Updated Thinking about DataTogether

[flyingzumwalt]

My thoughts are still evolving about Data Together, what it is, why we're making it, and how to talk about it. Here is a quick update of my current thinking. Please comment. I hope it will spur conversation that helps us focus the overall endeavor and message.

Key Points

• This is basically re-branding the social and organizational side of "peer-to-peer", providing a framework for understanding the benefits of peer to peer techniques, building on those possibilities, and mitigating weaknesses in the model.
• Creative Commons is a useful parallel. We want to do for peer to peer (decentralized storage & exchange) what creative commons did for content reuse (clear, permissive copyright).
• The primary audience for Data Together is Institutions, Community Organizations, Government Agencies and NGOs. In order to reach a mass audience with this same message, you need different language.
• This is catching on quickly. It's getting good traction at many levels. The concepts & patterns intuitively make sense to everyday people who rely on data (researchers, etc). They also make resonate, when presented clearly, for institutions and big agencies who produce or steward data.
• We are taking a “big tent” approach to the brand. Data Together isn’t just about IPFS. It’s about the pattern/model of communities using decentralized infrastructure to steward data. We want this model, this community, this conversation and any resulting resources to be useful for anyone who is advocating for decentralized approaches.

The Essential Idea Behind Data Together

The Problem We Are Solving: (needs work)
The centralized approach to storing, sharing and hyperlinking data is failing. When communities experience this, they instinctively reach for decentralized patterns. The p2p technologies are there for them to use, but we lack the social and organizational patterns for using those technologies. For example: Forming networks of participants, including government agencies, who coordinate to store copies of the data they rely on.

The conversations and projects around Data Together reach into many domains, but they all revolve around one essential idea:

Communities using peer to peer infrastructure to hold data as collective resources, with groups of individuals and community organizations (aka. libraries, archives) coordinating to carry out stewardship activities.

This has many implications and touches on many topics. Examples include:

• Communities retaining control of the data they have produced. (swadeshi)
• Spreading the burden of data stewardship
• Better signaling between entities to identify which data is important, how data are being used, which data is imperiled, and how resources have been allocated to steward data.
• Participatory digital preservation: Applying LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) model, using tools like ipfs-cluster to coordinate networks of participating storage nodes.
• Data Justice: Under-represented communities claiming agency in the system of data production, data analysis, etc.
• Communities, and individuals within those communities, having agency & autonomy to decide which data should be held and how it should be accessed, discovered, and preserved.
• Preserving the Public Record -- what is the public record? Who creates it? How can we preserve it? What are the threat models?

Verticals That This Touches

Today's work on Data Together is laying the groundwork for people to incorporate "lock the web open" within many verticals. Most notably:

• IoT & Sensor Data: The IoT space is already a race to build the walled garden that captures all the data. We need to establish p2p patterns that rely on communities & community orgs as the main stewards of these data.
• VR, AR and Mixed Reality: Locking the metaverse open -- the metaverse needs to happen on an open web, but it's not on that trajectory now.
• Government Data and Legal Data: It's not enough for governments to publish data. The governed must be able to organize to possess their own copies....
• Research Data on the decentralized web, especially public, open access data
• Social Data: Why are we relying on exploitative centralized systems to propagate data through our social networks? They are, after all social networks. Reclaim ownership of our social data by changing the flow of access, discovery and preservation...