International Experts Speak at Alternative Data Governance and Alternative Data Economies Seminar Series
Author Jake Goldenfein
Date 15 June 2021
The ADM+S Centre’s Institutions Research Program based at Melbourne Law School, recently hosted a four-part seminar series on Alternative Data Governance and Alternative Data Economies in collaboration with MLS’s Centre for AI and Digital Ethics and the ANU’s Humanising Machine Intelligence groups. The series brought eight speakers from across the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK into dialogue with discussants from ADM+S, CAIDE, HMI and the broader community.
The series began with the diagnosis that, in the digital context, laws governing privacy, data protection, and consumer protection have participated in building system of social relations in which platforms have become massive, market-like control infrastructures that have transformed individuals into ‘users’- a resource to be mined for data and attention. From there, the series explored alternative arrangements for the governance of our digitally mediated lives and economies, including collective approaches to governing data, attention, and platforms, the role of legal professionals in the ‘new economy’, and indigenous data governance for community produced data resources.
The four seminars are available online on the ADM+S Centre’s YouTube Channel:
Seminar 1 with Katharina Pistor and Salomé Viljoen (discussant Jake Goldenfein) reconceptualizing how data works in the digital economy, the ways in which platforms operate as control infrastructures, the types of social relations they instantiate, and the possibility of democratic data governance: Watch Seminar 1 Recording
Seminar 2 with Julie Cohen and Kean Birch (discussant Kimberlee Weatherall) exploring the degree to which platforms are market players, markets themselves, or something else all-together: Watch Seminar 2 Recording
Seminar 3 with Bronwen Morgan and Nathan Schneider (discussant Jeannie Patterson) discussing the role of collectives in new governance arrangements for data and platforms themselves, as well as the professional skills needed to set those new organisational arrangements in action: Watch Seminar 3 Recording
Seminar 4 with Peter-Lucas Jones and Karen Yeung (discussant Jake Goldenfein) outlining how government use of algorithms have taken the political program of ‘new public accountability’ into the new automated domain of ‘new public analytics’, and how indigenous language resources and data are being built and managed by indigenous groups, for instance using the unique data governance prescriptions of the ‘Kaitiakitanga licence’: Watch Seminar 4 Recording
The topics surfaced in these sessions have exposed a broad research agenda for reforming existing data governance arrangements and building new economic structures and institutions.
