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

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:

• Data assets (such as datasets, identifiers and registers)

• Standards and technologies used to curate and improve access to data assets

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

• Organisations that are responsible for stewarding data

• Communities 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 data feminism principles. 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?