2017 ICT4D Conference

The rise of the Open Data movement is helping to digitalize and open vast amounts of data from government agencies and departments, but data held by corporations has been harder to access for those who seek to utilize data and data insights for the public good – a major opportunity lost as much of the most valuable data about the behavior of households and businesses is today controlled by for-profit entities like telecommunication firms, financial institutions, retailers, and utilities.

From the perspective of commercial data holders, most private sector companies are unwilling to share the data they are collecting due to concerns over the legal ramifications of privacy and security breaches, fears over exposure of trade secrets, uncertainty about the best ways to value and monetize their data sets, and technical and managerial capacity constraints to extracting, sanitizing, and sharing their data or data insights. At the same time, there are many early attempts by corporations to open up their datasets for analysis by researchers, NGOs, and third parties to inform decision-making. This trend is sometimes characterized as data philanthropy, but in fact encompasses a wide range of often innovative models with different levels of commercial objectives such as the sharing of data and data nsights via prizes/challenge funds, trusted data analytics intermediaries, corporate data cooperatives and national data platforms, and the exposure of controlled API access to select data sets.

Our panel will briefly explore the potential impacts and benefits of data sharing for private sector entities and the barriers to realizing them in the development context. The focus of the discussion will question the often unexamined premises in the current data sharing debate and explore the incentives, processes, resources and platforms needed to make increased private sector data sharing a reality. To make the conversation more tangible and useful, the panelists will discuss specific examples of innovative corporate data sharing mechanisms and the value that such mechanisms are creating for the development community and public sector, on the one hand, and for the private sector data holders and intermediaries, on the other.