Data is Destiny: Consent, Classification & Community Voice
In April 2026, Ushahidi convened the first Data Is Destiny workshop at the University of Oxford, where five stakeholder groups stress-tested the licensing models currently used to govern community data. The signal from that room was clear: none of the existing models adequately protect community interests — including approaches we ourselves have relied on for years.
This second session picks up where Oxford left off. It asks:
— What meaningful consent actually looks like when the community giving it is vulnerable and the environment is low-connectivity.
— Whether classifying data by type and sensitivity changes the shape of that answer.
— What communities themselves recognise as protection, rather than what protection is assumed to look like on their behalf.
This session is for community intermediaries, deployment partners, data protection practitioners, consent UX researchers, and community representatives, particularly from diverse geographic contexts.
Together, we'll design consent processes for different deployment contexts, develop a data classification schema, and ground the emerging direction in what communities need rather than what the literature assumes.
This is the second of four workshops working toward a draft governance framework for Ushahidi's data commons — with questions and learnings we expect to be useful to anyone handling community-generated data. The work will be co-authored with Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI and published as a white paper in October 2026.
To get the most out of the session, here are two short pre-reads:
Workshop 1 report (from our April session)
Living framework document, showing what's been surfaced so far