Governance of Communal Data Sharing
by Chih-hsing Ho and Tyng-Ruey Chuang

[Note: This article is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). It appears as Chapter 12 in the book Good Data edited by Angela Daly, S. Kate Devitt and Monique Mann. The book is published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, in January 2019. This version corrects a few typos in the book chapter.

Production note: The XHTML file of the chapter was extracted from the book's epub format. Typos in the file were fixed (and this note added). The result was imported into LibreOffice to produce a PDF file.]

... This article proposes theoretical and computational approaches to the analysis of an alternative data sharing model, which is based on community participation in decision making and self-governance. When we talk about 'community', we use this term in a non-conventional way. We try not to see community as a fixed group or a predefined collective identity. Rather, it refers to a set of ongoing engagement and practices of group making.6 In other words, it is this dynamic process of community making - acts of mutual support, negotiation and experimentation, as David Bollier has argued - that are needed to build innovative systems to manage shared resources. Along with these curiosities, we consider several examples, such as user data cooperatives and collaborative data projects, to further explore how a community is formed and how the governance of communal data sharing is being established. We will then develop frameworks for the governance of communal data sharing by combining common pool resource management and a socio-legal perspective on the commons. ...