Data, contracts & law
Civic data commons
Develop the data, contractual and legal infrastructure needed to tend and nurture commons across sometimes competing environments.
This project explores the infrastructure needed to sustain data commons across sometimes competing environments. It would examine data stewardship and governance, contractual arrangements, legal responsibilities, conditions for access and reuse, and the mechanisms needed to maintain shared resources over time. It also considers the political economy of platforms: how platform ownership, business models and bargaining power shape the terms on which data and shared infrastructures can be accessed, governed and sustained. The work would attend to relationships among participants and institutions while recognising that their mandates and interests may compete. The aim is to understand what enables a commons to be tended responsibly, not to prescribe a single model or claim an established ecosystem.