Kicking-off the 2026 Data Stewardship Trends to Watch

The Data Tank and The GovLab, in a call hosted by Stefaan Verhulst, organized the first Data Stewardship Trends to Watch kick-off session for 2026. 

The Trends to Watch series consists of bi-monthly exchanges organized exclusively for our global Data Stewards alumni. These sessions feature curated trends designed to provide an overview of the rapidly evolving data stewardship landscape. 

The February session was divided into three main categories: 

1. Trends indicating leverage and resistance, reflecting growing concerns around the extraction of open data to train large language models (LLMs), the misuse of personal and sensitive data, and emerging forms of resistance that call for greater data resilience. 

2. Trends highlighting innovations in data governance, with a focus on new approaches, tools, and practices. 

3. Internal updates from both organizing teams.

Check out a recording of the full conversation here. The following resources were discussed during the session:

Leverage and Resistance: 

New Privacy Enhancing and Standardization Efforts: 

• MyTerms is a new IEEE standard, formally called IEEE 7012-2025 Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms.

• The Better Deal for Data (BD4D) is a lightweight data governance standard for the social sector. 

New Standards Development: 

• Recommendations for upgrading the nature data value chain for market participants represent the culmination of four years of research and pilot testing about how best to respond to the nature data challenges identified by companies and financial institutions around the world.  

New Licensing Forms: 

• Really Simple Licensing (RSL) for AI represents an open content licensing standard for the AI-first Internet. 

New Payment Mechanisms: 

• Where CC Stands on Pay-to-Crawl is a publication by Creative Commons on pay-to-crawl efforts and proposed responsible principles on the matter. 

Institutional Responses: 

• Data unions: people-powered data control is a publication by Nesta on data unions. 

Crowdsourced Data: 

• We Built a Public Record of ICE Because They Refuse to Keep One - a crowdsourced data project on activities, and incidents carried out by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

• Deportation Data Project collects and posts public, anonymized U.S. government immigration enforcement datasets. We expect these datasets to be used by journalists, researchers, lawyers, and policymakers.

Social License and Data Ethics Board: 

• Enabling ICE: The Moral Obligations of Data Sharing is a publication that argues that at times when authorities such as ICE request data access from big tech companies that exposes ethical tensions in data sharing that cannot be ignored. 

Innovations in Data Governance: 

 AI Ready Data Certifications: 

• Global waste sector dataset (1990–2050): scenario-based projections of generation, emissions, and socioeconomic drivers which is a Frontiers FAIR² certification (FAIR + AI Ready) incorporating unique identifiers, metadata, API access, structured for machine learning. Global waste sector dataset is an example of this. 

Agentic Stewardship: 

• AI-Ready Data: A Paradigm Shift From Traditional Data Governance To Agent-Driven Intelligent Enablement is a piece that outlines AI-Ready Data characteristics that define the future. 

Vibecoding: 

• Software is becoming something you speak into existence is a piece covering the recent developments of coding as a function of LLMs.

• But at the same time, Vibe Coding Kills Open Source, is another piece that studies the equilibrium effects of vibe coding on the open source software ecosystem, as in vibe coding the AI agent builds software by selecting and assembling open-source software, often without users directly reading documentation, reporting bugs, or otherwise engaging with maintainers.

Updates: Recent Updates and Publications

 

• Two new pieces on strategic data stewardship and AI Governance: The Case for Strategic Data Stewardship Re-imagining Data Governance to Make Responsible Data Re-use Possible and Toward AI Governance That Works: Focusing on all the Building Blocks of AI and Its Impacts. 

• Finally, the session was wrapped with two new blogs from our team: Recent Uses of Non-Traditional Data in the Public Interest: September-December 2025 and Looking Back to the Future: What’s Next for Data & AI in 2026?
  

Interested to learn more about data stewardship trends? Sign up for the Data Stewards Network mailing at this link.  Or contact datastewards@thegovlab.org to learn more.