Democratizing data for a fair digital economy

The digital revolution is here, but not everyone is benefiting equitably from it. And as Silicon Valley's ethos of "move fast and break things" spreads around the world, now is the time to pause and consider who is being left out and how we can better distribute the benefits of our new data economy. "Data is the main resource of a new digital economy," says Parminder Singh, executive director at nonprofit organization IT for Change. Global society will benefit because the economy will benefit, argues Singh, on decentralization of data and distributed digital models. Data commons--or open data sources--are vital to help build an equitable digital economy, but with that comes the challenge of data governance. "Not everybody is sharing data," says Singh. Big tech companies are holding onto the data, which stymies the growth of an open data economy, but also the growth of society, education, science, in other words, everything. According to Singh, "Data is a non-rival resource. It's not a material resource that if one uses it, other can't use it." Singh continues, "If all people can use the resource of data, obviously people can build value over it and the overall value available to the world, to a country, increases manifold because the same asset is available to everyone." One doesn't have to look very far to understand the value of non-personal data collected to help the public, consider GIS data from government satellites. Innovation plus the open access to geographic data helped not only create the Internet we know today, but those same tech companies.