Welcome to Big Data Governance Standards. Advancing Generosity and Justice in an Era of Big Data.
Big Data Governance Standards’ (BDGS) initiative provides background, analysis and insight into the emerging challenges for governing both the opportunities and the dangers of Big Data within democracies. A key question of this work is: Are democratic institutions such as in American democracy, strong, resilient and fair enough to govern Big Data. Some indicators would say no (or not yet).
BDGS initiative takes as our unique contribution to foreground the opportunities and dangers of Big Data for the lives and well-being of living individuals, human, animal…all living individuals.
We intend this work to develop standards and laws of governance that will value and give voice to the lives of individuals from the very beginning of this work.
5 Critical things you need to know about Big Data
1. Data is a new form of wealth in the world. Currently knowledge-information-data captured from and about living individuals (including health information) is being bought and sold and generating vast revenues without the living individuals from whom the data was captured or extracted receiving any of those revenues. This results in a transfer of wealth from living individuals to organizations, largely corporations—for profit and not or non profit—or governments, and in ways that are not democratically governed. Much more on this in coming posts.
2. This transfer of wealth is taking place without regard for moderate and low income people and children who most often need more revenues and while many are struggling for an increase in their already low wages.
3. Today individuals have no standing in the creation of these systems that is empowering this transfer of wealth.
4. A good bit of the current governance of these systems is being handled through public-private partnerships that exhibit corrupt and opaque practices themselves.
5. These practices are compounding the challenges of economic inequality and the growing climate change in our world. More underpinning on this in posts to come.
The BDGS approach is to take small, steady bites of the Big Data Governance subject so that as this work continues a body of knowledge will be compounded that can inform all of us.
To be sure our subject is called “Big” for a reason.
Still there are principles, assumptions and insights that can be called out from the beginning to bring clarity and context to the discussion.
We take as our unique mission the duty to foreground the opportunities and dangers for living individuals, natural persons, citizens — to identify and describe what is being left out of the discussion to date.
Our aspiration is to speak in as straightforward and transparent a manner as we can, while demystifying the underlying technologies.
Ethical concerns and questions will be included and discussed from the beginning. They are critical and integral (essential or necessary for completeness).
The scope of this Big Data Governance Standards work will include the areas of
- Health, well-being, privacy and increased capability of living individuals, as individuals and in living communities
- Identity of living Individuals, as individuals and in living communities
- Identity of devices and machines
- Internet of Things (IOT)
- Cyber-physical Systems
- Artificial Intelligence
New subjects and aspects will surely emerge. Some say it will take a hundred years to get a grasp of the changes Big Data will render. My perspective is that we must begin now.
To START
We will begin with the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)* working group on Big Data entitled the NIST Big Data Public Working Group (NBDPWG) and the Identity Ecosystem Steering Group (IDESG).
Among the ambitions of the NIST Big Data Public Working Group (NBDPWG) is to design and engineer a way for machines and devices to interact with each other while remaining agnostic of the underlying stakeholders, living individuals and their interests. This will take some explaining which we will hold off on for just now.
Tragically this work on Big Data has begun while living individuals are not at table but more explicitly have been erased and excluded from the table. Much more on this in future posts.
Many more voices and perspectives will be needed over the coming years. A call for participation and contributions is coming.
Ann Racuya-Robbins, Editor-at-Large for World Knowledge Bank® Broadcasting Network (WKBBN), Big Data Governance Standards and the World Knowledge Bank®
Racuya-Robbins has over seven years of hands on experience in working with NIST and standards development including three years working in the Identity Ecosystem Steering Group and over three years and counting in the Big Data Public Working Group. She served as a NIST guest researcher and member of INC ITS WG9 Big Data Working Group. Recently she joined the IEEE Big Data Governance Metadata Management working group.