Breaking open the data reuse dilemma: trust, community, and commons

Most data solutions talk technology – the IT language of data acquisition, definition, platforms, and applications. That’s the wrong place to start.

The central challenge of enabling data integration and reuse is the challenge of trust and how to build that trust. Our basic assumption is that trust is embedded in a community with common values and institutions, so that building trust requires building that community and defining the relationshipswithin it, in a contract for all community members.

The Data Commons is the way that a community shares its data. The commons principle implies a resource belonging to the entire community and shared equally by everybody in the community, subject to the community’s rules. It has a very different set of principles and objectives from the dominant Ownership Model.