The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Data Stewardship: The Need for Oversight of Open Data Sets
Data Governance lays out high-level policies and procedures for managing data in an organization. Data Stewardship is the day-to-day implementation of those policies. The data steward makes sure that data governance policies are abided by and that the data managed is of high quality.
But what about open data? Who manages that? Large data sets made available to the public by governments, educational organizations, and businesses are eagerly picked up by researchers, academics, and businesses, but there is often little investigation as to whether there are privacy or ethical issues with the data.
Margaret Mitchell, an AI ethics researcher, told MIT Technology Review that “people’s eyes have not generally been open to the complexities, and potential harms and risks, of data sets. For a long time, the culture within the AI community has been to assume that data exists to be used. It’s really important to think through the various values that a data set encodes, as well as the values that having a data set available encodes.” [Mitchell made headline news after Google fired her AI Ethics group.]
Mitchell advocates for data stewardship organizations to rigorously manage, maintain, and curate public data sets. The groups would be independent and make sure that data sets comply with privacy and other legal standards, that it has been collected with consent, and that people whose personal data in the data set are given an opportunity to opt out or later withdraw their data. This kind of stewardship is particularly needed for biometric, intellectual property, and personally identifiable information.
Mitchell said that “data set collection and monitoring isn’t a one-off task for one or two people. If you’re doing this responsibly, it breaks down into a ton of different tasks that require deep thinking, deep expertise, and a variety of different people.”
