Tim Davies

Tim is co-director of Practical Participation, and works as an independent researcher and practitioner focussed on the social and political impacts of data policy, particularly around open data. He is co-editor of a recent IDRC collection, “The State of Open Data: Histories and Horizons”, and was author of chapters on open data and land governance, and open data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. He formerly led a global research network with the World Wide Web Foundation on open data in developing countries, and designed and led the Open Data Barometer, a multi-country expert survey study of readiness, implementation and impact of open data policies. In recent years, Tim has worked on the creation of data standards for transparency and accountability, including wok on aid transparency, procurement transparency, and the openness of corporate ownership information. He has been an active civil society participant in the Open Government Partnership. Tim’s work during the Bellagio Residency focused on how approaches to data standardization affect outcomes and impacts of AI, resulting in a series of short articles and a book outline, aimed at supporting practitioners and policy makers respectively to give greater consideration to the design of data standards. This responds to a recognition that whilst many AI applications have been developed within corporate contexts, where data models can be imposed from above, the use of AI that uses data gathered from across jurisdictions and institutions requires special attention paid to the socio-technical design of standards and the political economy of their adoption.