Companies collecting large amounts of data appear reluctant to share relevant data, and, as a result, public institutions may lack information necessary to fulfil their public tasks as mandated by law. In response, the EU has placed digital sovereignty high on its policy agenda with the Data Act and the Data Governance Act.

In this interdisciplinary research project, the Institute for Information Law (IViR) and the Informatics Institute (IvI) will jointly investigate the legal and technical dimensions of business-to-government data sharing (‘B2G’) through a data intermediary. A data intermediary, a trusted third party with a bespoke data governance regime, can potentially help overcome disincentives and strengthen confidence in B2G data sharing.

Together with societal partners, the researchers aim to:

• understand the opportunities, considerations and pitfalls of involving a data intermediary to make B2G data sharing low-risk, accountable, and sustainable;
• design and test a fit-for-purpose data intermediary for a concrete, municipal use case;
• deliver, depending on the results, insights for legislators, regulatory guidance and data intermediary designers.

The municipality of Amsterdam invests in this project, in cash as well as in kind, by helping to identify relevant policy domains and practical use cases to test and apply B2G through data intermediation. With IvI, AMdEX fieldlab supports the technical design components of the project, while other civil society partners help to engage the citizen perspective in data intermediation in a meaningful way.

Project team:

• Dr. Heleen Janssen (FdR)
• Dr. Balázs Bodó (FdR)
• Dr. Thomas van Binsbergen (FNWI)
• Dr. Ana Oprescu (FNWI)