Session: SOLID and Business
Friday, March 31, 2023 (Afternoon)
The concept of data as a commodity has its origins in the technological development at the end of the 90s, in which suddenly more ubiquitous data were available, opening new business fields. Due its potentiality and value, the public opinion coined the concept of "data as a new oil". And in a similar way as for oil, several enterprises and governments hoard data in silos with a reduction of economic and social benefits. However, and different as oil, data is not scarce and can continuously be created and re-created. Many people can access them at the same time, and they can be consumed repeatedly without impacting their quality or depleting their supply.
Transforming the way in which data is managed has led to different business models. So, while IBM focused on classic data management and analysis in silos, Facebook, Google, etc. opened the possibility of collecting different data from anywhere, capitalizing on the freely available data (by using freely available infrastructure funded by governments). Simultaneously these companies (mainly based on USA and China) developed a monopoly based on the illusion of free services provided in exchange for a data robbery without concern for transparency and monopolization of data, information management, data privacy, and environmental impact.
New business models based on SOLID, (challenging common descentralized approaches based on block chains) can be an answer to such problems, where value emerges not in a central way (as in monopolies), but in the edge, leading into a re-democratization of data ownership, where individuals have the power to decide who, where, and why should use their data. Simultaneously this requires the creation of fully novel incentives for investors as well as for entrepreneurs and customers. Interest in investing in SOLID, for example, was sparked by Accenture with its strategic investment through Accenture Ventures in Inrupt, an enterprise software company focused on bringing online personal data back into the power of users while reinventing the way businesses and governments manage digital data.
Companies in the field of enterprise descentralization solutions, like PixelPlex or Inrupt, are demonstrating the potential of descentralization in the management of corporate data. SOLID has also been tested in entrataintment: reccently the BBC is testing the use of SOLID-Pods for the streaming of social television without compromising personal data . Also in E-commerce or compannies like Empathy are appying SOLID to store customer journeys. All these examples show that SOLID has great potential for different applications and offers exciting perspectives for novel business models.
In this session we want to mainly explore two fundamental questions:
Program
Detailed agenda, abstracts and speaker bios: