The Ada Lovelace Institute published a report exploring 3 legal mechanisms that could help facilitate responsible data use and management: Data Trusts, Data Cooperatives, and Corporate & Contractual Mechanisms.

In this report Anouk Ruhaak describes alternative approaches to data governance, specifically data trusts.

One of the challenges in developing AI applications is obtaining the vast amount of data that’s required. Making matters worse, regulations and privacy issues pose obstacles to firms’ sharing their data. A possible solution is for firms to form a “data trust.” that serves as a fiduciary for the data providers and governs their data’s proper use. Willis Towers Watson recently piloted a data trust together with several of its clients. This article shared what they learned about how to create such a trust.

Data capture requires the provision of immutable fields in order to capture and store collected data. Immutable capture items are identified by passive identifiers.

The EU’s draft data strategy set out its aim to promote a European data economy, while protecting individual rights and embedding ethical considerations in data governance. Data trusts offer a tool for bridging the gap between aspirations to share data and concerns about individual rights.
And Viivi shared an article with the US view on the EU funding personal data spaces as a trust: The EU is launching a market for personal data. Here’s what that means for privacy.

This post explores how we might map the suitability of different data sharing structures to different types of data use.

How do data trusts relate to data commons? When trying to make sense of the many data governance models and data sharing arrangements in existence this question comes up a lot. This article gives some basic insights into the relationship between a data commons and a data trust.
And the author (Anouk Ruhaak) also compiled a comprehensive reading list about the topic of Data Trusts.