Data Trust

Description

""Fiduciary trusts are already used to govern and maintain shared resources such as public lands, pension funds and, increasingly, data. Fiduciary data trusts aren’t organizations; they’re contracts that give a trustee, or a group of trustees, authority to make decisions about how an asset — say, data — can be used on behalf of a group of people. Fiduciary trusts are almost 1,000 years old, dating back to the Norman invasion of the United Kingdom — and they have been used to manage resources ever since.

Like powers of attorney, data trusts are flexible and de facto global, meaning that they can be written in ways that create legally accountable governance structures. It’s helpful to think about a data trust as a container — one that can hold assets, define governance and manage liabilities.

When used for governance, data trusts can steward, maintain and manage how data is used and shared — from who is allowed access to it, and under what terms, to who gets to define the terms, and how. They can involve a number of approaches to solving a range of problems, creating different structures to experiment with governance models and solutions in an agile way." (https://www.cigionline.org/articles/what-data-trust)