Olivia Ben­feldt

My work examines how data is governed, shared, and put to work. My ambition is to help organizations and societies navigate the opportunities and challenges of datafication in ways that are accountable, collaborative, and sustainable. 

At the core of my research is data governance. I study how decisions are made about who gets to define, access, and control data. My research frames data governance as a collective action problem, exploring what tensions emerge around ownership and access and how they can be negotiated to create value with data. 

I work on projects that explore: 

How organizations can build trust and accountability when sharing and reusing data across boundaries. 

How new forms of data organizing, such as data collectives and data cooperatives, enable governing of data beyond the organization. 

How data practices scale from the personal to the societal level, and what this means for policy, infrastructures, and work. 

My vision is to expand our imagination of what data governance can be; not just policies, rules, and frameworks, but also about people, organizations, and societies working to govern data collectively.