Data for Policy’s inaugural report, co-authored by Zeynep Engin (Data for Policy CIC), Emily Gardner (Data for Policy CIC), Andrew Hyde (Cambridge University Press), Stefaan Verhulst (The GovLab) and Jon Crowcroft (University of Cambridge) is published by the open-access journal Data & Policy (Cambridge University Press). The report, entitled “Unleashing collective intelligence for public decision-making: the Data for Policy community” shows how Data for Policy has emerged as a prominent global community promoting interdisciplinary research and cross-sector collaborations in the realm of data-driven innovation for governance and policymaking since its establishment in 2014.
This inaugural report demonstrates the progressive development of the Data for Policy global community of interest, a diverse group of stakeholders dedicated to exploring the possibilities and implications of data science, AI, and related technologies in governance and policymaking. It chronicles the journey of our community over the last decade and maps how the ecosystem of actors and topics related to data and policy have evolved. It demonstrates how the seven Data for Policy conferences (2015 – 2022) have played a pivotal role in stimulating relevant research and facilitating crucial discussions, underlining the importance of harnessing collective intelligence in studying and informing the future of data and AI governance.
The report also explains our perspective on data for policy as a distinct field of research, exploring the intersection between increasingly complex governance processes and the growing abundance of data, computational power, and analytical methods, and introduces a six-area framework designed to map the vast landscape of this research. The framework is based on extensive consultations with key stakeholders involved in the international committees of the annual Data for Policy conference series and Data & Policy. By presenting this inclusive framework, along with the guiding principles and outlook for the community, this report serves as a vital foundation for continued research and innovation in the field of data for policy.
The rapid adoption of digital technologies, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and recent advances in large-language models such as Chat-GPT, has brought about profound changes in our daily lives, work, and social interactions. The pace of this transformation has created an urgent need for informed debates and rigorous research across sectors and stakeholders with the advent of algorithmic decision-making and advanced language models like ChatGPT. The eighth Data for Policy conference ‘Trustworthy Governance with AI?’, to be held 9 – 11 July at Imperial College, London, provides a timely opportunity for further global dialogue and debate in this key area.
The open access report, complete with useful figures is available at Data & Policy.