Data as Development Workshop

Program

(please note speakers subject to change)

8:00AM - 8:30AM  Registration and Welcome Breakfast

8:30AM - 9:00AM  Opening Remarks 
Yasodara Córdova and Lorrayne Porciuncula

9:00AM - 10:30AM  Panel 1: Data Typologies

For developing countries, strategic areas where non-personal data is collected, such as those related, for example, to infrastructure and agriculture, are crucial to achieving their public policy objectives of development and sustainability. To contemplate these objectives, one option is to tailor new data markets by promoting innovative regulations that prioritize ownership, local business creation, data sharing, and re-use, in order to unlock the opportunities of data for their own private and public sectors. This panel will focus on these issues, prioritizing the experiences of entrepreneurs who are currently engaged in developing new data markets for a conversation on their experiences in the areas of ​agriculture, sustainability, energy, transportation and decentralized applications (running on top of mesh networks). The panel will also focus on how better data typologies can be created based on the practical considerations raised by the panelists.

Moderator & Chair: Yasodara Córdova, Senior Fellow, digital HKS, Harvard Kennedy School

• Bruno de Medeiros,  Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University
• Sabelo Mhlambi, Technology & Human Rights Fellow, Carr Center, Harvard Kennedy School
• Christian Reimsbach Kounatze,  Information Economist / Policy Analyst, OECD (virtually)

10:30AM - 10:45AM  Coffee Break

10:45AM - 12:15PM  Panel Two: Collaborative Data Models for Developing Countries

How to remodel our vision of data? Drawing on the results of our first workshop on this topic, we know that the effective regulation of data should push for data access and the use and re-use of data, avoiding silos and predatory models that facilitate data extraction as an end. In this new construct, data should become an enabler of new models of cooperative growth in these countries. This session will push the boundaries of existing debates on this question and explore how we can design and facilitate more collaborative data models in developing countries? The interventions will promote a discussion of new ideas, approaches, and examples in this highly complex, but a necessary area of policy.

Chair & Moderation: Juan Ortiz Freuler, Web Foundation

• Paola Villarreal, Coordinator of Data Science for the National Advisory Board for Science and Technology, Mexico
• Wallace Trenholm, Founder, CEO, Sightline Innovation Inc.

12:15PM - 1:15PM  Lunch

1:15PM - 2:45PM  Panel Three: Enabling Comprehensive Data Policy for Development

Decentralizing data ownership, or opening government data, could expand the potential uses of data and development of new business models, from small to big businesses, and advance multiple public policies objectives. However, the institutional capability to control and the perception of what privacy entails, for example, differs from country to country. For government, ensuring the necessary interoperability and quality of data (e..g standardized and structured) can be challenging. Meanwhile, private actors are advancing in reducing the costs of having data collected, classified and monetized. In this respect, what should the role of governments be to make the most of the opportunities of the digital transformation of the economy and society? How to elaborate principles that enable a comprehensive data policy implementation for developing countries?

Chair & Moderation: Lorrayne Porciuncula, Economist, OECD, and Affiliate, Berkman Klein Center

• Jeni Tennison, Chief Executive Officer, Open Data Institute (virtually)
• David Eaves,  Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School
• Fernando Kleiman, PhD candidate, Delft University of Technology

2:45PM - 3:00PM  Coffee Break

3:00PM - 4:30PM  Panel Four: Global Agreements & Local Interests

A number of global rules and agreements enable interoperability, but can also limit the potential of national governments and groups to devise solutions that promote local interests. A case in point is negotiations taking place in the context of the WTO or in regional agreements such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and also the geopolitical forces of exerted by the US, EU and China. As developing countries struggle for space to design their own digital visions, the economic and political reality of the global economy is changing. This final session will tackle the questions on how to balance this forces and, particularly, on how to remodel our vision of data for developing countries? Can technology solutions promote the protection of local interests in this context? Can cooperation among developing countries be harnessed to preserve their autonomy and foster their development?

Chair & Moderator: Mariel García-Montes, Research Assistant, MIT Center for Civic Media

• Rachel Han, D​irector,  @OpenDataSoft, and Fellow, Berkman Klein Center
• Sriganesh Lokanathan, Team Leader, Big Data Research, LIRNEAsia
• Susan Ariel Aaronson,  Research Professor, and Director, Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub at George Washington University (GWU)

4:30PM -  5:30PM  Roundtable: Next steps towards a notion of data as development?

This roundtable will bring together experts to discuss how to think concrete steps for the future. How will we think the next steps towards an idea of data as development? What are other issues that need to be considered, such as standards, investment and market developments for data? How will developing countries identify priorities for development strategies that take into account data in its center?

Moderated by:

• Yasodara Córdova, Senior Fellow, digital HKS, Harvard Kennedy School
• Lorrayne Porciuncula, Economist, OECD, and Affiliate, Berkman Klein Center

5:30PM - 5:45PM  Closing Remarks

6:00PM - 8:00PM  Reception (to follow conclusion of program)

Co-organizers

Yasodara Córdova

Yasodara Córdova is a Senior Fellow at the Digital Kennedy School, a Belfer Center project, at Harvard and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center. Her research comprises Citizenship, Digital Democracy, and Participation. She is an activist, software developer, and Industrial Designer that is part of several Civil Society organizations, as she is on the Director’s board of the Ciudadania Inteligente, and is a former Director of the “Serenata de Amor Operation”, an anti-corruption A.I. platform that uses machine learning and open data to facilitate social control of the public representatives in Brazil. Yasodara was invited to present this successful project in the Brazilian Congress in 2017. She was selected as a Fellow of the Berkman Klein Center in 2016, but before that, Yasodara worked as a Web Specialist at the World Wide Web Consortium, as the chair of the Data on the Web Working Group.

For more than eight years, working closely with several ministries in Brazil and the Brazilian presidency, she developed platforms for citizen participation as a technical innovation consultant for the United Nations. Earlier, she worked with data visualization and was awarded twice the biggest Brazilian prize in Journalism and Human Rights, the Vladimir Herzog Award. She collaborated with the Coding Rights, an awarded Brazilian think-tank, part of the Privacy International Network. In the same way, she worked with many organizations, like the InternetLab, Tactical Tech Collective, Avaaz, in several roles. She is one of the first female Hackerspace founders in Brazil and was part of the advisory board of the Open Knowledge Foundation Brazil until 2017.

Lorrayne Porciuncula

Lorrayne Porciuncula is an Economist/ Policy Analyst on Communications Infrastructure and Services at the Digital Economy and Policy Division (STI/CDEP) in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Her work is focused on telecommunications regulation and policy, including issues related to bridging rural digital divides, connecting SMEs, convergence, and digitalization of the economy and society. Previous to her current position, Lorrayne worked, at the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development (ITU).

She holds a Master degree on Development Economics from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Switzerland, and an International Relations bachelor degree from the University of Brasilia, Brazil. Lorrayne is currently an affiliate at Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. At the Center, she will be working on issues related to Internet Health, Data Governance Fairness, Infrastructure Regulation, and the relationship between the Internet and economic growth.

Pre-reading

• AI & the Need for Data Fairness in the Global South
• Can Data Become Part of a Development Strategy?
• Big Data, Meager returns? (post-workshop report)