Ushahidi Data Commons: Governing Community Data in the Age of AI

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Summary 

Ushahidi and the Accelerator Fellowship Programme of the Institute for Ethics in AI, University of Oxford present a draft governance framework for community-generated data, built across four workshops in 2026 and brought to Oxford to be tested before community validation in Nairobi.

About this event

Community-generated data increasingly ends up training or informing AI systems, often far from the people and purposes it was collected for. 

Over four workshops this year, the Data Is Destiny series worked through how such data should be licensed and governed: the promises we must be able to make to the people who share it, who should run a data commons and enforce its rules, and what happens when that data creates commercial value.

This event brings the resulting draft framework to Oxford. It is an early signal rather than a finished model, and it is shared here to be pressure-tested by practitioners across law, community organising, digital development and data stewardship, including approaches we have relied on ourselves. The conversation feeds directly into a community validation session in Nairobi later in November, where the framework meets the communities whose data it is meant to serve.

We will present what the series found, open the hardest questions to the room, and set out what still needs to be resolved before we can put the framework to communities.