This post is a recap of our #digtisingEU events in Brussels, Berlin, and Madrid in partnership with the Vodafone Institute

While governments across Europe have embraced open government initiatives towards greater access and accountability, Big Data has increasingly been viewed as a critical lever of innovation for society. Enthusiasts of the big data revolution underline how big data can help society spot socially valuable insights, unlock new forms of economic value in data and uncover human and social dynamics. Much of the societal usefulness of big data being collected comes from discoveries in alternative uses of passively collected data from companies, such as the use of call details records (CDR) for humanitarian response and disease tracking.

Once framed as the “3 V’s” (volume, velocity and variety) in the early 2000s, Big Data has emerged as an ecosystem of “3 C’s”: digital “Crumbs” (digital translations of human actions and interactions captured by digital devices); powerful Capacities to collect, aggregate and analyze data; and Communities of data generators, end users, policymakers, experts, privacy advocates and civic hacker communities involved in generating, governing and using data. Within such an ecosystem of activities and actors, the focus is no longer solely on the collection of government and survey data, but rather the integration of these traditional sources with proprietary, commercial data from the private sector.

In the last five years, several case studies have emerged involving companies sharing “private sector data” through various modalities (e.g. the Orange Data for Development Challenge, BBVA Innova Challenge, Twitter-MIT Laboratory on Social Machines, etc.) with the public sector toward social benefit; these experiments have been presented as exciting new opportunities to understand evolving societal behavior and improve policy and practice at large. Even as the social value of private sector data has been demonstrated by numerous academic studies and underlined by the EU Horizon 2020 and forthcoming regional initiatives, critical privacy and governance questions remain legitimately constrained by ethical, political, legal and commercial considerations. The data revolution is emerging out an initial phase of learning and experimentation, but much is needed to help the private sector and public sector—with the participation of citizens themselves—responsibly and effectively move beyond pilots and experiments towards longer-term programming and integration in existing systems.

Through a comprehensive series of European stakeholder dialogues and debates involving academic experts, private companies, civil society and the public, the digitising EU initiative — organized in partnership with the Vodafone Institute for Society and Communications — aims to provide European companies and public sector institutions with a privacy-preserving, transparency-enhancing toolkit and roadmap for initiating big data-driven projects and partnerships in the data revolution. These stakeholder dialogues and public debates have specifically taken place against the backdrop of ongoing debate surrounding the recently adopted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—in which EU policymakers and officials have debated how to find the balance between the opportunities of big data use and the risks to individual privacy protection.

Partners and contributors in these regional efforts include:

David Alandete

• , Deputy editor-in-chief, El País

Marco Bressan, Chief Analytics Officer, BBVA
Giovanni Buttarelli, European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), European Union
Stephen Deadman, Global Deputy Chief Privacy Officer, Facebook
Nicolas de Cordes, Vice President Marketing Anticipation, Orange Group
Kenneth Cukier, Data Editor, The Economist
Andrew Keen, Executive Director, FutureCast
Emmanuel Letouzé, Director and Co-Founder Data-Pop Alliance
Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Research Scientist, MIT; Research Affiliate, Data-Pop Alliance
Julia Manske, Researcher, Stiftung Nueu Verantwortung; Research Affiliate, Data-Pop Alliance
Esteban Moro, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, Professor, MIT; Director of MIT Media Lab’s Human Dynamics Group; Academic Director, Data-Pop Alliance
Mark Spelch, Managing Director, Vodafone Institute
Linnet Taylor, Marie Curie Research Fellow, University of Amsterdam; Research Affiliate, Data-Pop Alliance
Pilar Torres, General Manager of Central & Eastern Europe Emerging Markets, Microsoft Spain

Industry, government and institutional representatives have included: BBVA, Betterplace Lab, DG Connect, El Pais, European Digital Rights, EuroStat, European Commission, Facebook, Google, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute for Technology, Microsoft, Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, University of Amsterdam, University de la Madrid, and the Vodafone Group.

Some of the questions that our partners and network of experts have been exploring include:

• • • What principles should guide data use and ethical public responsible data sharing? What is the role of companies in keeping consumers informed in consent?
    • How can these decisions be taken when a company’s headquarter and data servers are in a different place than the people affected?
    • Who should participate in these decisions?
    • In what ways have government and public sector agencies partnered with companies to produce socially valuable insights through Big Data and the Internet of Things?
    • What are the critical lessons learned from these partnerships—from data sharing to civic engagement?
    • What kind of civic transparency and accountability measures exist in these initiatives and what is the role of both sectors in promoting civic participation, feedback and privacy protection?
    • What is required for scale?

Both the Berlin and Brussels events focused on the privacy, consent, and other ethical issues. The Madrid event focuses squarely on the forming new kinds of public-private partnerships (or data collaboratives) involving Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT), in the context of Smart Cities, exploring the motion: “Will new public private partnerships in the data revolution promote innovation and collaboration, or foster collusion and surveillance?”

A few initial insights have been captured in event summary reports, which will inform the forthcoming roadmap and toolkit on responsible data governance.

1. digitising Europe Berlin Report, November 2015
2. digitising Europe Brussels Report, January 2016 (forthcoming)
3. digitising Europe Madrid Report, June 2016 (forthcoming)