Hello all,
I'm Rigo Wenning, Legal counsel at ERCIM/W3C and one of the architects
behind the SPECIAL project. For ERCIM/W3C I participate in the
activities of the Big Data Value PPP since 2016 when it was founded.
The webinar from the G1 Unit, overseeing the data value chains is
behind the call HORIZON-CL4-2021-DATA-01, they said that they
deliberately made the calls more fuzzy to inspire creativity.
Nevertheless, Call 2021-DATA-01 is a call on data value chains. The
call says:
===
The technologies should facilitate sharing and manipulation of data in
compliance with prevailing and emerging legislation (e.g. GDPR) for
data processors and data subjects/rightholders and other stakeholders.
The technologies and solutions should enable safe and secure data
handling, sharing and re-use in the context of common European data
spaces in various situations and application areas.
===
It is clear that the core goal of the call is to enhance the
"dataspaces", I could also call them data lakes. Another hint is that
it says:
===
The actions are expected to build on Horizon 2020 actions on privacy-
preserving technologies and liaise with appropriate actions from
Horizon 2020 topic ICT-13-2018-19
===
The SPECIAL project (and e.g. Mosaicrown, where I'm involved) was done
under ICT-13-2018-19. But there were also projects on homomorphic
encryption etc.
This means the gravity of the call is in data value chains and in data
sharing and re-use. The project, as far as I understand it from a phone
conversation with Harsh, wants to get rid of cookie banners and get to
some decent consent mechanism.
While this may be needed to satisfy the legislative requirements as
pointed out in the call, this is just an add-on.
Additionally, the call will be highly competitive. This means chances
are really low to get the project funded because:
1/ The work has already be done to a large extend by SPECIAL
2/ The story about use of data for the better of society with concrete
use cases is missing.
In the meantime, I suggest to target the Call CL4-2021-HUMAN-01 that is
exactly about the challenge the project is targeting. But in this case,
re-doing DNT will not be enough. We need to augment this with further
research in the direction of SOLID and DIDs and identity management in
general. The SPECIAL approach may be taken as a basis, but is not
sufficient. What is missing now for this call is the participation of
core internet champions, meaning industry partners. But we can work on
this. Budget is 36Mio and I can ask how much they expect per project. I
assume this is similar to 2021-DATA-01-01, meaning 8Mio/project, so we
get around 4-5 projects funded.
Thy specifically mention cooperation with projects in 2021-DATA-01-01,
which could be done with some of the proposers in this space. This will
also show the needs for interoperability, which will be a plus.
I look forward to the discussion on 13h00, but I come out of a general
meeting all morning. This means I could be slightly late and pretty
worn out.
--
Rigo Wenning
ERCIM/W3C Legal counsel
