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Data Infrastructure for Common Challenges
  • Data Landscape Playbook
    • Data Landscape Playbook: status
    • What is this playbook for?
    • Who is this playbook for?
  • Play one: Explore the problem and how data can address it
    • Define how improving access to data can help address your problem
    • What type of data infrastructure does the initiative aim to create or maintain?
      • Build or manage data assets
      • Create or adopt data standards
      • Build or improve technologies
      • Create guidelines and policies
      • Build or support organisations and communities
    • Carry out initial research and engagement
    • Summary of Play One
  • Play two: Map the data ecosystem
    • Engage with key stakeholders
    • Create an ecosystem map
    • Identify gaps, barriers and opportunities
    • Summary of Play Two
  • Play three: Assess the policy, regulatory and ethical context
    • Understand the legal, regulatory and policy context of the initiative
    • Understand the ethical issues impacting your initiative
    • Summary of Play Three
  • Play four: Assess the existing data infrastructure
    • Make a data inventory
    • Assess open standards for data
    • Assess data skills and literacies
    • Summary of Play Four
  • Play five: Plan for impact when designing your data initiative
    • Plan an impactful initiative
    • Identify risks, assumptions and dependencies
    • Sketch your evaluation framework
    • Summary of Play Five
  • What comes next?
  • Acknowledgements
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  1. Play one: Explore the problem and how data can address it

What type of data infrastructure does the initiative aim to create or maintain?

PreviousDefine how improving access to data can help address your problemNextBuild or manage data assets

Last updated 4 years ago

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Common challenges to society such as improving public health, switching to renewable energy and responding to crises and disasters all need to be addressed through collaborative approaches. No single organisation has the resources or skills to tackle the problem, or the understanding of how to create solutions that work for everyone.

To create impact regarding your specific challenge, you need to choose appropriate activities related to building and maintaining data infrastructure. In your field, community or industry, some of the data infrastructure might already have been built, so you should ensure you are not duplicating effort.

It can be helpful to start with an idea of the data infrastructure that you currently have and need in order to undertake the initiative – the rest of this playbook outlines how to do that. However, as you go about your research, stakeholder engagement and data infrastructure assessment, you may need to revisit this. Often organisations find that data is even less accessible or standardised than originally anticipated; that they are lacking particular skills inside the organisation to build data infrastructure, or that data capabilities in the ecosystem need to be strengthened as part of the initiative.

Initiatives are designed to create or maintain data infrastructure to address challenges, including:

  • (such as datasets, identifiers and registers)

  • and used to curate and improve access to data assets

  • that inform the use and management of data assets and the data infrastructure

  • that are responsible for stewarding data

  • involved in contributing or maintaining data infrastructure, and those who are impacted by decisions that are made using it to tackle a specific problem

There are a variety of ways data infrastructure can help address major challenges. The following sub-sections go into those in more detail, and provide some helpful examples of data access initiatives building those types of data infrastructure.

Special focus: balancing power dynamics in data infrastructure

When addressing complex community challenges through creating, replicating or maintaining data infrastructure, initiatives need to understand the full context – the problem, needs, skills and literacies of the communities involved in building and using data infrastructure, and those who are impacted by decisions that are made using it. This infrastructure might have been designed by privileged groups or by individuals or organisations working in a different context and may not address certain community needs. To mitigate any unfair elements that this infrastructure might create or amplify, you could reflect on the . This framework can help you to examine systems of power and potentially address injustices by avoiding perpetuating biases and imbalances across protected characteristics – such as race, gender and sexual orientation – and other relevant characteristics such as socioeconomic or immigration status. From a data infrastructure perspective, your initiative might use the data feminism principles to ask and reflect on the following questions:

  • Examine power: does the data infrastructure that you plan to build or maintain with your initiative address the community and users needs, or has it been developed by privileged groups that might not understand the context?

  • Challenge power: how can you make sure the initiative’s data infrastructure does not perpetuate or amplify structural inequalities?

  • Elevate emotion and embodiment: how are you ensuring the initiative’s data infrastructure is inclusive and reflects the values, emotions and knowledge of the whole community/communities?

  • Rethink barriers and hierarchies: how will your initiative improve data collection practices? And can you avoid perpetuating oppression by rethinking how individuals are counted and classified?

  • Embrace pluralism: how can you make sure the initiative is open to, and respectful of, multiple perspectives, and that it prioritises insights from often marginalised groups such as Indigenous people, local communities, and other sources of knowledge?

  • Consider context: how will you build processes for your initiative which ensure ethical assessments of the data and the data infrastructure needed to address unequal relations?

  • Make labour visible: how can your initiative acknowledge and value the work of the many stakeholders and users that contributed to building data infrastructure?

Data assets
Standards
technologies
Guidance and policies
Organisations
Communities
data feminism principles