As proposed at PI World Barcelona User Group, we want to start seeing how data sharing and industry group collaboration can help solve some tough challenges.
As described in Chris's post in the forum (User Group Meeting Follow Up from PI World Barcelona), we had a very good discussion around data sharing and exchange between community members. We addressed the 3 most prominent communities scenarios we envisioned: Internal communities - Individuals and teams within a single organization, External - Organizations sharing with external partners and vendors, and Peer Communities - Data exchanged through neutral broker.
While most participants expressed interest and could articulate the needs for data exchange, the challenges still appear highly restricting, and simply insurmountable. Once again, the technical hurdles do not appear to be those that are the hardest to resolve. Legal, privacy, commercial, and intellectual property impediments all seem to have substantially higher chances of limiting initiatives relying on any type of data sharing. What is causing all this anxiety? Is it based on rational risk analysis, or fear of unknown influenced by what we all hear in the news? Notwithstanding the facts, there is consensus that something can and should be done to unlock the current situation.
As most think that the benefits organizations could obtain from sharing data sets under specific conditions, we would like to run an experience and ask our community members to look out for problems they are trying to resolve by using their operational data, identify the supporting data set, work through the internal obstacles, and get it out there for the community to help out. There are many ways we will be able to get eyes on the problem: Our Academic and Data Science team will surely look into it, but partners and other industry members will also have a chance to jump in and help out.
As needed, moderators on this forum can help obfuscate the data, or acknowledge the source as instructed. You can also elect to share with only elected parties rather than with this closed group.
I would also like to take the opportunity to ask everyone to share thoughts and experience related to the struggle of data sharing.
Max