NEWS FEATURE
Would you trust yourself with your own data?
Most organisations probably don’t know if the trust placed in them by their stakeholders is justified. And even if they wanted to know, how would they find out? Last month the Open Data Institute (ODI) published its Trustworthy Data Stewardship Guidebook, which offers a range of free tools to assess your trustworthiness as a data steward and also turns abstract issues of trust and trustworthiness into currency.
WHETHER it be a library service’s Covid track and trace policy, or its policies for sharing data with service providers or partners – trust will play a part in the exchange.
The ODI explains that: “Being ‘trustworthy’ is not the same as being ‘trusted’. An organisation might consider itself trustworthy, but it can only deem itself trusted once an external organisation has placed its trust in it in some manner.” Sometimes this relationship between an organisation’s trustworthiness and the trust placed in it can be misaligned. The ODI’s guidebook will help organisations spot this and “prevent potential crises or losses of trust by identifying whether there are areas of misalignment between what your organisation is doing and what your partners, stakeholders or customers expect.”
Distrust is contagious That trust and trustworthiness can be misaligned and re-aligned suggests a flexibility around the issue of trust. Last year Jeni Tennison, Vice Pres- ident and Chief Strategy Adviser at the ODI, discussed this in relation to libraries in an interview with Infor- mation Professional (December 2019 pp. 28-30 Libraries: don’t mess with trust
https://bit.ly/33fXCfu).
“Like every other organisation in the world, libraries have to think about what their position is on the information they keep about people. They have to think about it, espe- cially when it goes over and above what they absolutely need in order to provide them with a service.” She said: “Yes, of course, we think
April-May 2021
data is really valuable, really useful and that sharing is the only way in which we get to unlock that value for everybody. But we are worried about the way in which distrust around the use of data limits what becomes acceptable to people… Distrust is contagious and it is incumbent on organisations that already have a posi- tion of trust to make sure that they don’t undermine that.
“That means being explicit about the trade-offs that come with the collection and use and sharing of data – it has all these great things that could happen and all these bad things that could happen. Let’s make a decision based on that. Recog- nise there are both positives and negatives, show you’re thinking about it and not just doing it because everyone is doing it.”
Elements of Trust
It means a range of relationships between libraries and their users are viable so long as there is transparency — with some keeping as little personal data as possible and others keeping it and putting it to use. But the ODI suggests it would be a mistake to make trust itself the target. In the Guide- book the ODI says: “Trust is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. In data ecosys- tems, trust is crucial to starting new flows and keeping existing flows going: from data, money and insights through to regulatory guidance, and service-use.”
The Guidebook recommends organisa- tions start the process by looking at their own trustworthiness as data stewards. This is done via a process of determining their organisational priorities. The ODI has identified 10 elements of trustworthy data stewardships which organisations prioritise as they see fit. Then they assess the extent to which they meet them by asking questions like: “When we strive to demonstrate to
Jeni Tennison.
external organisations the trust- worthiness of our organisation, our data practices and/or the data we collect, manage, use and share, what elements do we prioritise? Why?”
Protecting reputations
And the end product should be easy- to-grasp benefits such as “peace of mind and confidence that you are doing everything possible to be trust- worthy and protect your reputation” while, at the same time improving your ability to “gauge whether an external organisation is trustworthy and can be trusted within a new relationship.”
With some self-analysis the data vs trust equation could be a win win for libraries. As Jeni said: “I think there are lots of places where libraries and trusted organisations can push the boundaries and be really innovative around the way in which they handle data, but that doesn’t mean they need to lose trust along the way.”
l Read the full report Trustworthy Data Stewardship Guidebook at
https://bit.ly/3xMKaOb
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