Data is Destiny: Commercial Use, Benefit-Sharing & Sustainability
In our third Data Is Destiny session, we designed a governance body for community data, working through its composition, its decision-making, and how much authority communities themselves hold within it. We stress-tested that structure against real violation scenarios, and costed what it would take to run and sustain it. The result was a governance structure built with legal practitioners, governance design experts, policymakers working on data sovereignty, and community representatives in the room.
This fourth and final session picks up where August left off. We now have a consent framework, a data classification schema, and a governance body with real enforcement behind it. One question has been building underneath all three, and it's the hardest one: where does commercial use that sustains the commons end, and where does extraction begin? And when there's value to share, how does it actually flow back to the communities generating the data?
This session addresses that fault line directly.
This session is for AI companies and developers, including frontier lab representatives, social enterprise leaders, sustainability model experts, funders, benefit-sharing practitioners, and community representatives.
Together, we'll draw the line on commercial use, permitted, restricted, and prohibited, against real use-case scenarios, design a benefit-sharing framework covering its forms, distribution, and safeguards, and build the sustainability model that funds both the commons and the governance body we just spent a session designing.
This is the fourth and final workshop in the Data Is Destiny series. Everything from the series feeds into a governance framework for Ushahidi's data commons, to be co-authored with Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI and presented at an in-person launch in Oxford on 6 November 2026, to policymakers, funders, and academics.
Pre-reads:
Governance framework document: https://bit.ly/UshEthicalDataGovernanceFramework
Workshop Reports from sessions 1&2: https://bit.ly/UshahidiLicensingWorkshopReports
Workshop 3's structured working document: https://bit.ly/UshahidiLicensingWorkshop3