Placemaking with data: a data trust to serve a coastal community
Natasha Nicholson and Pamela Charlick, charlick+nicholson architects
Imagine yourself in a coastal community in South Devon, UK, a fishing town with a population of around 17,000. It is a strong, resilient and independent-minded community with an active voluntary sector, located in an outstanding natural environment. It is also a community concerned about the lack of affordable homes for local people, the cost of living crisis, and a low-wage economy. And it is a place on the front line of climate change, with rising sea levels and increasingly fiercer storms predicted to affect the local area. This is Brixham, where we are working in the community on a pilot project to build a place-based community data trust.
Effective data use could help develop policy responses to these concerns. Data in coastal communities, in particular, has been under the policy spotlight: a concluding statement in the ‘Health in Coastal Communities Report’ (2021) by Chris Whitty (CMO) says, “The paucity of granular data and actionable research into the health needs of coastal communities is striking.” Our research in Brixham confirms this pattern: there is a lack of specific and detailed data available about the place. Data is often siloed in disparate organisations and is often hard to access. Underpinning these difficulties is the model of data sharing whereby citizens’ personal data, or ‘data about me’, is routinely transacted with commercial organisations via standard consents in an asymmetrical power relationship, which many people feel is past its sell-by-date. We think a data trust can help disrupt this pattern, and more effectively leverage local data to respond to local concerns.
In this blog, we share some findings and insights from our journey to build the foundations for a data trust in Brixham, and some thoughts about a new form of civic institution, for community benefit, that may arise from exploring data in a physical place.
As architects, responding to the DTI’s call for ideas to take data trusts from theory to practice, we proposed a place-based data trust. The idea of a data trust provided a structure for managing data rights connected to local data through collective action, in the context of a transparent, trusted and secure governance structure with oversight. We also felt a place-based approach could leverage the proximity between citizens, data sources, community and action for change to produce rich insights, and an intensity of interest and participation. The place-based data trust is an opportunity to bring the people who know the place and the community best to the centre of decision-making about local data, data rights and the purposes that local data should be put to. It can show how insights from personal data, with the necessary protections in place, can be harnessed for collective benefit.
The idea of enhancing data collection and use in the context of cities has already been the subject of much attention, but the all-seeing eye and all-knowing algorithmic mind of ‘smart city’ and ‘big data’ constructions are not appropriate for our project. The Brixham data trust focuses on an area of just a 3km radius from the town centre, including 14km2 of the marine environment. In this context, we’re looking at specific issues where data could serve community interests, supported by a lean, nimble, and responsive organisation that we believe will result in a more economical and sustainable data trust model. Four themes have been guiding our conversations and ideas with the community: placemaking and public spaces, environmental stewardship of the land and marine environment, health and wellbeing, measures to address the climate emergency, energy efficiency and net-zero ambitions.
The pilot project is designed as a journey to a data trust, allowing the time to nurture a data ecosystem or a data culture, and the space to be responsive to needs expressed by local people. We are guiding the project to grow organically from ‘what already exists’ in Brixham, starting with sharing data literacy resources. We are cultivating familiarity with data by seeking out people in the community who are working with data and sharing their stories and insights. We are building foundations incrementally, listening as ideas, concerns, networks and campaigns emerge from the place and asking the question, ‘What can data do for us?’. Prospect Brixham CIC was set up to support this process.
A ‘touchpoint’ is our term to describe a meaningful connection between people, data and place – this is where the abstract concept of data comes to life. Data can have colour, interest, meaning and value when its potential to illuminate a local issue, tell a story, or lead to a change, is revealed. This specificity is at the heart of this project. Naturally, these ‘touchpoints’ will change over time because they have a social and cultural context, sometimes borne of economic necessity, or environmental crisis. The data trust allows for the slow careful archiving of data for heritage and environmental stewardship or for extracting fast insights for an urgent issue. Both these paths of data discovery and data activism are both important. For the discoverer, recording, documenting and finding out new, quality data about a place and its people can reveal things that cut through long-held emotional responses and refresh thinking about the future. The activist focuses on data for change, as an evidence base. Both are about creating value in the place and for the community.
The final form of the data trust will be a response to these ‘touchpoints’ - made-to-measure for the needs of this place. To be relevant and useful, the data trust must address real needs and offer benefits - a clear value proposition that is sustainable over the longer term. This sets a hard test for data – it needs to prove its worth as a change-maker, and a valuable community asset. And the community has a challenge too - to move from the data shallows to the deep end as data-literate citizens.
Conversations about data are already happening in the community. Scratch the surface and many people will share their concerns about, for example, lack of control over personal data consents, issues of data rights, use and abuse of personal data online and knowing what data people hold about you. Sometimes people express a feeling of resignation that the power balance is so skewed, there is no point fighting it. The data trust will help to navigate these issues and build strong governance for data in the community, but it must first build trust with citizens.
Our proposal is to set up a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) – it has trustees, the oversight of the Charity Commission, and participatory governance through a citizens’ panel.
The work to create the data trust is progressing across various fronts:
· A data challenge competition, open to all, invites ideas and offers mentoring and support to five winning projects.
· Talks, workshops and pop-ups
· Trialling small research projects using personal data with specific use cases e.g. recording energy use in the home (with Mydex CIC). Participant’s data is shared between Personal Data Store (PDS) and the data trust pilot. Data anonymisation, aggregation for collective insights and the user’s experience are part of the study.
· A new open data platform (with The Data Place) will provide access to a curated selection of open-source data.
· Investigating data-sharing opportunities with local partners e.g. the local authority and environmental groups.
· Stakeholder involvement in the development of plans for the data trust.
We can see ‘data’ is coming out of the shadows. Some individuals and organisations are already on their own data journey, and are curious to take part in a collective project for the community. There is interest in how data could create social and financial value for the community. A local network of organisations involved in conservation of the marine environment is collecting sensitive data and using citizen science methods. A central car park site is a focus for debate about public space in the town. Data and digital tech people in the community are coming forward to join the project. Recent issues – the local housing crisis, cost of energy crisis, sewage on beaches, water shortages, climate change heatwaves – have highlighted how useful data can be in revealing what is behind the story, leading to informed decision-making.
Local voluntary organisations and other intermediaries are doing impactful work with limited resources. They know their sector of the community well, and the issues that need tackling and they have rich insights drawn from years of experience in the place. They have good ideas about ‘What can data do for us?’, but limited capacity to develop and implement them. This must be factored into the pilot stage, both growing the data ecosystem and the ongoing sustainability of the data trust.
Place helps us to make sense of data. A place gives spatial mapping and a framework for understanding relationships. The physical world is where cause and effect play out, helping us to see our impact on the environment and our community. Maybe we care more about things when they are close to home?
Perhaps this new digital institution with its feet on the ground, bridging the digital and the physical world, managing our data rights and security and stewarding data about our place and community, is uniquely positioned to connect the functions of existing civic institutions. It sits alongside them, but it brings fresh thinking and a new set of skills and enables them to function better in the digital age. A new kid on the civic block? We look forward to finding out.
Learn more about the Brixham Data Trusts development
Reference: Chief Medical Officer’s Annual Report 2021 Health in Coastal Communities – Summary and recommendations.