About
The Data Empowerment Fund supported a diverse set of initiatives that enabled greater individual agency or community control over data.It was powered by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Omidyar Network and Open Collective Foundation.
Why data empowerment?
People have limited opportunities to participate in the systems of data collection, use and sharing that shape our lives.
Most digital services provide only binary options to determine what they do with data. Workers generally have little say in how data is used in their workplaces. There are few opportunities for communities to organise around data and put it to work for their benefit.
Not enabling people to shape and participate in these systems risks creating deep mistrust. This mistrust could limit the potential of data – and the different technologies it powers – to be applied to the significant challenges of our time.
Empowering people with data also creates new opportunities. Citizen science projects show the power of harnessing the knowledge of crowds in conservation, medical research and beyond. Wikipedia remains the largest repository of human knowledge in the world, collaboratively maintained by millions of people around the world.
There is an urgent need for more experimentation of different forms of data empowerment, as well as greater understanding of those that could work at scale or across different contexts.
Initiatives
Located across the globe, the eight initiatives supported by the Data Empowerment Fund addressed some of the world’s most pressing challenges – including ensuring fair work, tackling the climate crisis and governing artificial intelligence.
The initiatives took different approaches to data empowerment, reflecting the causes they’d been designed to address, and the communities they worked with. Each demonstrated what is possible when people are able to participate in the systems of data collection, use and sharing that shape their lives.
The eight initiatives awarded grants by the Data Empowerment Fund were:
Digital Aotearoa Collective
to develop new versions of the Pataka and Āhau applications, and teach users how to use them and how they work. Pataka was designed and developed by indigenous community developers for indigenous communities to enable the recording and sharing of information while maintaining their data sovereignty.
Hush Line
to launch and develop new features for the open source whistleblowing platform, which is designed to make it easier, safer and more successful for people to share sensitive information without compromising their identity.
Growing Turkopticon for the Fight Against Mass Rejections
to advance the worker-run, worker-led advocacy organization’s work to fight for better conditions for data workers around the world, including to escalate its campaign around mass rejections (when a requester posts work on a platform and then rejects all submissions from all workers without paying them).
Community-based collection of linguistic resources for bias assessment in language technologies
to work with teachers and students to build a new dataset to document known stereotypes and biases in education, and to develop methodologies and courses for evaluating stereotypes and discriminatory biases in natural language processing.
Data4Mods: Content Moderators’ Collective Power through Data
to work with the African Content Moderators Union to develop a database of international companies outsourcing work to Kenya, document evidence of the working conditions experienced by these workers, and support moderators to decide together how to use the data to drive improvements.
Content Moderators United for Data and Digital Rights
to deliver an educational campaign to boost awareness of data rights among content moderators in Nigeria, provide training on privacy, data protection and other relevant topics, and provide mental health outreach and support to workers who have been exposed to harmful content.
Grassroots AI-supported news monitoring with human rights organizations
to extend collaborative data collection techniques developed to monitor news for femicide to other types of violations, such as murders of Indigenous land defenders and mass shootings. This process of assembling ‘counter-data’ is designed to fill gaps in public data monitoring, advocate for policy change and help provide services to impacted communities.
Ushahidi Climate Data Equity Initiative
to create a new tool to help users collect, manage and make sense of climate data more effectively, as well develop a toolkit and webinar series to drive usage of the data. The Ushahidi Climate Data Equity ensures citizen voices are included in conversations around response, mitigation and adaptation to the climate crisis.
Advisory Panel
The Advisory Panel supported the Data Empowerment Fund to reach, select and support impactful initiatives. The Advisory Panel members were: