Books: data philanthropy

Data Action: Using Data for Public Good by Sarah Williams

affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, City Beautiful movement, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data philanthropy, data science, digital divide, digital twin, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, fake news, four colour theorem, global village, Google Earth, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sidewalk Labs, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Steven Levy, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transatlantic slave trade, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration

While Stempeck makes a great argument in favor of how private companies “could give back in meaningful ways” by providing “data for public good,” especially when it comes to benefits for academic research and what he calls “responsive cities,” he is less clear how this works in favor of companies, which are always interested in their bottom line, the good PR of philanthropy notwithstanding.44 Traditional forms of philanthropy help companies save money, and while Stampeck provides some suggestions on how this could be done in data philanthropy, companies simply have not picked it up. One of the biggest reasons appears to be privacy concerns. Mariarosaria Taddeo, Deputy Director of the Digital Ethics Lab at Oxford, writes that data philanthropy is more complicated than it seems on the face of it. There are ethical concerns regarding sharing private data even if it is for a public good. She argues that data can be used for the benefit of society, but she also cautions that it can be used in ways harmful to society; and she calls out the moral ambiguity that, while data philanthropy might have a moral objective, giving away data may not always be morally upright or ethical.

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Just as the World Bank negotiates license terms for all its researchers, this nonprofit could do that work for numerous special interest groups, from public health to criminal justice. The nonprofit organization established would be a great investment for funders, and ultimately private companies could also invest in the foundation as a form of philanthropy. Data Philanthropy There have been attempts to encourage private companies to see data sharing for a public good as a form of philanthropy and to make sharing data a more altruistic gesture. The idea of data philanthropy originated in 2011with Robert Kirkpatrick of the United Nations Global Pulse, an initiative to accelerate the innovative use of big data for sustainable development and humanitarian action. Kirkpatrick suggests that corporations can find ways to share data for the public good, and in his article on the topic he mentions a few ways that can be done: he calls for a “data commons” to which companies can contribute data after is has been anonymized, and he reminds us of the idea of “strategic leaking” proposed by Michael Nelson of Microsoft's technology futures.40 More generally, data philanthropy has come to involve donating data, whether by individuals or private companies.41 A great example of data philanthropy is the Data for Development (D4D) Challenge, put on by Orange, one of the largest telecoms in the world.

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Kirkpatrick suggests that corporations can find ways to share data for the public good, and in his article on the topic he mentions a few ways that can be done: he calls for a “data commons” to which companies can contribute data after is has been anonymized, and he reminds us of the idea of “strategic leaking” proposed by Michael Nelson of Microsoft's technology futures.40 More generally, data philanthropy has come to involve donating data, whether by individuals or private companies.41 A great example of data philanthropy is the Data for Development (D4D) Challenge, put on by Orange, one of the largest telecoms in the world. Orange released its call detail record (CDR) in two African regions to see if the innovative minds of researchers around the world could think up creative ways to use this data as a public good.