Data Justice in Practice: A Guide for Impacted Communities

The Advancing Data Justice Research and Practice project aims to broaden understanding of the social, historical, cultural, political, and economic forces that contribute to discrimination and inequity in contemporary ecologies of data collection, governance, and use. This is the consultation draft of a guide for impacted communities. It provides actionable information for communities who wish to implement the principles and priorities of data justice. In the first section, we introduce the nascent field of data justice, from its early discussions to more recent proposals to relocate understandings of what data justice means. This section includes an account of the outreach we conducted with stakeholders throughout the world in developing a nuanced and pluralistic conception of data justice and concludes with a description of the six pillars of data justice around which this guidance revolves. Depending on their contexts, potential impacts, and scale, data activities may be carried out in a way that involves stakeholder engagement. To facilitate this process, the next section provides an explainer of the Stakeholder Engagement Process and the steps it includes—preliminary horizon scanning, policy scoping and stakeholder analysis, positionality reflection, and establishing stakeholder engagement objectives and methods. This section sets out considerations relating to internal community engagement (i.e. engagement within your community) as well as approaches to engaging external stakeholders (i.e. to inform or influence external activities). Additionally, it sets out considerations to be addressed when participating in externally-led engagement processes (e.g. where communities are invited to participate in stakeholder engagement initiated by developers or policy-makers). Finally, the last section presents the guiding questions that will help communities to address issues of data, digital infrastructures, and affected areas of civic, public, and private life, in relation to past, present and future dimensions of community life and in accordance with the six pillars of data justice.This report was commissioned by the International Centre of Expertise in Montréal in collaboration with GPAI's Data Governance Working Group, and produced by the Alan Turing Institute. The research was supported, in part, by a grant from ESRC (ES/T007354/1), Towards Turing 2.0 under the EPSRC Grant EP/W037211/1, and from the public funds that make the Turing's Public Policy Programme possible