Data stewardship has emerged as a cornerstone of responsible data and AI innovation. To support this growing field, The GovLab and The Data Tank have been offering executive education programs across Europe, the U.S., and online—equipping a global network of leaders to re-use data responsibly and with purpose. 

As part of this mission, the Data Stewardship Trends to Watch series offers a regular pulse on the latest developments in data governance and stewardship. 

In the April 2025 edition, Stefaan Verhulst, lead of the Data Stewards Executive Courses, shared updates on:

• The increasing “data winter”;

• The emergence of a 4th Wave of Open Data;

• The importance of establishing a social license for data re-use; 

• The global state of data governance;

• New data stewardship tools and resources;

• Use cases of data stewardship

Check out the recording of this event on The GovLab’s YouTube channel. The following resources were discussed during the session:

The Increasing “Data Winter”:

• Global Population Data Crisis

• AI Crawler Wars and the Closed Web

• Government Data Disappearing

• Trump Admin Plans to Cut Team Responsible for Critical Atomic Measurement Data

• Panels giving scientific advice to Census Bureau disbanded by Trump administration

• The Measure of Progress: Counting what really matters

• Beyond Answers Presented by AI: Unlocking Innovation and Problem Solving Through A New Science of Questions

The Emergence of a Fourth Wave of Open Data:

• Blueprint for Data Commons in AI

• Moving Towards the FAIR-R principles: Advancing AI-Ready Data

• Generative AI for Data Stewardship

• Reimaging data for Open Source AI: a call to action

• Best Practices for Open Data and AI

The Importance of Establishing a Social License for Data Re-Use:

• Researching data discomfort: the case of Statistics, Norway’s quest for billing data

• Legal Frictions for Data Openness

• The National Data Library and public benefit 

• The case for local and regional public engagement in governing AI 

The Global State of Data Governance:

• Towards a set of Universal data principles

• Economic Implications of Data Regulation

• It’s just distributed computing: Rethinking AI governance

New Data Stewardship Tools and Resources:

• Data Innovation Toolkit

• A Roadmap to Accessing Mobile Network Data for Statistics

Use Cases of Data Stewardship

• Using human mobility data to quantify experienced urban inequalities

• Big data for decision-making in public transport management: A comparison of different data sources

• SEPA launch innovative Satellite Emergency Mapping Service to boost environmental crisis response

• Space4Cities: Using Data for Sustainable Urban Development