Community Call: Data Policy Jam

​Hello Everyone! How much time have you spent thinking about your data policies recently? As a small project - what are the ways you’re respecting users rights while also trying to make data open? Maybe you’ve spent a lot of time on this and maybe… no time at all. Either way, that’s what we’re going to be digging into in this week’s community call!

​Context: We’ve been working with the #deliberative-tools-and-interop cohort to figure out how we might be able to share data and learn from each other’s work. And in the process we discovered that most small tools don’t have polices in place that respect user’s agency. This would mean that while we can ‘map’ our data to each other, sharing data without these agreements might end up removing or minimizing the autonomy of the users in the process.

​What we’re doing about it: We’re bringing in several researchers and legal professionals to help us build out a list of principles on which we can build a community agreement around how we preserve user sovereignty as well as the necessary legal documents like a terms of service or privacy policy for deliberative tools. We hope that eventually this can grow into a template that can help make it clear how small tools can preserve user autonomy and meet legal requirements for shared data. Shout out to @Seth Frey @Nathan Schneider @Ellie Rennie @Jake Hirsch-Allen @Zane Witherspoon, Joseph Gubbels, and @Matthew Victor for providing expertise in this discussion!We hope you’ll join us to let us know how you’ve been thinking about issues of data compliance within your own projects so we can understand what set of policies we might need to build out!

​See you soon!