‘If only we had access to data for…’: Exploring Data Stewardship and collaboration for…
‘If only we had access to data for…’: Exploring Data Stewardship and collaboration for philanthropic data innovation
Paulina Behluli , The Data Tank | A pre-conferecne workshop in Bologna
In recent years, Europe — the informally known global digital regulator, has pushed forward many digital and data strategies trying to address a rapidly changing environment. However, as stated in our policy brief, the European Data Strategy has yet to achieve a dual imperative: protect people from extractive and opaque data practices, and unlock data in a way that systematically advances societal goals. At The Data Tank (TDT), we think that addressing this challenge requires a collaborative approach involving all stakeholders.
As part of a series of events in Europe, The Data Tank organised a workshop in Bologna in collaboration with Fondazione Compagnia Di San Paolo. The workshop was organised in the context of the Csv,Conf,v9 conference, an international community event on open data.
The workshop in Bologna centered around the topic of data for philanthropies and gathered representatives across philanthropic organisations, civil society, and academia. We kicked off by introducing our 2025–2028 strategy and recent policy brief, which makes five recommendations for Europe’s next steps for its data and digital strategy. One of our recommendations includes the importance of data stewardship, the human infrastructure needed to make these data reuse ecosystems work. Data stewards are strategic data leaders across sectors that enable access to data in a systematic, sustainable, and responsible way. At TDT, we have trained over 180 global data stewards and created a community of practitioners that goes beyond borders and data infrastructures. We highlighted three key data stewardship principles: collaboration, protection, and action. Data stewards work with others to unlock the value of data by reusing it across sectors and industries and make sure that the data is ethically managed and protected, all while acting in proactively identifying partners who can do so. There are several use-cases on how philanthropies around the world have unlocked the value of data. We shared, for example, The King Baudouin Foundation’s Social Profit DATATrust, and Patrick J. McGovern’s Grant Guardian, to name a few. We also highlighted other important initiatives, such as the Data4Philanthropy. Such initiatives do not only provide food for thought on how data could be incorporated into the grant making cycle, but also bring together important actors around the ‘virtual table’.
Participants were also able to hear from Hilel Dridi, Data Program Manager at Compagnia di San Paolo, who took the stage and presented the data strategy of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo 2023–2030. Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo is one of the very few European philanthropies that have published a data strategy.__ A key point made by Hilel resonates with a key recommendation in The Data Tank’s policy brief, which is the need to prioritise high impact and tangible purposes when reusing data for the public interest. Fondazione Compagnia has already started doing their part on focusing their data-related investments on urgent and tangible societal challenges, paving the way for other philanthropies to follow.
The workshop was an opportunity for participants to share the challenges faced in relation to reusing data for the common good, as well as potential ways forward.
The challenges discussed are not unheard of in the data space, showing they persist in a context of rapid societal and technological change. They include: balancing privacy and security with data access and sharing, overcoming cost barriers associated with governance and total costs of ownership, balancing innovation and regulation, building trust and data literacy, and inability to keep up with the speed of technological evolution. Participants also highlighted a lack of multi-level coordination and siloed operations related to the high costs of governance.
The participants then turned to potential solutions to these challenges in the philanthropic and civil society sectors. Data standards, asking good research questions, creating consortia (including philanthropies, civil society, and librarians to these consortia), and finding innovative ways of sharing synthetic data instead of raw data to not breach any privacy concerns were some of the recommended approaches. Beyond these solutions, participants also highlighted the need for more investment on internal data literacy to better understand the potential of data reuse. Yet, the high cost of infrastructure (human and technological) remained a barrier towards achieving such ambitions.
The insights from this workshop reflected TDT’s diagnosis of the current state of affairs in data reuse and the steps outlined in our strategy in many ways. Even though there are many initiatives geared towards building the supply-side of data and technology, there is a need for more investment to cover the needs for demand, governance, and human infrastructure.
This workshop was organised as part of TDT’s 2025 events series. Stay tuned for more insights from Berlin and Brussels!