Awareness of the power and potential of data has grown over the last 10 years, there is improved data literacy, and a greater willingness to ask the important questions about the uses to which it is put. Those observations were among many voiced in a fascinating and optimistic discussion between Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt at the Open Data Institute’s Summit on Tuesday November 8.
The pair set up the ODI 10 years ago and joined a global online audience to discuss what had been achieved, and what their hopes for the future were. Both were optimistic, buit also realistic about challenges ahead.
Sir Tim said that “the power to use your data is one of the things people are starting to realise”, and Sir Nigel emphasized that the ODI “has always seen data as empowering. The question is for who and what?” He thought a key question now was “How do we spread the benefits of the large data sets?”
Both used the pandemic as an example of how ordinary citizens were actively searching for and interpreting data. “As things get worse, people get more data literate,” said Sir Tim, and Sir Nigel referenced the global climate emergency as another example. “Climate gives us this great use case for getting high quality data on a global scale,” he said, adding that “people are mobilized so we have an opportunity to involve them at scale”.
Work in progress
Discussing the impact of AI, Sir Nigel said that “we might be surprised how much of the planet’s data eco-system is a work in progress”. We’re still working out exactly how to analyze and use data at scale, and the “serious compute power” needed to do this needed “common endeavor”.
One question from the audience related to how much of that serious compute power was in the hands of relatively few corporations, most notably big public cloud outfits like AWS and Google. Both recognized the worries, with Sir Tim saying “It’s very easy to go and grab a bit of the cloud from a big provider and not think about where the physical computers are. The cloud is somewhere else – but it is somewhere!”
Sir Nigel agreed that data sovereignty was becoming increasingly important and warned of the dangers of building barriers. And he pointed out that “effective governance is also a question that these big companies are talking about”.
Question of trust
The remarks prompted a question about whether we should accept that data belongs to platforms, and why people seemed to trust large corporations rather than governments to hold and manage their data. Both thought that attitudes varied across geographies depending on the view of the role people thought governments should play in people’s lives. The ODI has published some in-depth research on the subject.
Sir Nigel strongly believes “technology application can’t be agnostic. What are the values and ethical trade-offs we want?” He said people needed to confront the reality that “there is a public good as well as a private interest in how data is shared” and that presented some tough choices.
The pair are still committed to one of the ODI’s core principles of promoting what Sir Nigel called “an appetite to understand what it is to be human in the 21st Century” and he rounded off the session by saying: “We’ve got to use data and make it our friend to improve things.”