Addressing the societal challenges of the 21st century, such as the climate crisis and pandemics, requires governments to make evidence-based decisions using the best available data. The problem, however, is that, due to the growing datafication and platformization, businesses now hold more relevant data than governments that can be valuable for tackling societal challenges. Accessing these data comes with legal, political-economic and other challenges, but governments in the EU have started taking regulatory and non-regulatory steps to encourage and/or compel businesses to share data with the governments when public interest is at stake. This special track invites submissions which explore the topic of unlocking private sector data for public interest purposes in the EU context. The EU has recently adopted a suite of measures to stimulate data sharing and foster data economy and innovation. At national, and most importantly, local levels of government, there is much experimentation with new forms of collaboration with the private sector on data innovation projects in view of public interest. Although such partnerships are welcomed by both sides, more unanswered questions remain about the shifting roles of government and business in the data ecosystem, the data monetization trends, the interplay among the different data access avenues, responsible and just data governance models, the trustworthiness and effectiveness of the proposed data governance models, the underlying values shaping these processes of datafication, as well as those shaping the effectiveness of data governance models, and the effectiveness of mandatory data access rules.

Submissions to this track can cover the following topics (but are not limited to them):

• Business-to-government data sharing
• New data access rules introduced by the EU
• Urban data platforms and public-private collaboration
• Data collaboratives, partnerships, donorship initiatives
• Instruments for mandatory data sharing (e.g. data sovereignty clauses, data autonomy)
• Data obligations for digital product passports
• Role of data spaces for unlocking business data
• Novel approaches to data protection and privacy, particularly taking into account collective risks and rights
• Responsible sourcing of training data for artificial intelligence
• Mitigation mechanisms of bias and discrimination, fostering citizen engagement and algorithmic justice