Governance

Over the past decade, the volume, velocity and variety of data have increased through business transactions, IoT devices and so much more. Data-driven decision making will soon become a central feature of economic and social life. Ongoing technological developments continue to shape how data is generated, collected, stored, shared, distributed, and analyzed by organizations. And as organizations become even more reliant on data, the strategic governance of data and comprehensive understanding of when data is most vulnerable becomes more relevant.

There are five major moments where data is most vulnerable: collection, storage, sharing, analysis, and deletion. Many of these vulnerability points are part of a cycle, known as the data lifecycle. Understanding where the data lives within the system is how you can consistently take steps to ensure proper data governance.

When talking about data, we have to talk about what access we have to them: universities and academia, public administrations, companies and civil society: how do they share the data they create? Thanks to open data, those data sets usually prepared with public resources will be made publicly available. But in a datafied world where data production is widely distributed, while increasing their need for any purpose, the power of data requires a better and complex governance that contemplates multiple forms of sharing, access levels, licenses, as well as transparency, accountability and responsibility of all the actors involved in data management and creation.

OUR PROJECTS

Eticas Foundation, Colectic, City Hall of Barcelona

In this project we have developed a robust and replicable Data Commons methodology, that is, an environment where to deploy and use existing data systems, and we have proposed to pilot this methodology at the neighborhood level, in the Raval, while exploring spaces for creating value based on proximity data.

Eticas Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation

The purpose of this study is to encourage Internet companies to be on the side of their users in the defense of their privacy and in the promotion of their digital rights. The study designs a series of evaluation criteria that serve as a guide in order to evaluate and compare the companies being analysed, and rank them considering how are they taking into account the privacy rights of their users and taking actions in their defense and promotion. These evaluation criteria are designed to go beyond what is strictly stipulated by law, as it seeks to promote best practices in defense of the privacy rights of users and customers. In addition, this evaluation criteria must be based on information that is available online (verifiable by anyone interested).

Eticas Consulting

This is a work of evaluation, analysis and recommendations for the platform Decidim Barcelona. Promoted by the Barcelona City Council, this online platform aims to promote citizen participation and direct, deliberative and participatory democracy in the city, combining both ICT-based tools and face-to-face resources.

Citizen science is an inevitable trend in the context of a society that demands higher levels of participation in a growing number of fields. This trend is facilitated by the increase in the digitisation of social interactions and, in general, a greater presence of information and communication technologies (ICTs). However, the dynamization of digitised information flows is not without risks. On the one hand, due to the digitisation and interconnection of the devices themselves, increases the fragility of the information; on the other hand, due to the increase in the number of subjects involved, which means that part of the control and responsibility must be transferred to a large number of people. 

Eticas Foundation partnered with Tactical Tech to look behind the headlines and clarified the role that personal data played during the climactic events of the independence referendum, in which there was never a definitive majority for either side of the debate, and in which personal data and digital strategies played a surprisingly prominent role.

 

Eticas Consulting

Eticas teamed up with the Open Data Institute in the UK to develop practical guidelines to help organizations anonymise the data they plan to publish or share. This is where we discuss why anonymising data is important and what it means.