Strategic designing for grand societal challenges: a closer look at the critical barriers to data ethics

Community platforms are increasingly practiced to activate collective strategy making and resolving grand societal challenges with data. In general, such digital communities offer a coordinating architecture for tackling multilevel societal problems with data sharing processes of the community participants. However, how in particular data sharing processes are organized in community platforms is relatively under-researched. This paper takes a closer look at the critical ethics barriers of data sharing within community platforms and discusses the relations of organizations and community platform users. This study gives voice to community platform users and data expert informants to identify which critical ethics barriers need to be resolved. Through design inquiry of their lived experience with context mapping and expert interviews on data management strategies, we employed strategic design techniques that strongly relate to the qualitative inductive research methodology. Through a fine-grained analyses, we unpacked the community platform practices, characterized three critical barriers, and established grounded constructs as result. Grounded on this evidence it makes a novel contribution with in-depth insight on the critical barriers of data ethics from both an organizational and user perspective.