Forming a Data Commons

The community needs to establish suitable standards, procedures, and protocols to enable a trust market.

These form the basis of the social contract that will underpin the Data Commons. You must be able to trust – and therefore share and reuse data with – people you have not met, and correctly interpret data you have not seen before. A set of protocols needs to make these relationships easy to form and terminate.

Trust-building begins by ensuring that principles are discussed and protocols are developed openly and transparently in a conversation amongst all those interested in establishing the Data Commons. This Community of Interest needs to have the right kinds of conversation and activity at the right level across interest groups. The way community protocols are developed is just as important as the end result.