Trust, Gatekeepers, Provenance

Trust, Gatekeepers, Provenance

Some questions

1. How can we trust Open Data about initiatives within the Social and Solidarity Economy?
2. What is to stop "green washing" where mainstream commercial businesses promote themselves by publishing open data under the banner of the Social and Solidarity Economy?
3. How can data be be trusted to be accurate?

Some answers

1. In general, information on the web cannot be trusted. But with experience, we learn of sources of information that we do trust.
2. Nothing can stop "green-washing". But if you know the source of information, you can make up your own mind.
3. Data can be trusted if it is known to come from a source that you trust.

In every case, the key to trust is offered by knowing who is providing the information. In other words, the provenance of the data is crucial. Trust is earned through experience.

Gatekeepers

When thinking about the Solidarity Economy, a question that often arises is "who is in, and who is out?". Of course, there are many organisations that would be out regardless of who answers the question (think global fast food chains!), and many that would be in for everyone. But there are also many initiative for which people will have differences of opinion as to whether the initiative is in or out.

There are some reference points as to what is means to be in the Solidarity Economy. For example, the National Secretariat of Solidarity Economy in Brazil defines a set of principles:

1. Self-management
2. Democratisation of the economic relations
3. Co-operation instead of forced competition
4. Valuing diversity. Human beings are more important than profits
5. Valuing local knowledge, constant learning and training
6. Social justice and emancipation
7. Protection of the environment

These are great guidelines, but they do not offer a perfect test that can always decide if a initiative is within the Solidarity Economy or not. There will always be grey areas.

To take on the role of saying who is in and who is out is to be a Gatekeeper. Membership organisations are very well equipped for this role because they can dodge the subjective opinion, and provide data that describes their members, and about what it means to be a member. For example, if Co-ops UK publish data about their members, then we can be sure that the data describes co-operatives within the UK.

Apex (umbrella, membership) organisations are in a good position to be Gatekeepers. If we know the provenance of this data, i.e. we know which apex organisation has published it, then we can find out the principles and values that can be expected to be held by its members.

Crowd sourcing

One could also use "crowd-sourced" data - the idea being that if enough people express their subjective opinions, then a consensus will emerge. Experience of this approach taken by review websites is mixed. Whose reviews can be trusted? A trusted source can become untrustworthy simply because it has gained a reputation for trustworthiness, and therefore becomes a target for those with a vested interest in swaying opinion by posting biassed reviews.

That does not mean that there is no place for crowd-sourced data, but that we need to keep track of the fact that the data was created in this way.

Provenance

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have been working on this issue. The following quote is from the W3C PROV Overview document:

Provenance is information about entities, activities, and people involved in producing a piece of data or thing, which can be used to form assessments about its quality, reliability or trustworthiness. The goal of PROV is to enable the wide publication and interchange of provenance on the Web and other information systems. PROV enables one to represent and interchange provenance information using widely available formats such as RDF and XML.

We want to build provenance information into our data model, and our starting point will be to look at the work in the PROV project by the W3C. The goal is to provide not just the data itself, but the metadata that describes who is asserting the data to be true. We want the information about provenance to be visible at the point where the data is viewed. The technical details of how to achieve this are a work in progress.