EVENT DETAILS
Organisations & Intermediaries in the Data Economy – Alternative Data Governance // Economies
11 May 2021
Speakers:
Dr Jake Goldenfein, Associate Investigator, University of Melbourne node
Prof Jeannie Paterson, Affiliate, University of Melbourne node
Prof Bronwen Morgan, UNSW Assistant
Prof Nathan Schneider, University of Colorado, Boulder
Watch the recording
Duration: 1:27:48
TRANSCRIPT
Dr Jake Goldenfein:
Well, welcome everybody. I’m thrilled that you can all be here for this the third seminar in our series on alternative data governance and alternative data economies. My name is Jake Goldenfein, I’m a senior lecturer here at Melbourne Law School, and an investigator at the centre of excellence for automated decision making and society. Before moving on and talking about the series, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that the place where I work and where I sit now is on unceded war Wurrundjeri land and I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians from the Woi Wurrung language groups and the Kulin Nations, and I am also presently sitting and working in a law school. And I want to take a moment to think about the role that law and legal instruction and practice has had in the continuing process of colonization. And I similarly want to reflect on the significance of our topic, data governance, and the way in which data governance is implicated in these questions of colonization and sovereignty. Now today’s seminar theme is organisations and intermediaries in the digital economy. This is the third in a series that has so far looked at, in our first seminar with Katharina Pistor and Salome Viljone, we looked at how we might reconfigure our understandings of data to achieve more desirable social relations in the digital economy. In our second seminar with Julie Cohen and Kean Birch, we explored the ways in which platforms have superseded or transcended the idea of markets and called into question current regulatory trajectories of trying to turn the digital economy into a more competitive marketplace. And today we’re going to explore the role of organisations and intermediaries as a point of leverage for building new kinds of economic arrangements and rearranging power relations between different actors online, as well as thinking about what that means for the professions and for the professions involved in building these kinds of organisations. So, these seminars are organised by the Australian research council-funded centre of excellence for automated decision-making in society, or ADMS as we call it, along with our partner organisations, the humanising machine intelligence project at the Australian National University and the centre for AI and digital ethics based at Melbourne law school at the University of Melbourne. And I now wish to introduce professor Jeannie Patterson, director of the centre for AI and digital ethics whose work investigates the role of consumer law and contract law and other species of private law, in the regulation and ethics of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, and who is a wonderful interlocutor thinker and colleague. And I’ll ask Jeannie to introduce the speakers and share today’s session. Thank you.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
Thank you so much, Jake, for the introduction. And thank you to our panel and our audience for being here for a really interesting discussion. The title of today’s seminar is organisations and intermediaries in the data economy. But we could have more colloquially named that, who’s creating value, who’s left out, and what do we do about that. So, we’re really fortunate to be joined by two people who thought long and hard, as well as Jake himself in fact, about how we perhaps think about different structures for ownership. We encourage a shared interest in democratisation and adding ethical – and perhaps also environmental sustainability values to the market – through structures that are generative rather than extractive.
So, I’m very pleased to introduce first of all, Professor Bronwen Morgan who’s a professor of law at the University of New South Wales. And Bronwen’s renowned for her work on transformations of the regulatory state at both national and transnational contexts, and she has a particular interest in the interaction between technocratic intensities of regulation and collective commitments to democracy continuality and ecological sustainability. Bronwen’s current work focuses on new legal platforms for social enterprise and also the changing demands that will be made on professionals in working in this environment. So, thanks for joining us Bronwen. And we’re also joined from the US at – I don’t know, I hate to think what hour – by Nathan Schneider who’s a journalist and an assistant professor at the University of Colorado. He writes about religion, technology, and democracy, and his current project is an exploration of models for democratic ownership and governance for online platforms, with a particular interest in platform corporativism. And Nathan has written widely in both popular media and otherwise. And he’s also the founder of the media enterprise design lab. So, thank you so much for joining us, Nathan.
Now I thought we would just begin by setting the scene a little bit. I’m sure that everybody in this audience is aware of the impact of surveillance capitalism or um what Julie Cohen, a couple of seminars ago, described as information capitalism. So, we’re facing pervasive tracking collection of personal data, sophisticated analytics, to find value in that data. And it’s used to predict influence and control behaviour of consumers and global citizens. Now this data transaction between individuals and digital platforms is typically perceived in contractual terms so we hear about contracts for data, contracts for privacy and the like, now this places responsibility on individuals for the uses of data, and increasingly the efficacy and fairness of this approach has been challenged. And in response we see moves in the regulatory state to improve more substantive concerns of fairness or fiduciary obligations, even on data controllers and discussions about how to break up or refashion the market power of the platform forms through antitrust interventions. But there’s another strand of really important work that’s taking place about the roles of new intermediaries like trusts or co-ops, that might stand between stat platforms and users and represent – as I mentioned – a more democratic and ethical sustainable form of use. So, this is a discussion we want to have today, and I thought we’d start with Nathan.
Nathan, if you’ve thought and written and talked a lot about these issues, can you talk a little bit about the attraction of alternative intermediate restructures as opposed for example, to relying on stronger laws or better regulators to control the excesses of platform power?
Prof Nathan Schneider:
Thank you. Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for the opportunity to be part of this conversation. It’s really something I’ve been looking forward to, but I wouldn’t say that it’s an either or, you know. I think we need both. We need a framework that encourages accountability one way or another, and part of that I think, can be the recognition that not all that accountability should come straight from the state. That we want to build accountability into the structures in diverse ways of the entities that we’re building. And this I think, really will require a regulatory framework as cooperative structures of the past have needed. But that if we also enable space for people to be creative about their accountability and democracy, really cool things can happen. And one reason for that, the need for that creativity, is that platforms are so diverse. For instance, the kind of data stewardship, the kind of cooperative structures one might want for a ride share labour company, are very different from what you might want from a personal data company like Facebook. You might want more oversight and control over what is done with your data with something like a ride share company. The priority might be on financial benefits, and so we need a framework that encourages appropriate models and invites creativity of communities and entrepreneurs and regulators, and others, to find the right models for the diverse, creative and interesting cases and challenges that we have before us.
Okay, I’m just going to push you a little bit on this idea of diversity in different models. I mean, surprising to me to raise this question, but if we took a sort of hard line economic approach, or efficiency approach, when we say that intermediaries – particularly when we’re talking about different kinds of intermediaries for different markets – don’t we just increase transaction costs which ultimately don’t benefit consumers and citizens. I’d have to think about that. I tend to think that we have diverse models and if we try to apply a kind of one size fits all solution on them, we’re going to see greater transaction cost, we’re going to see a kind of greater friction. So, you know I’d like to hear more about those concerns, but I tend to think that we want to invite not just the creativity of our profit-seeking entrepreneurs, but are the creativity of our accountability seeking democratic entrepreneurs. And it’s that latter kind that I think we are not incentivising, as in our societies and in our tech economies, while we are very actively and aggressively incentivising the former. So, in a sense we’ve got a one-size-fits-all at the moment. This is the model for innovation as opposed to something else which relies on profit extraction rather than any other perhaps, purpose. So, Jake, I’m going to actually pull you in here, because you’ve also thought and written hard about these issues, and in particular many of us will have seen your piece in response to suggestions during – I have to say – the first Covid wave, for cell phone tracking? And the question about who should be responsible for location data, for managing Covid spreads. Now you wrote about this sort of idea that it’s not an either or, but there’s actually different models we might like to think about. For example, data cooperatives, which may also facilitate trust in those types of tracking technologies for public purpose benefits. Would you like to talk a little bit here then about the sort of attraction of thinking it’s nothing to say about creativity and alternative models?
Dr Jake Goldenfein:
Yeah, thanks. And thanks for including me. I’m certainly not as expert Bronwen or Natha, but I suppose I can chime in a little bit. You’re referring to the piece in Jacobin, called privacy versus health is a false trade-off. That was a piece I co-wrote with Solomon Bullon and Ben Green. And I suppose it comes back to this question you recently asked about whether or not something like an intermediary imposes transaction costs. And I think part of what we’re arguing there is that irrespective of the transactions costs involved – and inevitably there will be transaction costs involved in associated with new business, technological, legal design for intermediaries like that – what we’re really talking about is trying to institute a different system of social relations. Because the idea that you know, we’re individuals and we have this privacy that we then have to give up for some sort of public purpose is, I think, a kind of dichotomy that we want to move away from. And instead, how can we have mechanisms by which we collectively decide over the governance of how our data moves and what it’s used for, and how can we do that in ways and this is what we’re really arguing for, in that piece is how can we do that, in ways that don’t generate governing surpluses. They don’t generate political surplus or policing surplus.
So, how can our data be collectively managed in a way that’s purpose-bound and not really be used for anything else which is what undermines trust in governments, what undermines trust in corporate providers, and such. And you know, in the health context is one thing, and then moving on to the consumer internet, we also think that intermediaries have a part to play because we need – you know, so much of what we’ve been talking about in this series has been about trying to move away from the idea of consumers online exclusively as users of platforms, where the idea of a user is this kind of lingering pathological account of a resource that can be mined for data and attention. So, how do we do that?
Well cooperatives and collectives online are a really interesting way of doing that because they offer alternative mechanisms for genuine collective arrangements and self-governance. And we see creativity being a really critical thing because you know, this question, for what purpose are we collectivising or forming an intermediary, is a really important one. And that’s the one that I’ve we asked in a piece that I’ve co-written with Sebastian Benthal, that’s going to be in the AI, Ethics and Society conference, for what purpose do we want to build an intermediary? And if it’s genuine collective action and self governance, that’s really exciting, because we argue that control over data doesn’t equal control over the governing power of data. And getting to that is really the critical thing for us.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
Thanks Jake. So, there’s two really interesting threads of thought, many interesting threads of thought coming out there and threads that I know that Bronwen has thought and written about in a wider context. But so, I think what we hear coming through from both Nathan and you, Jake, is this idea there’s two concerns. One is this push for democratisation, so that more interest should be represented in the uses that are made of data, particularly since the value from data comes from its aggregation. It’s not valuable in an individualised sense, it’s valuable precisely for the fact that it’s combined and used to make predictions, find insights about groups rather than individuals, and I guess the other thread that’s coming through from this discussion is the idea that we can use this information for public goods for health purposes. Empowering consumers, developing different models of businesses that may go further than simply capturing attention for monetization of advertisers and platforms. So, we can see that there’s a focus on the data, but there’s also a bigger aspiration for a different kind of market and I think that’s precisely where Bronwen’s work comes in.
Bronwen, can you talk to us a little bit about the work you’ve done on the attractions of these kinds of non-corporate, or non-investor-driven models of business?
Prof Bronwen Morgan:
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m really pleased to be here, so thank you for organising this. And I was listening to this and thinking my entry point is different, and I think would give a slightly different angle to the question that Jeannie raised about transaction costs versus, if you like, the benefits of creativity beyond economic measurement. And that’s probably because I feel the conversation has been more focused on not entirely – and I know it’s more nuanced than this – but the idea of data as the product or the service at an aggregated level. Whereas I’ve actually come into it from a different angle, where it’s the use of data and the digital infrastructure for delivering goods and services is now pervasive. So, it’s this question of developing these non-corporate structures could be applied specifically to how we house data and deploy its uses for public purposes. But the more general drift and I think Jeannie’s point she’s getting to, is that the use of market vehicles is now implicated with data and digital platforms at such a pervasive level that the question of how data is governed is going to come in much broader context than the specific thing of aggregated data for, say health or even in consumer internet, and so on. And I’ve been starting to struggle with this in terms of if you’re doing empirical work – and I know both Nathan and I are interested in platform cooperatives – what is a platform cooperative? I mean even if you identify there are arguments about the cooperative form which we could get to, but the question is, is a company with a website a platform? Probably not. Is Amazon a platform? Clearly. But there’s a huge spectrum in between, and I think the question of transaction costs and the importance of creativity, diversity, and pluralism, is vitally important. Particularly outside of that huge aggregated data type of focus. And for the same reason that I think we don’t want an economy with just two supermarkets, or just four banks, we don’t want a monoculture of institutional structures available for conducting economic life. I don’t even want to say a conducting market, and there’s a sort of – I suppose it’s a competition at all point in answer to transaction costs in some ways. But I think what we’re all searching for here is a different language to articulate the creative benefits of that diversity of institutional form and I can’t resist just giving – well actually, an illustration of the non-economic benefits of pluralism in corporate and non-corporate forms.
This is a fairly extreme version but I’m thinking it comes from a South African author called Graham Boyd, who writes about freeing the corporation almost as an existential thing. That the corporation in its mainstream form is in a sense, a slave to investor interest as designed by its specific financial and legal infrastructure, and that creating diversity and pluralism in non-corporate form is actually an existential form of freedom for the legal person of the corporation. Now, I hadn’t come quite to this angle of the legal person, the corporation before, but I think it’s really interesting. Graham is actually South African and I’ve often spoken to students about the importance of realising competition law has non-economic transactional benefits in leveling the playing field. And this goes back to Jake’s introduction, sort of picking up on the importance of long historical patterns of inequity and colonisation and competition law in South Africa, had aspirations to level the playing field between different racial groups in ways that transaction cost language just doesn’t capture. So, I think that’s also a really important aspect of pluralism in organisational form. The idea of freeing the corporate structure from this slavery to the profit motive has just been the first mind-blowing moment for me of the day, probably the week. So, thank you for that.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
Oh no, it’s fantastic, but it’s a really important point isn’t it. Because when we look at that sort of narrower question of advertising to consumers or the market for attention, one of our concerns is about diversity. That we end up with this sort of you know, homogeneous beige coloured monotony where everybody’s getting the same information or being promoted the same products, and there’s a lot of discussion amongst people who are interested in design and information systems, about how we can prompt spontaneity and prompt diversity in those sorts of markets for attention and Dana Mckay, one of my colleagues, has done a lot of work in this. And I love that now what we’re really saying here is how do we have diversity at the market level so that antitrust starts to take on a whole new meaning in this field. Now Nathan, we started with you, so before we move on to sort of some more specifics, I’m sure that you’re dying to hop in here and comment on what’s going on, what this conversation or this part of the conversation, so back to you.
Prof Nathan Schneider:
Well thank you. I mean, I also really appreciate that intervention about liberating the corporation and I just think it’s really important to recognise how constrained the cooperative model has been you know, in each of our societies, certain forms of cooperative business have kind of been unlocked in very targeted fashion. So, in some ways we’ve seen that kind of one-size-fits-all ism, and it’s something that frustrates me constantly as I’m working with cooperative founders, because there’s a 130 billion cooperative banks down the road from me but none of the tech co-ops I work with can use it because it was created through US policy to support farmers during the great depression, right. And so, similarly credit unions are constrained or cooperative banks are, you can get loans to set up cooperatives that are rural electric utilities but you can’t get the same loans to set up community solar arrays in urban or rural communities. The models in which shared ownership has been unlocked and enabled have been very narrow and kind of straight jacketed to the point, where to protect investors from having to face real competition from community owned business and so that historical legacy is something that makes me really eager to say, okay, if we’re going to enable these kinds of models we want to enable them as broadly and generally and creatively as we’ve already enabled investor ownership. If we’re serious about community ownership being a real bulwark against the profit motive, we need to unleash it, you know. And we need to create really generalisable models for enabling this stuff. So, you know, when I think about okay, we’re going to create some data cooperatives my policy proposals around this step have said let’s not just focus on data cooperatives, let’s focus on what all kinds of cooperatives need and then data cooperatives will arise in the mix.
Prof Jeannie Pattterson:
So, that’s a really interesting response, Nathan because you’re reminding us of where we started in this series which is the role of the law in effectively determining how powers distributed and exercised across the economy by what it recognises as property, by how it defines and structures ownership, that’s a big question. Let’s just take it down to more of a micro level. We’ve been talking a lot about the cooperative structure. Now I don’t know what resonates in people’s minds when they hear the word cooperative other than a counter to the corporate model. When I was at university, I belong to a food cooperative but I’m equally reminded that some in Australia anyway, and in the US, dairy cooperatives have been around for a really long time and are a really good working example until recently- other story of the cooperative structure fulfilling its function. But also participating fully in the market economy. I’m going to start with you Nathan. Can we push you a little bit more to about ideas, about cooperative structures or trusts, or I know you’ve spoken about a union model. Can you talk a little bit more about that.
Prof Nathan Schneider:
Yeah, I always grasping for the right kind of term that we need here because you know, for instance, in the United States, our most successful model for employee ownership has not been worker cooperatives, it’s been the employee stock ownership plan which is a trust-based structure, right. And I see them as linked movements for data. Again, I think there are some cases where a cooperative structure might work really well. Other cases where a trust or another kind of structure, a non-profit, a foundation, might work really well. There’s some ways in which the kind of things that we don’t even have in the United States like the Islamic concept of the walk, kind of religious foundation, might be something we need to learn from. There are all kinds of models and structures we could consider. One frame that I’ve used – the frame of shared ownership – a lot. Another frame that Sarah Horowitz who was the founder of the Freelancers Union here in the US, has been advocating as mutualism, I think they’re, I think it’s important for the purposes of building a kind of movement, a shared movement to have terms that are both broad and encompass different legal structures. We don’t want to get overly fixated on the legal structure necessarily, but we do want to be focused on the values and recognise you know- one value that I think is really important to centre is creating commons as opposed to creating commodities. Cooperatives are one way to do that, but as we develop this discussion I think it would be a mistake to think that there is a perfect legal structure. What we want is a set of goals and intentions and use whatever legal structures we need in order to get there.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
I think that’s an important point, because you started with the diversity of models of context that we might be looking at and I can imagine that participants in the sharing economy might be more interested in a model that allows them to have a voice and share in profits, where people who are interested in sort of promoting health outcomes might prefer a mutual model where they don’t have to take operational decisions. But there’s a collective aspect to what’s done with data and the role of the entity that they’re part of, so I think that’s a really important point, that we shouldn’t let the legal structures drive the output. But it should be a functional approach. Jake I’m going to come back to you because while you’ve also talked, written about, sorry, I’d love to – I’m actually looking forward to hearing Christine’s perspectives here shortly, because I know she’s thought about some of these issues in regard to sustainability. But Jake, you’re on our screen so I wanted to ask you. You’ve talked about data cooperatives but you’ve also talked about this idea of big tech is going to the top end of the market, or the big end of the market. You’ve talked about big tech as a public utility and that’s another possible mode of regulation, because of course at least in Australia when we think about the regulation of electricity and water – and I would add, I would hope increasingly, telecommunications – we put a lot of constraints on those providers in recognition of the fact that they are providing essential services. And so, we expect them to in fact curb the profit motive to be responsive to the diversity of needs of their users, and indeed to be making sure that people aren’t excluded from the market that, they are a lack, that everybody in principle should have access to these essential services in a way that’s commiserate with their means and needs. Do you think this idea of public utility has a role here, or is that just something that applies to social media? Or can we use that more broadly?
Dr Jake Goldenfein:
Alright, thanks. Well there’s a lot of things I want to comment on. Firstly, I want to remind everyone here that you should ask questions through the Q and A if things are coming up in your mind. Sorry, just organizational head on for a moment.
I’m still thinking about the existential freedom of the corporation actually, which is a very interesting idea. But I also – and it reminds me of the work of David Siepli who wrote this really great sort of history of the corporation in a piece called the wayward leviathan for the hedgehog review, and his work is typically about that. And he talks about how corporations started as these charter organisations with public purposes and then sort of devolved through this race to the bottom in corporate law towards having profit motive as their public purpose. But I do wonder you know, whether there’s like a qualitative categorical difference between organisations that encourage absent absenteeism in ownership versus active governance. And to me, a corporation participates in that. And while I think it’s very good to think about the corporation as a unity rather than a nexus of contracts, it is a hierarchy and employees are a factor of production, and I wonder how much we can recuperate from the corporate form, necessarily. And indeed, I’m sure there’s a bunch of critical scholars here at the law school who would look at the role of the corporation historically, and sort of unpack some of its features which I think would have relevance here. So, my preference is to not necessarily move away from the corporate form, but to encourage diversity as much as possible with respect to the public utility idea.
So, this is the idea that comes from people like Sabil Rahman, who have been writing about platforms as public utilities for a while. So, it’s a really complicated question and in a piece for the Jane Family Institute publication, Phenomenal Worlds, I actually argued against the public utility idea on the basis that in a lot of ways it maintains this – what I described before as pathological dimension – of the digital economy, which is the treatment of individuals as users. And I think you know, there’s such a diversity in public utility ideas and we have to remember that a lot of them come out of the way in which we deregulate what were socialised services. So, we had these socialised or nationalised telecommunications services, and then in order to fabricate a market for them we had to put in place these sort of non-discrimination requirements and things like that. So, in a lot of ways what we think of as public utility regulations are part of a neoliberal program of marketisation of social services. Snd so, falling short of socialisation, I’m iffy on public utility regulation. That said you know, the kernel of what I thought was interesting in the Australian news media bargaining code proposal, was that when it comes to regulating the relationship between content producers and platforms on the supplier side of that market, efforts to do that in Europe have relied on creating a property right, and then hoping that that property right would somehow coordinate that relationship between the platform and the news organisations. And in Australia, the ACCC was like well, there’s too much doctrinal baggage associated with trying to fabricate a copyright here, let’s just require a pseudo-rate setting arbitration mechanism. And it was getting close to rate setting that back end of the market and that was the most promising dimension of it, and that is also sort of a kind of public utility type of regulation I would think, as well. So, in that case, using the power of competition law to regulate those kinds of relations, I think could be really interesting and really useful. So, it’s a bit of a mixed bag and that’s my response.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
Well, that’s consistent with the emphasis that we’ve had on diversity, but also a beautiful lead into again, Bronwen’s work, because I know Bronwen, you thought in a very actually holistic way about hybrid legal models, is I think the term you use. Which takes us away from market parrot, which borrow from different concepts of organisational structure with a focus on the socially orientated goals and innovation. And importantly, I think you see that very linked to changing skill sets in individuals. So, I know that’s a big question for you but can you talk a little bit more about your work from the hybrid to the professional o==.
Prof Bronwen Morgan:
Oh yeah, well I could, we might want to sequence it. I wouldn’t mind just saying a little bit about – because I think there’s a difference if you look through the prism of the organisational structure versus the sort of professional biography, if you like. The set of skills and the human pathway that came into designing that and I think that part of what we can see opening up in really creative ways is more easily seen through the second, but it’s worth a comment I think. Just one more comment on the institutional diversity at the organisational level, and actually the difference between these two things was captured in a piece I wrote with Declan Koosh a while ago. One of the things that we did, and he did this particular part, was a Twitter graph. I’m probably using the wrong technical language too, but it was a graphical representation of the way that people exchange conversations and dialogue over hybrid institutions. And we did it through two ways. We did through hashtags that looked at institutional form, and then hashtags that just attract people. And it was really remarkable. Like the diagram clustered very neatly. It absolutely illustrated Nathan’s point, which is that the institutional constraints on cooperatives are maybe just as kind of monocultural as corporations within the details of design of that form. So, you had charity clusters, cooperative clusters, and corporation clusters, and this was just a sort of sample of conversations between many of the people we’ve been researching. But when you looked at it from a sort of the question of who was actually talking to who, personally, there was a mess but a creative and anarchically sort of productive mess as a diagram. And I think that follows in something I’ll say later about professional biographies. But I think it’s obviously also useful, and for transaction cost reasons, probably to standardise the options and to give people a sense of a map of that diversity. And the way I’ve often thought of it which might I think just be useful to throw into the conversation, is I actually had two categories but I think that sort of leading into this seminar has made me think there are three. Which is the two categories were structures that are more concerned with internal shared ownership and the democratisation of process within the intermediary institution. And we’ve actually been focusing on that a lot more in this conversation. And then we’ve contrasted that a little bit to trust structures which I think are in some ways as hierarchical as mainstream corporations, strongly led by investor finance, but obviously with an eye to a very different kind of beneficial purpose, and a different legal vehicle of fiduciary. Well you know, fiduciary duties come into both of those but that trust is quite hierarchical in comparison to the democratisation of the internal governance and shared ownership. But then of course, there’s a third structure which actually I think has more institutional support, especially from the financial world and more buzz around it which is the social impact outcome. A hybrid structure. And so the whole question of it’s – I actually find it I’m very excited that we’ve had a conversation where how many minutes in and we haven’t mentioned social enterprise, like i think we’re diversifying the conversation already by doing that, but there’s a lot more work done between legal and financial architects if you like, on social impact and benefit corporations I suppose would be the sort of obvious example of one of those forms. But I think we could say a lot and debate a lot about the pros and cons of focusing on outcome and impact versus internal shared ownership. And again, versus this more hierarchical public purpose through the trust.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
I was on mute, somebody had to do it. No, I think that’s fascinating because I’m interested, I did actually have social enterprise written in my notes and we also haven’t talked about trust models, you’re right, because I think that’s entirely right. The trust is the taking away of control essentially. We’ll look after things for you and that has a purpose. Obviously a very important purpose, particularly in charitable fields for example, but if our interest is in democratisation or perhaps incentivising creativity, then the trust model may not be agile enough for that. Though it may have other functions elsewhere, so I think that’s entirely right.
We’re going to turn to the panel shortly, there were two more things we kind of wanted to discuss, so I might just ask Nathan really almost as placeholders, Nathan can you give us a comment on incentivising individuals to participate in these sorts of new democratised structure and then Bronwen, if we can come back to that comment about the changing nature of the professional in this model, and we’ll just do that and then we’ll move to our panel if that’s okay. The panel, the rest of the participants.
Prof Nathan Schneider:
I mean – again, I think the question of incentive gets into a broader regulatory framework because if our goal is simply to incentivise people with market like poll, I think we’re probably going to be in trouble because a lot of the things that we’re talking about are things with longer term pay benefit, rather than shorter term kind of attractions. And so it’s yet another reason why I think it may be important in some context for there to be a kind of obligation or requirement for these kinds of structures, and I do think the public utility question is important. The question is really what layer we’re talking about. For instance, there’s a proposal now that’s starting to move forward in California to require lab platform labour companies to contract with cooperatives. So, rather than talking about data intermediaries we’re talking about labour intermediaries. So, the cooperative manages the contracts between the workers and the platforms and this still enables an open market of platforms, but it says okay, the labour intermediary layer is one where we’re going to create a kind of strong regulatory requirement, encourage some creativity, but there’s a kind of expectation there in other cases. I think there are possibilities of creating incentives where people will actually want to join these models. We’ve seen that with platform co-ops for instance, around medical data, in a couple of different types of models where actually co-ops have been able to provide better deals for people. The problem is that co-ops don’t have a strong financial – it’s access to capital, so it’s harder for them to get going than the venture-backed start-ups. And so even though actually, there would be an incentive if these companies were there for users to go to them, the problem is that they’re being totally drowned out by their investor back competitors, so they need capital access. That is in some way comparable. So, in some cases you know, the answer is really both and we need to recognise in some cases there will be market incentives that will draw people. In other cases, we need to recognise you know, in some way paternalistically or democratically, that we need to carve out certain pieces of the market for where we want intermediaries to be obligatory and where a utility framework might actually be appropriate.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
Thank you. I think there’s much to go on there but let’s move to Bronwen and then we can come back to pick up some of these ideas and questions.
Prof Bronwen Morgan:
Okay so, yeah, This is just adding I guess, that other angle on institutional diversity which is, how do you build them, what are the sort of professional skills and expertise that you need to do that, and basically I mean I could talk more links with questions but we had some interesting findings in the work I did with Declan Kush over years on this and they mirror I think Nathan’s implicitly, conveying that you know, finance is a really hard piece of this. And I would say that the lawyers are the other really challenging piece. So, we did an analysis which I won’t go into but we looked at LinkedIn biographies. It’s a really interesting way to too, because I was finding the people who were most adept at building these hybrid institutions started to – at first, I would look at their pathways and think what is that, is that a career? But you know, we ended up with typologies of really creative – you might call it like a bricolage kind of career – and the pathways that were quite vital in this respect were not lawyers or finances, they were engineers, designers, architects, computer software programmers, especially ones with a hacking sensibility and certain combinations of sustainability and arts backgrounds, and education. And those people, when you put them in teams, could design and actually design institutions really well. But ultimately, when you have to sort of formalise the institution and go out and raise capital, as Nathan says, then you are faced with law and finance being really crucial. And there we had people, I mean the interesting thing is that we had a lot of people in the space who’d come out of the market, out of large-scale corporations who one of them called themselves a corporate refugee and that was a phrase we ended up using that they really wanted to deploy their skills to more creative intent with greater public purpose. But the institutional models that they were working with were almost too ingrained to depart from. So, they actually had more struggle with the institutional creativity than the other professions that I talked about. And on the – but there were lots of them, lots coming out of the corporate world on the finance side but not struggling to find creative models. While on the other hand. there were hardly any lawyers coming out. It’s really remarkable, and the ones that were coming into this space where I’m mostly trying to stop being lawyers – which I thought was quite interesting. And I think you know, this is just a throw into the mix, there’s something important about sustainability and ecological transformation. I mean, it was the context of my research but where people were trying to restructure the fundamentals of the economic engine in a way that properly recognizes this immense sustainability and ecological challenges that we face, they were more able to design true diversity. But if they were sort of hooked onto the models that are causing the damage ecologically, and this was most strong in finance, then you would get this ill fit between the background skills and expertise. So, the corporate refugees if you like were available, but a bit lost. Whereas all these designers and architects and engineers you know, could carve a pathway, but they needed the lawyers and the finance people. So, there’s some really great work by an organisation called R3.0, which is regenerative is the third level of the R’s, and they talk about positive mavericks in different professional settings and actually develop quite concrete ways of supporting professionals who kind of self-identify as positive mavericks to work within mainstream professional trajectories to start to create the ecosystem and the tent that Nathan is talking about there, will be more attuned to public purpose, but ecological possibilities of transformation as well.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
Thanks so much, Bronwen. So, there we go. Positive mavericks. That’s an interesting contribution to the discussion because we’ve talked a lot about structures that might be available in contrast to traditional market capitalism. We’ve talked about different purposes driving those structures, but in terms of the purposes up to now, we talked mainly I think about democratisation and creativity. But you’re reminding us the sort of outward facing purposes as well. And that those sort of altruistic or existential beliefs may in fact be one of the main drivers of change. And they’re not incompatible with of course, the idea of democratisation. And so what’s important is both the structure and the individuals that can create those models by both being incentivised to participate, and being prepared to apply their creativity to creating new forms and persuading those in the traditional market to take them seriously. I’m sure we’ve got lots more to say but I’d love to bring in our expert panel that we have, I can see on the screen sitting waiting. So, I’m not sure if we need to change our screen to do that but I’m just wondering if Christine, Kim, Jenny or Julian would like to jump into the conversation at this point?
Go for it or raise your hand and I’ll ask you a question, you’re all very polite.
Prof Kim Weatherall:
okay well I’ll jump in there, I’ll be the least polite.
I actually want to follow up that last point about the kinds of skills and the kinds of people that we can get doing these things, as well as that you know, married purpose. Because one of the things that I think i’ve been involved – I’m a lawyer trained, I’ve been involved in plenty of policy discussions and a lot of these discussions do occur between sort of government and law and finance and business, and I found in those rooms people do struggle to think about how we integrate these other models, how we do things communally. The question of sort of communal ownership and communal groups barely seems to enter the room in that context. So, I’m wondering, I mean how we make that leap, how we not only sort of engender these sorts of organisations, you know, get these people together, but how we also get them into some of the rooms that are making these decisions about the legal framework. Or do we not need to?
Prof Browen Morgan:
So, I wrote a paper coming out of the future fellowship research, called where are the community enterprise lawyers. Which I suppose – with Joanne McNeill and Isabelle Bloomfield – and that was identifying that unmet need in a sense, that you’re articulating. And some of the support pathways and gaps that could be supported to do that . Because as, I guess as Nathan also mentioned earlier, these alternative forms do have, it’s not only just a regulatory framework that’s supportive but a sort of ecosystem of capacity support I think, that matters, getting those community enterprise lawyers into the rooms is another thing, a step again. I mean I’ve spent quite a lot of time on the – I think it was called the social enterprise legal models working group, and we were trying to get those rooms to happen. And the one question which is really hard, is which government department? So, we would have conversations with treasury which I mean, treasury I think was the department that led to sort of drift away from multiple you know, towards sort of more focus on the national corporation as a relative monoculture. So, it wasn’t and it was concerned about the transaction costs that Jeannie raised at the beginning. But then we were with social services for a while and that was just really a gap too far to cross because their mindset was regulatory in a very deep way. So, it’s, yeah, I suppose it’s a long game but I think it’s a long game with massive potential for young people and that’s the bit that I feel like is really important and exciting.
Prof Kim Weatherall:
Yeah, I wonder too you know, this is all making me think about all of the different grant schemes and support schemes that are around start-ups and the kinds of support that we build around those, or the government builds around those. It’s like you know, we’ll create a start-up hub and we’ll provide you with some finance people and some law people and joint venture people. Where are the people who are like, how about the design people or the ecological sustainability people, or the how to build a social purpose and bring people along with you people?
Prof Bronwen Morgan:
No, you’re absolutely right. I just remembered that I was part of a group called Sydney commons lab which last year ran an event with the city of Sydney on community wealth building, which we haven’t mentioned but it’s another interesting model going beyond institutional intermediaries to a sort of ecosystem of shared ownership. And after that the four universities – we had people from UTS, Western Sydney, UNSW, and Sydney, and we talked about trying to run a regenerative economy hackathon. And I think I’ve got a meeting about it next week but that’s exactly actually, what you’re alluding to. I don’t know if we’ll get there, because the inter-institutional turf sensitivities are not easy to translate.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
I’m going to actually move to the question that’s come up, because I actually think this is at the heart of something we all should be interested in, and reflect on. There’s a lot of discussion about creativity and democracy in precisely this field that Kim is talking about, which is the sort of techie space, dare I say woke – my children would shoot me. But the question that’s asked I think, goes to the genuineness of this issue of who’s in control of who gets to speak. The question is this, I think you can see it but I’ll read it out.
Can each of the speakers reflect on the challenge of progressive movements academia social enterprise platform cooperatives replicating existing patterns of domination, oppression, and exclusion. A lot of black, brown, queer, trans people are more than capable but will never be able to sustain careers, or I’d say even participate in the conversation that we’re occupying. And actually this was something I know Nathan had raised when we were planning this discussion. So, Nathan, can I ask you to reflect on that that question or comment at first, and then we’ll go to the other panellists.
Prof Nathan Schneider:
Yeah, thank you so much for raising that point because you know, this question of inequality is really central, particularly if we adopt a framing around digital colonialism you know, which puts what we’re talking about in the context of a longer pattern of extraction and depression, which I think is really appropriate in many contexts. One, there’s so much to explore about this question. It’s something I’m currently working on a paper on, and a broader research project around digital colonialism in the context of this stuff. But just to reflect back on the last topic around building spaces of support. An example I’ve been really grateful to be part of is start Co-op, which is a an accelerator specifically designed for cooperatives, and really focused on the digital economy in a lot of context. And we’ve succeeded you know, it wasn’t the case at first but we’ve really succeeded in making a lot of progress toward focusing our energy on marginalised founders, and a lot of that comes from just a lot of intentionality at every step of the way. Who are our mentors, who are our you know, what kinds of goals are we focusing on, who are the investors, and what do they want? Asking at every step with every stakeholder you know, what are you trying to build and how are we making sure to centre those who have been marginalised. And for instance, that produces different business models. So, one data cooperative that has gone through our accelerator, the driver’s seat cooperative, has built a business model not around you know, putting organixations out of business and demolishing for instance unionised jobs, but actually building a model around supporting unions, by connecting gig worker data and making it accessible to worker organisations. So, when we build our accelerators and support infrastructures differently to centre other kinds of people than the mainstream models have cantered, we’re also creating space for different kinds of business models with very different kinds of outcomes. So, it’s a hard challenge. It requires persistence at every step of the way, but when we do that intentionally we can really produce very different kinds of outcomes. Again, thank you for the question.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
Jake, did you want to comment there?
Dr Jake Goldenfein:
I mean Nathan’s answer was really terrific and I don’t really have too much to add beyond that, except to say that you know, this question sort of highlights my preference in intermediary design towards community-based collectives rather than sort of corporate models because this seems to me, space for genuine community purposes to drive the formation of these kinds of organisations. And in that case you know, you might get intermediaries or collectives or co-ops that are organised around principles like mutual aid and things like that which is something that is theoretically or potentially more inclusive than participation in a capitalist market economy, which is always racialised in one way or another.
So, I mean I don’t have a good answer for that question but it’s a really important one, yeah.
Prof Bronwen Morgan:
And then maybe I can just add too, I also support pretty much what Nathan says, and Jake’s comment makes me really think yes, that the typology I had before about social impact and outcome is one mode of hybrid institution drifts very quickly towards measurement and metrics as the kind of indicia of progress and those are as opposed to the participatory one of small-scale initiatives, would link to things which I think is getting away from the institutional scripts which reproduce domination on the one hand but also staying alive to the human element about who is involved and exactly – in a very sort of human identity way – who is at the table and those two things have to constantly be and collaboration with each other because if you involve a whole lot of people, that is more inclusive. But reproduce institutional scripts that are going to systemically reproduce the patterns over time, then you won’t get anywhere. So, they both have to be in the next.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
Okay, can you guys hear me because my screen has now frozen.
Christine had a question, then Julian.
Prof Christine Parker:
Yes, thanks Jeannie. And thanks to Nathan and Bronwen and also Jake for your excellent thoughtful contributions. I wanted to make a comment or a question that I think is complementary to what we were just discussing now. So, this is a completely unscientific observation, but I sit here sort of listening and this all sounds so lovely and Bronwen’s just raised the question about what some people call scaling out of these tiny little models, and I think the thing that’s coming into my head is you know, I look at Amazon and Facebook and so on, and we have these sort of American, US white alpha male cult of personality type corporate behemoths running the culture here, and we’re sort of talking about whether a cooperative model or whatever it is, that how it stacks up against a corporate legal structure. But the logic of domination, the power that we’re talking about is using the corporate legal structure. But it’s not contained by that. So, I sort of, it has made me feel very uncomfortable that we don’t really know how to contain this power and some things that were coming into my mind as you were talking was you know, we do have a lot of legal and democratic institutions that try to make corporations. If you just take that very simple model of a corporation that we’ve been assuming of a bunch of shareholders and a board and employees you know, we’ve got a lot of laws about corporate governance. And then if we expand our view, we’ve got a whole ecology of law and regulation that applies to these corporations. So, we have laws about worker health and safety, proper pay, diversity, discrimination, environmental regulations and so on. And like, if they all worked perfectly and get going in the right direction, a lot of what a corporation did would look like the kind of things that you’re talking about. But we don’t have that. We have corporate groups based in the US with layer upon layer of companies owning companies. And then going back to some individuals, somewhere lobbying US congress so that even somebody like Obama passes all these laws that help them to do worse things and treat arbitrage between countries, and so on.
So, when we try to do something – okay in Australia they’ll just threaten to leave and go somewhere else, anyway. I got very depressed basically, and so it’s a bit more of a comment but I really like the fact that Bronwen sort of brings it back to well, we need to encourage people who have the professional biography and skills to start looking for the ways that you can build something different, that actually somehow changes the structure through some form of sociological agency, legal agency, design agency, and so on. Anyway, sorry my pressure’s trailing off, but I think you know, what I’m saying, it’s more of a cry of despair and maybe you’ve got some hope there somewhere.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
I’m going to jump in first because I think Christine, I think your question and the previous question I read out, really go well together. Because of course we’re talking about these structures against them on a monolith of a quite aggressive transnational capitalist model. And I think it’s really important when we have these conversations to start with the point that I think Nathan made that we’re not saying there’s one solution, we’re presuming attention you know, funded regulators attention on antitrust and the like. And I think your point is just your comment and question have just told us precisely why we can’t throw out the regulatory model as well. And Nathan, did you want to respond first, and then Bronwen and Jake? Or shall we sit in our existential horror at the world before us.
Prof Nathan Schneider:
I’ll sit with the horror for now.
Prof Bronwen Morgan:
I do want to just say a short thing. I mean I feel like Christine just described backwards why I sort of moved into this space. It’s like I mean, I suppose you go in cycles but I felt, and still feel, all of what you described. But that is what in part has energised and motivated me to study this. And I mean maybe this seems to apple pie, but I mean there’s a sort of a consciousness shifting, and I don’t mean that in an individualistic level. I mean the collective process of engaging in these practices at a small scale is consciousness shifting, in the same way that I feel like feminism was over. And you know, the sort of small conversations around the kitchen tables and the homes of women who were frustrated, and I know that feminism you know, the achievements of feminism are massively limited at an intersectional level so I don’t want to underplay that at all, but with the greater intentionality and consciousness about the first question, about not replication domination patterns, I think there’s hope in consciousness changing practices that if they’re embodied and embodied now with data is. So, I mean embodied in the sense of sort of being brought into practice and conversation with practice and building actual institutions and not just commenting on them. I think that does change things, but then again as Jeannie says, it’s not all that we need and these positive mavericks that are working in the large institutions, I mean if they can have more conversations with the more edge work that’s being done on the niches, that’s just that all it can be done. Plus, the big protest movements I suppose, that’s the other thing I’m thinking. With the other, is that you know the big protest movements that are saying no to some of the worst, it’s linking up what saying no means with what’s saying yes could mean after that. I know that’s very, it’s not enough, but that’s all I have.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
Jake, did you want to say a word?
Dr Jake Goldenfein:
I mean not a long word, I’ll just say that you know, though the conditions that you just describe mean that the individual can really only stand in a certain number of social relations to a platform, right, you’re a user or you’re an employee or something else. And I suppose the thing that makes me think that intermediaries or organisations that sit between individuals and things like platforms are important, because it seems to me that because of the sort of superordinate power and rationality of these organisations, the individual is never really able to understand or pursue their own interests in their relationship with these organisations. And that’s to me, that’s the foundational point behind why intermediaries are important.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
Thanks Jake. Now I’m going to go back to the person, our attendee, who made the comment about oppression, who also makes the point that I have been painfully aware of as we have spoken, that we need to diversify panels going forward and allow black ground authors to write about data and colonialism and also a variety of authors to write about these issues. So, I cannot say that it’s a point well-made, and we’re all acknowledging and reflecting on that comment, so thank you. And also to our anonymous and I hope autonomous, attendee. Please, I would love it if you wanted to email us with suggestions for a panel on digital data colonialism. We can do that, or if you have suggestions of people you’d like to hear speak. I think that would be a really worthwhile contribution to this debate. So, thank you for your tolerance and patience with this panel. I’m going to move now to Julian who has the question, and then we’ll move back to some of the questions that have been raised by our attendees.
Prof Julian Thomas:
Thanks very much Jeannie. Really, just a quick comment. I suppose following these observations, just I suppose noting that you know in Australia, we also of course have a long history of associationism and a lot of stories of extraordinary innovation around the creation of organisations and institutions for precisely the sorts of reasons that Jake and others have been talking about. And I would say that many of the most inspiring examples of those come from Australia’s indigenous sector, and that when we’re thinking about the complexity of these issues the fact that the sorts of organisations we’re talking about – whether they’re sort of social enterprises or corporations of different kinds, cooperatives, we see that full diversity in Australia’s indigenous sector in the history there. And that that ecology has achieved an enormous amount so when we’re talking about how those kinds of organisations can work towards you know, the extraordinarily ambitious and important social goals such as the creation of an indigenous digital economy or digital media system in in this country, I think it will be really interesting to see how this plays out over the next decade or so. We’ve talked a little bit about how important, what the role of governance and regulation, the creation of metrics in this sort of area. And that has really driven I think, the remarkably important work of the coalition of peaks in Australia. led by Pat Turner. And I think what they are trying to do is actually reconfigure relations between the sorts of sectors we’re talking about, and government, in very inventive and important new ways which I think should give us cause for considerable optimism, as well as concern clearly, about what we see going on elsewhere in the corporate or government sector, here or anywhere else. So, I suppose there’s just a brief comment. But you know, just to point out that we’re seeing this playing out in action right now where a remarkable network of indigenous organisations is really taking control of the policy agenda in this space for that very important part of our country. Thanks.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
Thanks. Thanks so much, Julian. I think that your comment is very pertinent and also leads into a question from the audience, so I’ll ask that and then I’ll ask my panellists to comment. She says, I work in the area of – they say I work in the area of land rights and land formalism in developing countries where there is a push to use new technologies driven by donors and insisting on bottom-up approaches. This clashes with state structures since land ownership is highly regulated. This is an emerging space in this sector, and can each of the speakers suggest areas we should pay attention to given their experiences. And this sort of tension between formal legal structures about land and a push to use new technologies to control and distribute that land. I think it’s the question. Bronwen?
Prof Bronwen Morgan:
I’m just trying to, I’m wondering what to ask for – I mean the thing that comes to mind and this may not deal with what the speaker was thinking of at all, but is some of the use of blockchain to trace carbon capture within soils and then reward land managers for that soil. But I don’t know if that’s, or is it the digital titling of land which you know, New South Wales has now privatised its land titles office, and we’re about to issue fully electronic titles, apparently the first in the world to do that. So, is it I mean, if that’s just the sort of thing that’s meant, I suppose the more general capacity of digital technology of the particular participants who tend to control the resources and decision-making processes around automation, especially at scale, are often not attuned to the needs of people who are otherwise being shut out of the economic system. So there needs to be sort of inclusion and a step back. I mean I feel very concerned that even at the level of cities we seem to be almost assuming that large-scale digital platform design will be done by the private sector. So, some I suppose, some form of capacity building plus really committed procurement, social procurement that pays primary attention to historical inequities, would go somewhere towards redressing that. But the use of the digital, both scales and speeds up patterns of change in and around land ownership. So, it sounds concerning but I don’t know that I found, saying if i’m speaking to the specificities of a question like that.
Prof Nathan Schneider:
I think for me, the challenge is to recognise that the digital and land have never been separate, right. And that we need to challenge ourselves to better integrate how we think about the online and the offline to recognise that our data centres are on land, and access to certain places enables access to digital economies. And in turn, that these economies are helping to shape, as Bronwen has been saying, how we govern and imagine land. And for both, I think we need to cultivate a much more strident commons language and approach. One that is in conversation and led by indigenous communities in many cases who, where there’s a deeper understanding of the commons than in settler colonial communities, who’ve built their lives and livelihoods around eliminating commons. And at the same time, recognising ways in which digital economies have actually rekindled commons through things like open-source software and other forms of peer production. And to, in both sites, have a rejuvenation of a recognition of the possibility of common holding, common – I don’t want to say property, but common governance. And to recognise that as we work to design the kind of entrepreneurial and innovation economies of the future, that we may intentionally build them to create commons as has been so successful in so many aspects of the digital economy, but which private corporations have fought tooth and nail.
I think today about you know, that this week our government was dragged into supporting an exemption on the patents for the Covid vaccines, right. That the framework of focusing on a IP driven regime for the vaccines was driven by the Gates foundation, Bill Gates made his money actively fighting open source software and free software, even despite the fact that now his company has embraced those methodologies in pretty remarkable ways. All this is to say that we need to recognise opportunity at every turn to build commons rather than private wealth.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
Thanks. And Jake, did you want to comment there? Yeah, no I would just add that I mean, that’s a really sensible and sort of beautiful sentiment, and that you know, when you’re using cadastral systems to abstract land into rights and then abstract those rights into more property rights, you have to just be wary of the reality that a lot of that’s used for financialisaton and other things that are not necessarily going to benefit the people who have used the land beforehand. And so that’s, I mean, the question was what do you pay attention to when you’re developing digital systems for land management. I say well, that strikes me as the thing that you need to pay attention to.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
Thanks. Thanks, Jake. And Serena comments that asking I think also, should we be asking communities who are digitally illiterate to be co-producers, which I think is a pertinent comment and perhaps shows we’re asking, wouldn’t we move into those communities? We’re asking the wrong questions.
I have a comment here, well first of all Jeni did you have a comment? You’ve actually been typing rapidly. Did you want to just comment with some of the resources that you’ve shared for us?
Participant 1:
Yeah. So, hi. Thank you first of all, the speakers, this has been a really interesting conversation, especially I think once the panellists and the audiences come in, and I think it’s taken a really interesting critical – especially critical turn, that is an important conversation we need to have. I don’t have personal thoughts so much to add, but I have been sharing a few resources through the chat that pertain to this discussion of structural inequality, intersectional inequality and data economies, in particular data capitalism. One of the pieces that I shared was trustee, Macmillan Codem who is a critical race theorist and technology theorist who’s written about this intersection of platform capitalism and racism, and then sort of on the more practical side, I’ve shared a link to data for black lives which is sort of a ground up, pretty widely known organisation that trains people living in affected communities – mostly people of colour – in data science, so that they can sort of bolster autonomy and ownership from within. And I guess, so I don’t have so much to add, so much as my appreciation for their works and their intersection with what we’re talking about here. And these are in particular works by scholars and activists of colour which I think speaks to some of the issues and challenges that we’ve been confronting here today.
Prof Jeannie Patterson:
Thanks so much Jeni. And we will share those resources with the recording which you’ll be able to find on the website for the Centre of Excellence. I think that we are coming to an end, so it’s probably appropriate to thank our speakers and I’m going to hand over to Jake in just a second, just a few words. But I just wanted to note for those of you can see the Q and A, Fleur has made a comment, they’ve asked is hope essential? And maybe there’s political reasons to try and bracket the necessity of hope as commonly articulated and said, instead pro possibilities associated with modes of thought, action, feeling, often derided as forms of stuckness or destructiveness, which I think very well summarises some of this discussion. So thank you Fleur. I now hand over to Jake to wind things up and tell us what’s coming next.
Dr Jake Goldenfein:
Alright, thank you so much. Thank you so much to everyone, to all the panellists and to the audience who made really good questions and important points with respect to the topic that we’ve been discussing, but also our own organisational thinking around it. And I especially want to thank Bronwen and Nathan. This has been really fascinating, interesting, and I think quite a unique take on something that’s been discussed relatively broadly. And I think that your approaches really have expanded the ways that we can think about this and the things that we can attend to where in now, in our future thinking, so thank you so much again.
Just before we go, I just want to tell everyone about the fourth and final seminar in this series that will be happening on Thursday the 20th of May. The theme for that is Governance, Data for Governance. And our speakers include professor Karen Yeung from the university of Birmingham. We’ll be talking about the use of data in the public sector and an idea that she calls new public analytics. And Peter Lucas Jones who is from Tariku Media and Māori television, talking about the Māori, natural language translation program that he stewarded in New Zealand. So, hopefully I will see you all there. I see that the registration link has just been put into the chat so I’ll give you a second before we close the seminar for you to just click on that and bring up the web site for the registration. But thank you everyone so much, and we’ll see you next time. Thank you.