Connected by data

Observing the NHS AI Lab Public Dialogue on Data Stewardship

Tim Davies ▪ Feb 23, 2023

Over last three weeks at the end of July 2022 I was an observer of the NHS AI Lab Public Dialogue on data stewardship: a process involving around 50 members of the public meeting for 12 hours (across four sessions) to share their ‘thoughts, aspirations, hopes and concerns’ about how access to healthcare data for AI purposes should be managed. A report of the dialogue was published by the organisers (Open Data Institute, Imperial College Health Partners and Ipsos), and the NHS AI Lab (who co-funded the dialogue along with Sciencewise) intend to use the findings to inform the Terms of Reference for a research competition titled ‘Participatory Fund for Patient-Driven AI Ethics Research’.

This write-up contains my notes as an independent observer of the dialogue, and member of the project’s Stakeholder group.

What is insight infrastructure?

Jeni Tennison ▪ Jan 10, 2023

We are working on a project with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to help them understand the ecosystem around their work to develop an insight infrastructure for social and economic inequalities, and how to engage with it.

One of the things that’s been a bit challenging to pin down is how to think about what an “insight infrastructure” actually is or does. Is it just a fancy name for what’s essentially a data portal? Or the long term development of system-wide change? Is it intended to be a set of services that JRF will provide? Or a shared movement they’re building? I’ve been drawing on previous work to provide a couple of ways of thinking about what insight and insight infrastructures actually are.

People Power vs Surveillance Capitalism - democratising data governance

Tim Davies ▪ Dec 14, 2022

Beset by train strikes and snow, a small group of us gathered this week in London for a Connected Conversation session with Professor Shoshana Zuboff, author of the 2019 book ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’, and a new paper titled ‘Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Death Match of Institutional Orders and the Politics of Knowledge in Our Information Civilization’. Our discussion was framed by questions of strategy: what are the most promising avenues to encourage a rethinking of how data is governed, and how different strategies of organisations and movements fit together (or not)?

Data and AI regulation around the world

Tim Davies ▪ Dec 13, 2022

We held the first in our Connected Conversations series earlier this month, bringing together a number of data governance thinkers, practitioners and campaigners from four continents to explore current contours of data and AI regulation around the world.

In our hour-long discussion we just scratched the surface of the different opportunities and challenges present when it comes to putting communities at the heart of data governance, and we’re confident that there is value in continuing and deepening the conversation, particularly with a focus on the narratives and agendas around data at play in the G7 and G20 over the coming years.

Put briefly, contributions pointed to both opportunities to innovate and build models of collective data governance within existing and nascent legal frameworks, and to the need to critically engage with advancing data policy agendas to make sure they don’t narrow, undermine or sideline the space for data governance that takes account of community impacts and democratic voice.

Weeknotes are a combination of updates and personal reflection written on a routine basis