Description:

There is a growing recognition that the advent of platform capitalism, as signified by the presence of very large trans-geographic players who have monopolized critical sectors, poses a threat to the continued relevance of the idea of the internet as a digital commons and discourages the emergence of new players and local innovators, thus defeating the idea of a healthy and competitive global digital economy. The demands for better and more comprehensive antitrust regulation, more accountable content governance and regulatory oversight are a direct outcome of this thinking. But this recognition is often decoupled from an acknowledgement of the fact that the building blocks of the digital – data is enclosed, concentrated and monopolized. Without structural reform that can free data from the organizational logic of mainstream platform capitalism, renewing a digital commons remains but a distant dream. The proposed workshop session will bring together participants and audience members to debate and think through how ‘deconcentrating’ data value chains where wealth and resources are not cornered at the top, can help us shape a more democratic and equitable digital economy that is geographically diverse, can function at various scales and allow for context appropriate local innovation. The proposed session will attempt to answer this question – How can data value chains be democratized to better serve the economic and social needs of people and communities? Speakers will draw from their standpoints as experts in policy advocacy, research and industry. a) Duncan McCann, New Economics Foundation will moderate the session and provide an overview of the issue, and highlight learnings from various data sharing platform experiments being undertaken in the UK b) Anita Gurumurthy, IT for Change, will discuss the policy challenges around governing data value chains and outline the vision for a global-to-local data governance framework that promotes economic democracy c) Nicole Alix, La Coop des Communs will share concrete experiences of building platform and data infrastructure to support cooperative platform business models d) Obasegun Ayodele, Vilsquare Capital will share from his work in using data science and civic technologies to support public and private sector organizations in Africa This session will follow an innovative problem-solution format with an opening and concluding round of lightning inputs from speakers interspersed with facilitated small group discussion among audience members. In the first round of lightning inputs, speakers will define the problem statement around data concentration and its discontents, touching upon the role of data in markets, in critical infrastructure and the implications of data concentration for the rights of smaller economic actors. This discussion will serve as the impetus for breakout groups, where audience members will be encouraged to react/respond and brainstorm solutions towards this problem. In the second round, speakers will make an additional round of lightning inputs and share lessons and success stories on alternative data value chains at the local/sub-national/city level. Representatives from breakout groups will also share the discussion points with the larger audiences and an open floor interaction will be facilitated through this process.