Synopsis
It has never been easier to gather and store information. Data is now a key raw material of business, government, and society. For governments, business, and even private citizens, data is cheap, widely available, and relatively easy to access, and its use influences almost all aspects of how our society works. Organisations and governments use it to conduct their operations - whether that is the delivery of services such as financial advice or healthcare, and the sharing of information in the media, or to make decisions such as what products should be made available to who and so on. People use data across the board: to access and use services, stay in touch with friends or family, administer things, make decisions, and to undertake multiple tasks such as take exercise or even (increasingly) to find romance.Beyond this, data is opening up new frontiers in science and the humanities, from extending our knowledge of how the universe is built, to creating new understanding around climate change, to discovering the impact of a specific teacher on a specific pupil’s performance. All this suggests that data has potentially enormous value. What is surprising, however, is just how little consensus there is around exactly what this value is, or where this value comes from. Many fundamental questions remain unanswered and are subjects of continued debate and controversy.Throughout 2018, Future Agenda canvassed the views of a wide range of 900 experts with different backgrounds and perspectives from around the world, to provide their insights on the future value of data. Supported by many leading organisations we held 30 workshops across 24 countries in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. In them, we reviewed the data landscape across the globe, as it is now, and how experts think it will evolve over the next five to ten years.The aim? To gain a better understanding of how perspectives and priorities differ across the world, and to use the diverse voices and viewpoints to help governments, organisations, and individuals to better understand what they need to do to realise data’s full potential.To achieve this, we did three things. First, in each locality we brought together as wide a variety of people of different perspectives and disciplines as possible: Policy makers, corporate professionals, start-ups, NGOs, students, think tanks. Second, we asked participants to identify and prioritise the themes they considered to be most important in terms of opportunity and concern. Third, we asked them to debate in depth the highest priority issues, to identify areas of agreement and disagreement, and map out possible paths forward.We are not aware of any other exercise of this scale or scope. No other project we know of has carefully and methodically canvassed the views of such a wide range of experts from such a diverse range of backgrounds and geographical locations. The result, we hope, delivers a more comprehensive picture of the sheer variety of issues and views thrown up by a fast-evolving ‘data economy’ than can be found elsewhere. And, by providing this rich set of perspectives, we aim to help businesses and governments - to develop the policies, strategies, and innovations that realise the full potential of data (personal, social, economic, commercial), while addressing potential harms, both locally and globally.
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