New blog on Data Autonomy: National developments towards more Data Autonomy (1)

The regaining of more autonomy over our data at the university is a major undertaking. Apart from activities within the UG, this requires national and even international collaborations, such as PublicSpaces and SURF. One of the focus areas of SURF is Public Values in digitization. The three core public values for education and research are justice, humanity and autonomy.

Autonomy includes not only data, but also freedom of education and self-determination of students. In the UG Data Autonomy program, we aim to obtain those aspects of autonomy by offering more choices than the applications of the BigTech companies. From the CIT we actively participate in the SURF Public Values team.

Ronald Stolk is Director of the Center of Information Technology en CIO of the University of Groningen. Together with Oskar Gstrein, he initiated the Data Autonomy project and he also forms part of its steering committee.

Roadmap to Data Autonomy

The CIT has started the discussion to investigate the possibilities of how the University of Groningen can gain more autonomy over its data in the future. Together with various representatives from across the University, we are working on a roadmap to promote data autonomy and a strategy that will enable the UG to respect, protect and promote academic freedom in the digital age.