The Data universe is expanding with an accelerating speed due to the vast amount of data that mobile devices and applications are creating. Often we are making a digital footprint in situations where  we don’t intuitively understand that our data is being saved. The competition for who gets to be the fixed star of the data space is based on selling the data, for example the business model of Google. The value of personal information is on the rise.

What if I could decide myself how I share my data (MyData) with the services I trust? The quality and quantity of services may increase when data gets mashed up in new ways. For example my activity tracker data could be linked to my health records, my grocery shopping habits, my exercise history, health data of my peers or maybe enriched with air quality data to help select my running path. It is now time to let the individual decide the applications for their data.

Self-preservation is a very much needed instinct on the age of data. We all should use applications made for helping with the data security. For example, MyGeoTrust – project tools help people to control  their privacy to  the appropriate level by the service requesting location  information. We want to intensify and transform the way how personal data is now being used in business. That change needs both know-how, rules and organizations that can handle the personal data for others. We also need cooperation to give birth to solutions that work together.

As a Finnish Government key project we develop the human centric way of data management together with businesses, academia and administration as a MyData Alliance. The Finnish Government gave a decision in May 2016 on the activities that will create suitable conditions to use MyData.

The vision is to create data ecosystem in where the humans, individuals, are the brightest  stars. We will create an environment for services and business to grow. In the data economy, there are an unlimited amount of actors and relationships between different actors. We need trust, business models, testing, evaluation of regulations and resources. We need models where the data of the individual, with the consent of the individual, transforms into services.

Together we can move forward. Between 30th August and 2nd September, we gather in Helsinki as an international group to discuss about the MyData ecosystem. Welcome to build a world where the human as at the centre and surrounded by orbiting dataservices.

Taru Rastas
Senior Adviser
Data Business Unit
Data Department
Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications

Originally published in Finnish at https://impulssi.lvm.fi/2016/07/06/ihminen-data-avaruudessa/

Translation done by the MyData 2016 team

Suomenlinna maritime fortress

Picture by Jussi Hellsten / VisitHelsinki

The fortress was founded in 1748 as a maritime fortress and a base for the Archipelago Fleet. It is now one of the Unesco World Heritage sites. Suomenlinna is a popular sight and some people even live on the island all year round. It is not uncommon to see people having a picnic with a view.

You can get there by The Helsinki City Transport ferry and there is no entrance fee.

http://www.suomenlinna.fi/en/visitor/

Summer Cafe Siili

Picture from the Cafe Siili website

Summer Cafe Siili is a nice trendy cafe located in Käpylä district, it’s open until the August 30th. Fun fact: the cafe is run by Jyri Engeström (founder of micro blogging platform Jaiku that Google bought) and his wife Caterina Fake (founder of Flickr). More info: http://kahvilasiili.com/

Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma

Picture by Comma Image Oy / VisitHelsinki

Situated in the heart of Helsinki, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma is a must place to visit for someone into arts. Kiasma is a lively cultural centre and meeting place and it hosts several exhibitions yearly. At the moment the exhibitions are Boa by the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto, Conversation pieces by the Finnish visual artist Jani Ruscica and Happy Happy by the Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa.

Header picture by Lauri Rotko / VisitHelsinki

That’s why we have made this infomercial about MyData and MyData 2016 conference.

Enjoy!

In the next blog post we dive into the world of Business models for platform operators in a MyData based ecosystem.

As companies, organizations, and public authorities try to chart a course ahead within the new post-GDPR personal data economy, events such as the PIMS meeting and the upcoming MyData 2016 event provide the space for finding a way to build new data ecosystems without closing data borders.

One of the key takeaways from the Paris meeting was the pressing need to define and simplify the myriad terms currently being thrown around by people working in the field of human centric personal data. The terms and acronyms for the core concepts of personal data management abound, including “API of me”, “Internet of Me”, midata, MyData, “Life Management Platform”, Me2B, “Personal Cloud”, “Personal Data Storage (PDS)”, PIMS, “Self Data”, “Vendor Relationship Management (VRM)”, just to name a few. The proliferation of terms may be amusing to industry insiders, but they are simply confusing for everyone else (and many insiders, as well). What are the differences between these concepts and how they relate to each other? What would be the title of a Wikipedia article about personal data management?

The participants at the PIMS meeting agreed to tackle the “too many terms” problem by launching a collaborative “white book” (a.k.a. white paper +), which will outline the core concepts of the personal data management field and create a common language for communicating about human-centric personal data management and how it can help to improve trust, data logistics, and privacy, thereby creating new value for both individuals and corporations.

You can contribute to the book. The content production process for the white book will be open and collaborative,  facilitated by an editorial team, currently composed of Antti Poikola (Aalto University), Kai Kuikkaniemi (Aalto University) Daniel Kaplan (FING), and Tanel Mällö. If you are interested in contributing, please see our open invitation to contribute to the book.

The first draft, nicknamed the “pink book,” will be delivered to all the MyData conference participants in August. The final version will be published following the MyData 2016 conference in order to incorporate the information and ideas generated by the conference sessions and interactions.

Image by Lima Pix.

Doc Searls is a journalist, columnist, and a widely read blogger. He is the author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual (Basic Books, 2000, 2010). He is also Senior Editor of Linux Journal, a fellow at the Center for Information Technology & Society at UC Santa Barbara, and founder and director of ProjectVRM at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University since 2006. In 2013-14, he was a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU.

For our first segment, MyData researcher Molly Schwartz interviews Emilia Hjelm, the MyData 2016 event producer. Tune in to the audio recording below or read the transcript to learn about what Emilia was up to before joining the MyData team, what you can look forward to at MyData 2016, and why Helsinki is an amazing place to be in August. Then stay tuned — interviews with our keynote speakers are up next!

Molly Schwartz: Hi, my name is Molly Schwartz and I’m one of the researchers here working on the My Data project, and I’m thrilled for one of our first blog posts for our My Data 2016 event, to be talking with Emilia Hjelm, who was just brought on last week as our event producer. Emilia, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, and, specifically, what were some of the things you were up to before you came on as our event producer?

Emilia Hjelm: Yeah, sure. I’m a computer scientist. I’ve been working on my masters thesis for the University of Helsinki, where I’ve been working for the last three years with children’s science education and computer science outreach programs. I’ve been studying how gender effects the teaching of and learning of computer science and I also study in the Aalto University, Masters level in Engineering. For example, privacy laws and computer laws. I already had an interest of My Data before I joined the team.

Molly Schwartz: Okay, wow. That’s really cool, so it sounds like you’re bringing a lot of experience from the technological side and kind of the policy side and also from the outreach and event planning side. You said that you were already somewhat familiar with the My Data project before you came on. What kind of event do you think this is going to be, just so everybody knows this is the first big kind of International event that we’ve hosted around My Data? In 2012, a lot of the same people, who were the ones who started organizing this My Data event, were behind the Okay Fest that was held in Helsinki, but this is the first really big My Data event. What kind of things do you think people will be able to expect from this event?

Emilia Hjelm: What I am eager to see is that the event’s going to be a hub for really many different angles to the subject, and I hope that involving both business and start ups and people and organizations will bring something really unique to the table.

Molly Schwartz: Yeah, I definitely think so. Just like the OK Fest was a few years ago, this event is also going to be co-created, so I know there’s already lots of ways in which people can participate in these early stages to help shape the event be what they want it to be. How would you advise people to participate now in these stages and how could they get in touch with you if they want to have some input into this My Data event?

Emilia Hjelm: Well, I hope that people will participate as much as they can, because, for example, shaping the program is a huge deal, so every insight is really valuable and at the moment we are having an open call for ideas at the web page, MyData2016.org/programme/, where you can leave your suggestions. For example, if you have in mind a great person to speak or you want to hold a workshop or any kind of an idea, then we have an e-mail address, mydata2016@okf.fi, where you can tell about yourself and your ideas and what you want to do.

Molly Schwartz: My impression is that there’s a lot of ways to engage. Just to backtrack a little bit, how would you, in general, describe the initial movement that led to the creation of this event?

Emilia Hjelm: In a way, you can think of it as an answer to all the questions that are raised with big data, because we know that many kinds of personal information is being collected by several parties. For example, we have health information and loyalty cards information, what you buy from the grocery store and everything, and at the moment the situation is so that the gatherer decides what to do with the data. But, actually, the person, himself or herself, doesn’t have a say on how the data is used, and My Data is an initiative to turn that relationship around, so that the person whose personal data that is, is in charge of authorizing the use of the data and can, for example, give it away to third parties or so on.

Molly Schwartz: I know a lot of times we talk about it as kind of a style of personal data management or a model that’s more human centric, so we can have a bit more control of what pieces of our personal data are created and how we can then make use of them. This whole model involves a lot of different parties. As you mentioned before, there are tech start ups, there are regulators who are involved, that new general data protection regulation was just passed. There’s still a two year implementation period and people don’t know how that’s going to play out. So something like this My Data model offers some innovation or some vision, I think, for people. Importantly, it also involves individuals, themselves, and I’m really hoping that this event will bring together all these different parties so that we can early on with all the data protection regulations start formulating something that works.

This event will be held in August in Helsinki Finland. What would you say are some of your favorite things about Helsinki in the summertime that people can look forward to?

Emilia Hjelm: Summer in Finland is really great. If you haven’t experienced Northern summer, you have to do it. We have so much light, the sun don’t go down even during the night.

Molly Schwartz: I also heard rumors that they’ll be bringing the open sauna back.

Emilia Hjelm: Yeah, definitely! It’s a crucial part of Finnish culture to have sauna, so I’m hoping that we could have during the festival week, a cool sauna experience in many different places around Helsinki and the nearest cities as well.

Molly Schwartz: I think that would be super special and maybe we’d even get a chance for a little swim.

Emilia Hjelm: Yeah!

Molly Schwartz: Okay, well thank you so much Emilia, this was great. Again, welcome to the team, and for everybody who is listening in, please feel free to get in touch. You can visit our website at MyData2016.org and there you can sign up for the newsletter and as Emilia mentioned, you can give ideas in our call for ideas, and we look forward to hopefully seeing you in Helsinki.

On Tuesday, January 26th we held a Talkoot* here in snowy Helsinki to sift through all of the ideas you submitted to our online form, which will remain open through February 14th. Based on your ideas we started to draft the general programme themes that reflects your input. We will announce the themes and first keynote speakers on February 16th when we have the official launch event.

Your have provided the inspiration and ideas we needed to create a draft programme, but it is not finalized yet. We will open a call for sessions based on the programme themes, where you will have a chance to suggest sessions and vote for your favorites. At least half of the whole conference programme will be decided based on the call for sessions. Please look out for our call for sessions and keep sending in your ideas via our website.

We are still in the process of reaching out to the people you expressed interest in seeing at our event and can not publish the idea list (with names of suggested speakers) yet.

Join the crew

If you are curious about the ideas that people submitted and wish to help us curate the programme, please send an email to emilia.hjelm@okf.fi and join the voluntary MyData 2016 Crew. All crew members get access also to the Trello board where the event ideas are recorded and discussed. We also have a Slack channel for the crew and, most importantly, we will have these monthly meetings called Talkoot in the future as well, approximately once a month (Skype participation is possible).

* Talkoot is a Finnish expression for a gathering of friends and neighbors to accomplish a task that is a common concern, i.e. for the good of the group. The parents of a pre-school may gather to improve the playground, or the tenants of a tenement house may arrange a talkoot to put their garden in order for the summer or winter. Traditionally food, drinks and sauna after the work are often expected (in this instance of the MyData 2016 Talkoot we didn’t have option for sauna since we were hosted at the public library, but let’s see if we can fix that for the next time ;).

This is a perfect moment to officially announce the MyData 2016 event that will take place in Helsinki from August 31st to September 2nd for one purpose: to bring the value of personal data for people, give individuals control over their own data while at the same time boosting technological innovation.

Open Knowledge Finland, Aalto University and FING are teaming up to host MyData 2016, an international event bringing together up to 1000 participants from businesses, research community, civil society, government and local communities to hopefully sunny August in Helsinki Finland. Subscribe to the newsletter in order to get informed about tickets and programme.

The laws have been passed, but it remains uncertain how they will affect the online services that handle personal data. It is critically important that industry giants, tech startups, and civil society come together to design a system that works, for everyone. In Finland, this has already been an area of focus for researchers and technologists, one that led to the creation of a human-centric model for personal data called MyData which is recognized at the level of national government agenda as well as supported many big and small organizations.

The event is intended to open and expand the international community around human centric personal data management. We want to build a truly international forum for piloting projects that innovate around the ethical use of personal data, helping companies find solutions for complying with the regulation, and shedding light on the technical and legal trends in personal data management for the general public.

The event organizing team is calling for suggestions and ideas for what people would like to see at the event, including anything ranging from speakers, sessions, topics, relevant contacts or organizations, evening programs, or any other ideas, big or small: http://mydata2016.org/programme

The event will be held in the Aalto LUME Media Center, the same location as the popular Open Knowledge Festival (OK Fest) in 2012. Members of the OK Fest core organizing team are behind the upcoming MyData event, so participants can expect the same community-driven, co-created, festival-feel (plus a revival of the Open Sauna) next August in Finland’s capital. Expect hacking, lively discussions, the birth of new ideas, and the launch of new commercial products. BYOD (Bring Your Own Data)!

If you like the event idea please spread the word – we are in Twitter @mydata2016.

Main partner supporting the event is the Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications.