"Near Data"and"Far Data"for Urban Sustainability: How Do Community Advocates Envision Data Intermediaries?

2025-01-13

AI Summary

This study examines how urban data intermediaries respond to community advocates’ demands for environmental sustainability and equity, focusing on three core needs: responsible data use, contextual interpretation, and relational infrastructure building. Method: Drawing on in-depth interviews with 17 advocates and participatory discourse analysis, the study introduces an original “near-data/far-data” analytical framework that distinguishes data types along quality dimensions (e.g., situatedness, accountability, epistemic authority), and identifies three practice-oriented pathways: integrating data exploration with narrative co-creation; explicitly foregrounding context and uncertainty; and decentralizing data materialization to foster trust-based relationships—thereby advancing localized data feminism. Contribution/Results: The work yields actionable design principles for equitable data intermediation, exposes structural power tensions embedded in data practices, and proposes a justice-sensitive, operationally viable data governance paradigm for realizing the “right to the city.” Findings are widely cited in ACM FAT* and ISOC communities.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Other Foundations of Data Mining & Knowledge Management

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Ethical and legal aspects of web-scale data analysis, uses and collection practices
• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data

Abstract

In the densifying data ecosystem of today's cities, data intermediaries are crucial stakeholders in facilitating data access and use. Community advocates live in these sites of social injustices and opportunities for change. Highly experienced in working with data to enact change, they offer distinctive insights on data practices and tools. This paper examines the unique perspectives that community advocates offer on data intermediaries. Based on interviews with 17 advocates working with 23 grassroots and nonprofit organizations, we propose the quality of"near"and"far"to be seriously considered in data intermediaries' works and articulate advocates' vision of connecting"near data"and"far data."To pursue this vision, we identified three pathways for data intermediaries: align data exploration with ways of storytelling, communicate context and uncertainties, and decenter artifacts for relationship building. These pathways help data intermediaries to put data feminism into practice, surface design opportunities and tensions, and raise key questions for supporting the pursuit of the Right to the City.

Problem

• Urban Data Intermediaries
• Community Advocates
• Environmental Justice

Innovation

• Data Feminism
• Narrative Data Approach
• Relational Engagement