<aside> ✍ This is the revised research framework for the Global Data Barometer. Comments are welcome to [email protected]

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The Global Data Barometer

<aside> ➡️ Tracking data for public good

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Introduction

Data is a source of power. It can be exploited for private gain, and used to limit freedom, or it can be deployed as a public good: a resource for tackling social challenges, enabling collaboration, driving innovation and improving accountability.

In some cases, data for public good involves making datasets open: unlocking the social and economic value of data collected by public and private institutions. In other cases, realising the public value of data requires carefully managed data-sharing. In all cases, data needs to be well governed: with attention paid to whose interests datasets represent, which use-cases they can serve, and how human rights and privacy are protected.

The Global Data Barometer will build on many years of open data assessment to take a broad look at the extent to which national and sectoral data ecosystems around the world are promoting data for the public good, whilst managing the risks that data can bring. It will generate actionable insights for decision makers, advocacy organisations and innovators: highlighting cases of good practice, supporting peer-learning, and showing the key areas for development in each country.

Motivations

<aside> 🌎 The Global Data Barometer is built around identified user needs for data, evidence and ongoing assessment. (Read initial stakeholder engagement summary here)

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The design of the Global Data Barometer responds to critical knowledge gaps in how policies and practices of governing, releasing and using data for the public good are unfolding across the globe. It will focus on:

<aside> 💡 Setting the boundaries: a note on scope

Through processes of 'datification' almost every part of modern life can be viewed through a data lens.

The Global Data Barometer is centred on public data understood as data that is generated or used by entities carrying out a public task such as the delivery of public services, or the management of public resources. In most cases, this excludes personal data, understood as data that identifies individual people (for example, social media data) and corporate data that does not become involved in public tasks (for example, companies internal supply chain data, or data used to train computer vision models in industrial machines).

As such, in the initial editions of the Global Data Barometer we are not trying to answer questions about the extent, impact, resource or risks of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, nor to explore in any depth issues of data-driven personalisation of consumer services, or surveillance of consumers and citizens. The extent to which a country is making use of data or AI solely within industry falls outside the scope of the proposed study. Scientific data also falls outside our core focus.

In most cases, the data we are focussed on may are capable of being represented as structured text or quantitive tables or plotted on maps. Datasets covered by the study may be both small and big data. With a few exceptions, we are not focussed on image, video or audio data.

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Study design

The Global Data Barometer will produce quantitative and qualitative assessment of country performance against a range of metrics. These will be structured under four key components: governance, capacity, data infrastructure, and data use and impact.

Components and sub-components