Community and regional data sharing policy frameworks: Frontier stories

Data sharing necessitates stakeholders and populations of people to come together to learn the benefits, risks, challenges, and known and unknown "unknowns." Data sharing policies and frameworks require increasing levels of trust, which takes time to build. Join Mei Fung for trail-blazing stories from Solano County, California, and ASEAN (SE Asia), which offer important insights

For the past eight years, Solano County, California, has been pioneering data sharing for the purpose of increasing population health, under the leadership of the county public health director. Ground-level data sharing agreements have allowed increasing levels of aggregation encompassing health providers, educational institutions, not-for-profit organizations, and for-profit companies as well as state and federal agencies. Practical agreements have been struck, revised, and refined. The experience, along with that of similar projects at the World Bank, is now being applied in ASEAN (the Association of South East Asian Nations), which has a population of over 650 million and an average age of 29 years. Current initiatives on data sharing in ASEAN are being facilitated by the World Economic Forum (WEF). A recommendation from the recent WEF ASEAN conference in Hanoi was to develop basic common principles and apply them in pilots in two general areas of shared ASEAN interest—for example, weather and agriculture. In parallel, stakeholder and policymaker discussions would begin, with the goal of shaping the data sharing policy framework to be developed. Mei Fung shares stories of barriers and breakthroughs as trust and understanding increased, along with insights on current approaches to evolving data sharing policies and agreements.