About
Source: Website
The Centre for Data Futures is pioneering participatory infrastructure across the entire AI lifecycle. We envision a future where communities – whether professional groups like GPs, judges and educators, or civic organisations and neighbourhoods – actively shape the AI systems that affect their lives and maintain agency over the data generated.
This requires two mutually reinforcing foundations:
Foundation 1: Data Empowerment
Communities control and benefit from the data they generate
- Without collective agency over data, participation becomes extraction.
- The missing piece: Trained data stewards – “the missing profession of the 21st century“.
Foundation 2: Participatory AI Interfaces
AI systems that learn from, augment and adapt to collective human intelligence
- The breakthrough: LLM interfaces make meaningful collective participation possible in unprecedented ways.
The Intersection: Communities as Architects of AI-Augmented Futures
Participatory AI interfaces can demonstrate significant value independently. But they achieve their full transformative potential when combined with data empowerment.
Contact
Email: cdf@kcl.ac.uk
Data Empowerment Clinic
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What is the Data Empowerment Clinic?
The Data Empowerment Clinic (which is part of the Centre for Data Futures) is the first dedicated educational infrastructure of its kind supporting grassroots data empowerment movements globally and addressing the missing profession of the 21st Century – data stewards.
Designed as a collaborative ‘think-and-do’ space, we equip students from diverse disciplines to gain hands-on experience in data empowerment practices.
Working alongside experts and community partners, students will support organisations across sectors (such as education, health, and the creative industries) in addressing real-world challenges at the intersection of law, technology, and governance.
Our mission is to build capacity for bottom-up data stewardship by:
- Training diverse cohorts of KCL students across Law, Informatics, and Digital Humanities, equipping them with practical skills through hands-on work on real-world data empowerment projects.
- Partnering with organisations through live case studies, where student teams and community partners will co-design, test, and implement participatory and empowering data practices in response to scoped or open-ended challenges.
- Developing a knowledge hub by curating and sharing accessible resources, practices, and insights that enable others to embed data empowerment in their own contexts.
- Fostering a transnational peer community that facilitates knowledge exchange, solidarity-focused collaborations, and the scaling of data empowerment practices globally.
Why do we exist?
The data economy is marked by profound power asymmetries. As individuals, we have little power in challenging these systems let alone being empowered by them. Change will require us to work collectively.
So, we must support communities with the capacity to question, reshape, and repurpose data practices in ways that reflect their needs and priorities.
The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation have supported us to establish this pioneering clinic.
Who is the clinic for?
The clinic will support a wide variety of people and organisations including: social enterprises, grassroots organisations, foundations, charities, cooperatives, institutes, public interest technologists, advocacy groups, unions, researchers, coalitions and community led groups.
