Data is Destiny: Who gets to Shape it?
A Workshop on Ethical Licensing for Community-Generated Data in the Age of AI
As Artificial Intelligence continues to proliferate across sectors, with increasing demand for training data, a harder question is emerging: how do we ensure community-generated data improves representation without enabling extraction or harm? For nearly two decades, Ushahidi has worked from the belief that lived experience is expertise, enabling communities to share real-time data across elections, crises, governance, and climate response. But the assumptions that underpinned the open data movement no longer hold.
As part of the Accelerator Fellowship Programme at the Institute for Ethics in AI, University of Oxford, and with appreciation for their support, Ushahidi is convening a small working session on the sidelines of the Skoll World Forum 2026 to explore what a responsible data commons could look like in practice, one that centers consent, agency, and equitable value-sharing. Together, we’ll map stakeholders, stress-test emerging licensing approaches, and co-design principles grounded in a real-world use case.