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Data Trusts Initiative

Overview

Our interactions in the workplace, at home, and with public services are increasingly mediated by digital technologies. These technologies have great potential to boost economic growth and enhance wellbeing, but new patterns of data collection and use can also create new vulnerabilities and concentrate decisions about data in the hands of organisations that collect and control it.

Realising the benefits of data while protecting individual and collective interests requires institutions capable of governing how data is accessed and used. Data trusts emerged as one proposed model: independent institutions through which individuals or groups can pool rights or interests in data and entrust their stewardship to trustees acting on their behalf.

The Data Trusts Initiative, led by Jessica Montgomery, investigated how data trusts and related institutions could move from theoretical models of data governance into practice. Supported by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, the programme combined research with engagement and practical experimentation, working with researchers, practitioners and organisations developing new approaches to data stewardship.

A central theme of the research was that decisions about who can use data, for what purposes and under what conditions involve questions of power, representation and collective interest. The programme explored how participatory approaches could give individuals and communities a meaningful role in shaping the institutions that govern data on their behalf.

The Initiative also examined the practical conditions required to establish data trusts in the real world. Its work considered the legal and institutional foundations of data trusts, international approaches to data institutions, barriers facing practitioners attempting to establish them, and the research questions that needed to be resolved as the field developed. This led to a series of working papers and practitioner-facing outputs intended to connect emerging theory with implementation.

Internationally, the programme contributed to the Global Partnership on AI’s work on data governance (Enabling data sharing for social benefit through data trusts), including work to develop a shared understanding of data trusts and their potential role in enabling data sharing for social benefit.