Addressing Challenges and Opportunities in Data Sharing for the Common Good: The Case of Europe's First Data Altruism Organisation

Smart-cities are heavily linked to decision-making based on data. However, despite the different waves of open data, those pertaining to the citizens themselves are not directly contributing to citizen participation and engagement. This is particularly true of the fine grained data regarding utilities consumption despite the huge potential to impact climate change. The common good that such data represents has raised debate about the schemes by which such data could be shared and what tools could empower those the data is about. DATALOG is a non-profit association aiming to facilitate data donation, sharing, and re-use for the common good and planetary well-being coordinated by Universitat Pompeu Fabra, with the collaboration of the innovation consultancy Ideas for Change. In 2023 it became the first data altruism organisation recognised by the European Union under the Data Governance Act. However, data altruism organisations as defined face several challenges. In this article we describe the process of creating DATALOG to collect consumption data from utilities (water, gas, electricity) in Barcelona. We reflect on the barriers and opportunities we faced during its creation as well as those challenges that we foresee in the near future. These lessons learnt will contribute to inspire new organizations and promote data sharing through the creation these new data intermediaries.