Description
Europe’s social economy spans a diverse range of businesses and initiatives, including cooperatives, associations and social enterprises. All embrace the primacy of people and the environment over profit, reinvestment towards the collective interest, and participatory and democratic governance. Data-driven social economy actors—such as health data cooperatives, platform cooperatives—recognize that access to and reuse of data can unlock new opportunities. For these organizations, data is integral to their operations. However, there is still much ambiguity around which data is useful, how it can be shared and reused, and how partnerships around data can be fostered. Both data-centric organizations and more traditional social economy organisations recognize the need to strengthen data collection, usage, and storage within the broader ecosystem.
How do we as a society use data for social objectives? How can social economy actors benefit from sharing data? And what are the conditions that are important in doing so? Working closely with the European Commission (Directorate General GROW) and committee of social economy actors, Commons Network and Waag Futurelab joined forces to develop a Code of Conduct. Through a participatory process of co-design and research the code was collaboratively developed. On the occasion of the launch of the EU Code of Conduct for Data Sharing in the Social Economy, Sophie, Dwayne, Ayoub, and Mai went to Brussels last week to present the code at the European Commission.
