A user-centric approach to responsible AI

Katalin Bártfai-Walcott (KBW) of Ambient Enterprises posted some helpful observations and thoughts via LinkedIn in September on how LinkedIn and other comparable platforms are treating their most valuable contributing users, with a focus on how they could improve. My takeaways from that post included the following:

• Data sovereignty (which KBW calls data agency and ownership): LinkedIn should stop acting like a data oligarch and start paying experts whose data they’re farming even more aggressively than they used to.
• A compensation model for user-generated IP: Users should have fine-grained access and permission controls for their content, not to mention specified level of contribution-based royalty rights and a built-in means of receiving payment from their hosts.
• Designed-in equity and associated user-friendly interactivity for the overall system. In an ideal online world, the system wouldn’t just be one way. Instead, users would have the right to interact and negotiate with platform providers when it comes to the terms of IP sharing. Users would have the means of influencing decisions on how profits are shared, once they are shared at all.
• Designed-in transparency and accountability. While we’re empowering users, let’s make the system transparent and hold both owners and users of the system accountable.

We’ve had the web now for over 30 years. KBW is right about the pressing need for the kinds of equitable capabilities she’s enumerating. What used to be an open, shared publishing environment is now primarily a data oligarchy.  The data farming oligarchs who’ve profited enormously for a form of one-way data feudalism should be held to account. (See my 2021 post at https://www.datasciencecentral.com/a-window-of-opportunity-for-data-democracy-part-i-of-iii/ for more information.)

How can this owner-user equity actually happen?

Was sidestepping legacy entirely an overly ambitious goal?

My 2021 post on the issue noted the promise and new, data-protecting, decentralized capabilities of peer-to-peer data networks such as IPFS:  “One way to sidestep the old architecture is to move to a more suitable one that already exists. Peer-to-peer networks aren’t new, but developments over the past decade have made them more compelling for business use.

“That’s particularly the case when it comes to desiloing, data-centric development, and personal data protection. For example, without a central server, each individual user can be in control of their own data from the start, by default. And both data enrichment and app development can be broadly collaborative, even more broadly than Github, by default.”

What I said back then continues to be true today. But three years later, peer-to-peer data networks are still an underperforming, underadopted niche. That’s not for lack of trying, of course. Data networks such as IPFS reflect highly ambitious goals and designs.

Much thought has gone into design considerations. For most users who aren’t technically sophisticated, IPFS lacks ease of use, which makes me wonder if most P2P data networks like it are simply immature and underfunded. It’s difficult to test, iterate and continually improve when the user base remains small and is perhaps less engaged than it used to be. 

My impression is that revenues haven’t materialized as hoped. The “crypto winter” of 2023 triggered some layoffs at Filecoin, a file storage layer built on top of IPFS, according to Crunchbase. In 2024, I noted others in the P2P data networking space leaving what seemed to be promising startups with seemingly solid business models.

Solid, Inrupt and a humbler effort

Rather than building an entire decentralized data network and inviting others to build a stack on top from scratch, Inrupt has squarely focused on a data storage layer designed to support individual users as data owners that’s otherwise designed to interoperate with conventional web technologies. 

The open Solid protocol, which web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee has backed, covers new self-sovereign identity and data management standards that support the principles and goals KBW espoused in her LinkedIn piece. 

After a slow start eight years ago, the Solid protocol that Inrupt has been nurturing and building on top of has had some evident successes. Data Wallet is a white-label product Inrupt launched in July 2024 that makes it possible for providers to build full solutions around its user-friendly data sharing functionality, reported Cate Lawrence in Tech EU in july.

Lawrence noted that government agencies in six different countries have deployed Solid-based systems, and that three more were conducting pilots. The CEOs of Inrupt and Athumi announced a renewal of a three-year partnership in April 2024 between Inrupt, Athumi and Cronos Groep focused on building a user-centric data economy in Flanders, Belgium. Inrupt has been working closely with the Flanders government on initial steps for the shape of such an economy that invites and includes both public and private sector participation.

How an activist government is starting to empower data users and best data practices

An EU project followed the City of Ghent’s initial efforts that began in 2005  to transform a cavernous structure and grounds initially built in the 19th century called Wintercircus in Ghent, Belgium. As of 2024, Wintercircus is coming into its own as a bona fide tech incubator and community center. 

With their own connections to the University of Ghent and the local community, Inrupt and Solid are both nicely situated to benefit from what the Flanders government is helping to make real.