusts Initiative hosted an information session about our new support programme for data trust pilot projects. You can read more about the pilot scheme on our pilot projects pages. To supplement the FAQs published alongside the scheme, this post sets out our answers to the questions that came up during the information session.

The Data Trust Initiative’s core mission is to move data trusts from theory to practice – creating real-world data trusts that serve different communities. Shortly after the launch of our call for pilot projects, Sylvie Delacroix sat down with Mozilla Executive Director Mark Surman for our next ‘in conversation with…’ blog. Mozilla’s Data Futures Lab complements the work of the Data Trust Initiative, undertaking research and providing funding related to a wide variety of data stewardship approaches.

The Data Trusts Initiative pilot project scheme, which launches today, is inviting applications from individuals or organisations that would like to set up a data trust. These pilot projects would facilitate independent stewardship of data through the action of data trustees, support individuals and groups to collectively negotiate terms of data use, and provide strong institutional safeguards against data mis-use. Pilot projects might come from any sector, and the scheme is open to applications from any country.

In most civil law jurisdictions, the use of trust law for data stewardship is not part of the legal landscape - trusts are generally emblematic of common rather than civil law traditions. The “civilization” of trust law is complex, affecting the contours and content of fundamental notions of civil law (ownership, legal person, patrimony).

In the next of our series of ‘in conversation with…’ blogs, Sylvie Delacroix speaks to Astha Kapoor (Co-founder, Aapti Institute) about how discussions about data trusts are developing in India, following publication of a report from India’s Committee of Experts on Non-Personal Data.

A new report from the Ada Lovelace Institute, in partnership with the Data Trusts Initiative, AI Council, ODI and City of London Law Society, explores the different legal mechanisms that can contribute to data stewardship.

A new Working Paper from the Data Trusts Initiative explores how different countries are developing data trusts, and what lessons can be taken from these international comparisons.

The draft Data Governance Act marks the start of a new phase of action by the European Commission in its ambition to “boost a data-driven economy in Europe”. The Act sets out a framework to govern the work of data intermediaries – organisations that are involved in data sharing services – with the aim of increasing data sharing while supporting individuals to exercise their data rights. In this post, we look at some of the questions the Act raises about the development of data trusts.

Publication of the draft Data Governance Act marks the next phase of the European Commission’s plans to bolster data sharing across the EU. In a bid to shed some light on the intricate questions surrounding this Act’s reference to the delegatability of data rights, Sylvie Delacroix (University of Birmingham) hosted a conversation with Ben McFarlane (University of Oxford) and Paul Nemitz (European Commission).