“The Data Futures Lab serves as a pioneering playground for tackling data stewardship hurdles,” says Dr Chijioke Okorie of UP’s Department of Private Law, who is an awardee of the lab’s Infrastructure Fund

Dr Chijioke Okorie of the University of Pretoria’s (UP) Department of Private Law has joined the cohort of awardees for Mozilla’s 2024 Data Futures Lab Infrastructure Fund. The fund encompasses five ambitious projects aimed at building tools to tackle issues concerning transparency, privacy, bias and agency in the data lifecycle. 

Each of these projects will be granted up to $50 000 (about R1 million), in addition to receiving support and training from staff and fellows from software developer Mozilla. Mozilla issued an open call for awardees in July 2023, and received over 250 applications from 54 countries. As an experimental space for instigating new approaches to data stewardship challenges, the Data Futures Lab is the perfect place for these projects to build and release tools and methods that can be leveraged by developers. All projects will make their code available under a public repository. 

Dr Okorie’s research group, Data Science Law Lab, will work on the project to design a more responsible data licence. She is the only recipient from Africa, and among the 2% who were awarded the grant. Her research will address the shortcomings of using Creative Commons licences in certain contexts (such as reinforcing extractive practices and digital colonialism), and will create a prototype for a new data licence based on the group’s findings.

“As the principal investigator of the group, it’s beyond exciting for me to have the opportunity to undertake this research,” Dr Okorie says. “As evidenced by Mozilla’s history, current open licensing arrangements for data are built on principles emanating from copyright law, and while primarily enabling creators to freely share their work with the public, they also acknowledge that the needs and contexts of creators are diverse.

 Recognising the diversity of people and needs, especially from a Global South perspective, our project seeks to develop a new set of data licences that, while enabling free and open data use and reuse, also allows data sources to confirm or withdraw consent, be involved in benefit-sharing, receive attribution and more.”

“This year’s Infrastructure Fund cohort features an eclectic mix of expertise – which is exactly what we need to shift the data ecosystem in a new and better direction,” says Lisa Gutermuth, programme officer at Data Futures Lab. “Mozilla is funding researchers and entrepreneurs, programmers and activists, and communities working on voice, text and synthetic data as it relates to trustworthy artificial intelligence, broadband access, mobility and health data.”

“To get to be part of Mozilla’s existing network of awardees and fellows pursuing a more equitable data ecosystem is uplifting and galvanising,” Dr Okorie says. “I am thinking especially of a fellow awardee from Argentina, who will build on their existing toolset EDIA (Spanish abbreviation for “stereotypes and discrimination in artificial intelligence”), which inspects core components of automatic language processing technologies to detect and characterise discriminatory behaviours.”

Mozilla’s DFL Speaker Series is another enriching platform where awardees and fellows share ideas to build a more equitable data ecosystem in the era of generative artificial intelligence.

Sign up for Dr Okorie's talk, which explores how new data licences can address issues with existing open data licensing arrangements.