PC: Copyright as an issue came up. One major tension was around data ownership-- data localization was a key point that I picked up on. For example, if sensitive Kenyan data is stored on Amazon or Microsoft cloud services, then if the US decides to subpeona it, there’s nothing Kenya can do about it. (Probably a similar or even graver concern with Huawei and China.) At the same time, people mentioned that there are clear advantages to scale. “There’s a reason no one uses their company emails here… everyone will have a gmail or yahoo account.” Also, strict data privacy or localization of data infrastructures may be a barrier to data sharing / open data. How do we reconcile this tension? One thing I would note here is that most people’s concerns were dealing with digital trace data, not traditionally qualitative data. Beyond copyright issues, I don’t remember hearing too much concern with sharing qualitative data, perhaps because the infrastructure or ability to share/analyze such data at scale (for profit / control) isn’t quite as common.
