Chat with Brixham Data Trust

MEETING BRIXHAM DATA TRUST

Last week I meet with Natasha and Pamela from the Brixham Data Trust to hear about the valuable work they’re doing and to learn about the challenges they are facing. The Brixham Data Trust is funded by the Data Trusts Initiative as one of three pilot projects to explore the potential for data trusts in the UK.

Data Trusts are a model that aims to contrast the huge power imbalance around who in society gets to use data to further their aims. It explores the potential to use a legal structure, governance mechanism and technical solution to give power back to grassroots groups or the data subjects themselves.

The other two pilots are focused on a specific type of data: NHS data and data around pregnancy and birth. Brixham Data Trust is the most relevant to my research theme as they are focusing more on data from a very specific place but from a wide range of sources. As a result, the data they must incorporate and the organisations and partners they must work with are incredibly varied in format. In particular, they must work with data subjects as well as organisations who control data. This raises many challenges around how democratic governance is managed to allow for citizens to have a say in how their data is used.

Sustainability

The biggest challenge that emerged through our conversation was in the sustainability of the data trust. Such an initiative is not intended to make a profit and sourcing ongoing funding could be a challenge going forward, especially with how novel the format is and it being hard to judge value immediately in the work they do.

Governance mechanism

Natasha and Pamela explained that they’re considering implementing a CIC organisational model as opposed to a “trust” legal model. I’m quite interested in how governance and organisational structures impact the practices of that organisation, in particular with regards to efficiency and to democratic representation. However, I’m thinking it might be relevant to transfer my interest in this subject instead to how digital infrastructure impacts these things as I’ve really enjoyed developing my data engineering skills recently.

Digital infrastructure

The conversation with Natasha and Pamela helped me to understand the different levels of control of data that can be afforded by the technical design of a system. I’m currently reading Costanza-Chock’s 2020 book Design justice: community-led practices to build the worlds we need which speaks extensively about the affordances of a designed system and how this dictates behaviour on that system.

The Brixham Data Trust is considering only technologies which allow data subjects full control over their data. I’d not appreciated the level of control that could be offered by technological solutions and would be interested in questioning this in future. Especially given my research into the similarities of data trusts to the community development trust where full control is not needed by everyone but instead control is given to a group of elected and trusted individuals.

Open data infrastructure	Restricted sharing infrastructure	Individually controlled data
Next to no control over the data which is freely available. Could include the use of open data licences, for example non-commercial licenses.	It is this kind of sharing that I’m more aware of given that I am involved in the creation of a decarbonisation data exchange through my work. The platform they want to use allows for access to datasets to be restricted but these decisions are always made by one technical account that represents a whole dataset.	The platforms being explored by Brixham Data Trust include the MyDex platform which retains control of an individual’s data within their specific account. They are able to change or remove it at any time. (This appears to be very challenging to technically implement).

How this relates to my research/ key themes

I’ve not yet specified how I’d like to focus my research within the topic of data trusts. I’m interested in a few aspects of the model such as:

How can the technical backbone of the technology reinforce the innovative governance models? What restrictions do current technical systems place on the innovative governance mechanisms?
How do the public perceive the value of such a data trust? What are the barriers in terms of imagination, drive and relevance to current public concerns?

References

Costanza-Chock, S., 1976- author. (2020) Design justice : community-led practices to build the worlds we need Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Delacroix, S. and Lawrence, N.D. (2019) ‘Bottom-up data Trusts: disturbing the “one size fits all” approach to data governance’, International Data Privacy Law, 9(4), pp. 236–252.

Image credit

Image courtesy of Markles55. Can be accessed at https://www.flickr.com/photos/30302870@N08/3112075658. Uploaded on December 16, 2008. Licence Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0).