8. Meeting legal/regulatory, ethical and sensitive data obligations

Digital/Extended Specimen
50

@dshorthouse Thanks a lot for your reply, it is food for thought for me. So far, my perspective has been that the DES infrastructure will grow

  1. In the way that collections, GBIF, Wikipedia, etc. grow - rather randomly or semi-organized based on the individual interests of its providers and users.
  2. Providers and users will use and expand the DES, because the infrastructure is useful to their own work, comparable to physical collections. The more user-friendly the system and the more value it provides, the more it will be used and expanded.
  3. Providing a connection to discussions under Topic 7 “Workforce & capacity building and inclusivity”, specifically the posts following this question posed by @austinmast : at one point, which might be early-on, DES data curators might fill gaps, add and curate links focusing on specific topics, projects, goals, etc. They might provide maintenance, integration and expansion services in an organized, goal-focused way. Who might coordinate such work, is a question that @Debbie asked in Topic 11 “Partnerships”.

I completely agree with your statement:

My point of view is that the goal for the DES is or should be to have “techno-governance” structures so well implemented that they are user-friendly and fulfill the needs of their communities, thereby intrinsically providing value and motivation to providers and users.

Wikidata has come up by now several times (see eg. Topic 6 “Robust access points …” and the discussions there). Having had no previous exposure and only slowly starting to understand its core, functionality and the experiences with it, I am starting to see its relevance and importance for the design of governance layers for the DES. One difference might be that the DES is “dealing” not only with publicly widely available data, but with a lot of data which are “sensitive” due to a whole range of reasons, as well as with the intersection of such data with an often non-trivial legal (and political) context. Though this might be a simplified view of the situation of Wikipedia/Wikidata and a reason to check their legal, ethical and sensitive data guidelines.