Trustworthy Data Stewardship Guidebook
The Trustworthy Data Stewardship Guidebook has been created to help organisations assess, build and demonstrate both their trust and their trustworthiness, as part of our Innovate UK-funded project ‘R&D: Building trust through audit and certification’. Many of the tools and resources within the guidebook are still in the prototype stage.
By operating in a trustworthy way, organisations should be able to create value while limiting harms; and are more likely to be trusted by the people, organisations and ecosystems they interact with and rely upon. Trust and trustworthiness are therefore key – both to data having societal and economic value; and to companies and organisations realising the value of their services, products and ecosystems.
However, trust and trustworthiness are multifaceted, as are organisations. The Trustworthy Data Stewardship Guidebook provides a systematic way of examining the trustworthiness of an organisation – as well as its data practices and any data it collects, manages, uses or shares – in a way that accounts for the complex nature of trust and trustworthiness.
The guidebook has been created as part of our Innovate UK-funded R&D project aimed at helping organisations to build trust when accessing and sharing data. It builds on previous work on how to design trustworthy data institutions, as well as research into mechanisms for increasing access to data while retaining trust.
Why use this guidebook?
In the guidebook, we provide resources and outline activities to help organisations assess their trustworthiness and the degree to which they are trusted, build trust and trustworthiness where necessary and demonstrate their trustworthiness to others.
It is intended for people and organisations looking to be both trustworthy and trusted when collecting, managing, using and sharing data; and for those looking for ways of demonstrating that trustworthiness to others in order to build new relationships or strengthen existing ones.
Many of the tools and resources within the guidebook are still in the prototype stage. We encourage you to use the guidebook and the tools and activities contained within it, and welcome feedback to help us make them better. In particular, we are interested in feedback on:
- Which of the activities and tools are most useful
- How they can be improved
- Which format is the most useful for engaging with the tools and activities (some of the tools and activities are likely to be more useful in a workshop or group setting, while others may be more suitable for individual work)
- Other tools and resources that can help organisations assess, build and demonstrate trust and trustworthiness that should be included in our catalogue of trust-related resources
For more on the process of how we developed the Trustworthy Data Stewardship Guidebook read our project worknote.
Later in the year we will be opening up our Data Ethics Facilitators programme for others to join – initial expressions of interest in the programme received over 200 responses. Due to the popularity of the programme we decided to send out a short survey to find out why people choose to register and what is most important to them for us to provide in relation to the programme to help inform our data ethics learning products further. Find out more in this worknote.
Get in touch
Are you interested in working through this guidebook in a workshop setting, facilitated by the ODI – eg as an internal audit of trustworthiness in your organisation, or as a collaborative exercise when working with another organisation to share data? Would you like to share your thoughts, feedback and recommendations for further development of these tools and resources? Are you an industry body interested in using these tools to develop sector-wide data sharing initiatives? If so, we’d love to hear from you – get in touch at [email protected]