Empowering the Digital Person through Data Mobility

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The ‘Digital Person’ enables the rapid creation and propagation of highly supportive and ‘liquid’ services that improve how people live their daily lives; from financial visibility and proactive healthcare to no-spam marketing and optimised city environments…at least, that’s what should have happened. 

Global data regulation put in place to protect our privacy has resulted in our personal data being locked down in sectorial and territorial silos. The new “oil” has been created but it cannot flow. This disincentivises the innovation of online services, particularly for SMEs who are resource-challenged, as they must comply with a multitude of commercially unscalable data regulations. 

Conversely, resource-rich incumbents like Big Tech are hugely advantaged as data regulations encourage the creation of walled gardens in the name of safety and privacy, which disempowers individuals through a lack of broadly owned services, personal agency and rights over their digital selves. Interoperable standards and consent regimes, with all the good intentions of making data more accessible, fall short of reducing the costs of data portability and much less provide balanced legal and technical solutions for the future development of markets and economies. 

Data portability, through decentralised data ownership and secure technical infrastructure, enable enterprises of all sizes to openly create services that use data, whilst making individuals the largest beneficiaries and owners of their digital lives. 

The upcoming 5th Symposium on the Digital Person on March 1 will uncover projects in our ecosystem that are leveraging Data Passports and Personal Data Accounts (PDAs) to rapidly transform business models, and hopefully, entire verticals. Their emerging innovations are delivering commercial breakthroughs through data portability, whilst providing individuals with greater agency and rights, all resulting in market solutions that are finally achieving organic scalability, equity and economic balance. 

The Symposium will feature five projects in the following areas:

• Finance: IFC, a part of the World Bank group, on its plans to use PDAs and Data Passports to bring decentralised financial visibility and on-demand credit scoring to Vietnam’s small merchant population, allowing secure access to credit and micro-loans. (Watch their pre-Symposium conversation)
  

• Health and Wellness: The SejutaKG community weight-loss tracking platform on its use of Data Passports to launch a nationwide campaign in Malaysia to collectively lose one million kilograms over the course of 2022. (Watch their pre-Symposium conversation)
  

• Travel and Tourism: End-to-end trip planning and management platform Wejugo.com on using Data Passports for tourism and travel in Australia. (Watch their pre-Symposium conversation)
  

• Smart Cities: Urban Systems will discuss how Data Passporting and PDAs could be used in the context of smart cities. (Pre-Symposium conversation to be uploaded soon)

Join us for our discussions around data mobility and the empowered digital person!

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BOOK NOW for the Symposium

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ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM

The Symposium on the Digital Person is an annual event organized by the HAT Community Foundation (HCF) and Dataswyft as a unique cross-disciplinary environment for a robust discussion on the “state of the digital person”. This year's event will also feature presentations on global projects and case studies on how the state of the digital person is being improved globally. Participants include industry captains, policy makers, government representatives as well as thought leaders from the sciences, humanities and social sciences domains who come together for discussions relating to law, computer science, history, sociology, entrepreneurship, business, economics and the global society.

This year, the theme for the 5th Symposium on the Digital Person is The Empowered Digital Person: Global Projects with Data Passports and Personal Data Servers, addressing the problem statement of equity and economic justice, as well as how Personal Data infrastructure technology is now unlocking entire markets for SMEs across verticals.

Anchoring the 5th Symposium will be the annual discussion on the current state of the digital person, decentralisation, transformation and business models breaking new ground globally. This afternoon panel session moderated by Jim Spohrer with HAT/Dataswyft ecosystem academics Professors Jon Crowcroft, Irene Ng & Youngjin Yoo as the panellists.