A new policy brief, by PARIS21’s Archita Misra and Julia Schmidt, explores the significant, and growing, deficit of trust among citizens and their governments around the world and identifies participatory data systems as a possible solution to strengthen trust.
The brief, Enhancing Trust in Data – Participatory Data Ecosystems for the Post-Covid Society, characterizes participatory data systems by the direct engagement of citizens in the process of planning, producing and using data. The goal is to bring citizens and data closer to each other.
Such participatory approaches present national statistical offices with an opportunity to become trust brokers within modern, digital data ecosystems. This will require immediate and long-term policy actions. Therefore, it is crucial for policymakers to
- establish sub-national policy dialogues to learn more about the needs of local communities,
- design COVID-19 crowdsourcing pilot initiatives,
- create peer learning mechanisms on participatory approaches for data,
- invest in resilient national data systems,
- develop solid legal frameworks for better data governance and educate citizens in how to use data and statistics.
Moreover, the PARIS21 brief identifies three ways in which such systems could have an impact on the lives of younger generations:
- At an individual level, such participatory systems might act as an incentive to promote data literacy and trust in digital technology.
- At an institutional level, they have the power to shed light on the topic of digital ethics.
- At a community and societal level, participatory data systems could contribute to increased political participation among the younger generations of today’s digital age.
The policy brief was developed as part of an open competition among OECD personnel for innovative ideas on how countries can emerge from the COVID-19 crisis. The 10 most innovative proposals have now been published in the new report, Shaping the COVID-19 recovery: Ideas from OECD’s Generation Y and Z.
The report underlines the multifaceted crisis engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which will profoundly shape many aspects of our lives for years to come. With younger generations being particularly affected by its impacts, the OECD publication aims to capture their perspectives.
