Practical approaches for people power in data and AI governance

Challenge 9 of the Open Gov Challenge calls for a focus on digital governance: strengthening transparency and public oversight of AI and data protection frameworks.

It is abundantly clear that, as uses of data and AI continue to grow in power - both in the public and private sectors - that protecting and extending democratic control over these technologies requires a concerted effort.

Many early proposals to improve the governance of data and AI have drawn on familiar open government terms such as transparency and participation. However, these ideas have often been applied in relatively narrow ways: focussed on measures such as creating voluntary registers of public sector algorithms, or ‘democratising’ access to data and AI tools, rather than framing participation as a question of who shares in decision making and control over system development and deployment.

Yet, the toolbox of open government, and experiences from more than a decade of the Open Government Partnership, has a significant contribution to make to meaningful democratisation of the power inherent in data and AI. Ideas and practices drawn from open government initiatives in open contracting, extractives governance and climate policy-making (to name but a few) can all provide critical insights on how to design embedded and multi-stakeholder policy measures that can strategically strengthen citizen voice and oversight over novel technologies.

This was a critical finding from the workshop that Connected by Data, the campaign for communities to have a powerful voice in data governance, organised alongside the 2023 Open Government Partnership Summit in Tallinn.

With a diverse group of civil society, government and academic stakeholders, we explored existing work on algorithmic transparency, participation in data governance, and data protection, and set out to sketch ideas for future open government commitments that could be SMART, effective and attractive ways of meeting Open Government Challenge 9.

The three commitment areas we explored were:

1. Participatory oversight of technology procurement through creation of multi-stakeholder oversight groups that are empowered to advise, question and publicly report on public sector data and AI procurement.
2. Deliberative development of data and AI strategies at both national and local levels through use of both open, and more targeted, participation processes.
3. Strengthening citizen voice within sectoral regulators to create a robust feedback loop and ensure data and AI firms have social licence to operate in the way they do.

The workshop report sets out in more detail a set of key features for each commitment concept. It provides more detail on how each was developed and how they might be adapted to different contexts.

We hope this report provides a useful starting point for civil society, governments and private sector organisations working on national action plan developments around data and AI.

To support further thinking and knowledge-sharing we’re organising an hour long ‘Connected Conversation’ on Zoom on 29th November at 2pm UTC / 9am EST to share more detail on the commitments, invite expert commentary, and discuss individual questions and examples of promising practice.

You can register to take part here.