A few weeks ago, Olga and I traveled to Ispra to conduct a role play together with the JRC on how data spaces might federate to provide access to data and services contained within more than one data space.
Going in, I had many questions about federation. The Data Spaces Support Centre has a relatively expansive definition of federation, speaking in broad terms about aligned rules on governance, including shared trust frameworks and shared business interests. But this level of alignment seems unrealistic to me, or at least it’s unrealistic without a central driver of some kind to bring parties together.
And this was the goal of the role play that we would run—to understand whether and how federation would form when a fictional real-estate developer of a smart community would require access to data across multiple data spaces. Here’s a bit more information on how we set up the role play, but feel free to skip over the summary.
A well-known European real-estate developer has a vision to build three smart communities in three Member States of the European Union. These communities will forward ambitions around sustainability and efficiency, with smart services catering to the needs of its residents. Policymakers have seen the plans and believe in the vision being presented, seeing it as viable and potentially a model for other regions. Local governments have been providing subsidies to the developer as a part of a public-private partnership.
The developer can gain access to the data they need in one of four ways.
- They can individually negotiate with the appropriate data holders outside of the data space framework.
- The developer can join each of the data spaces and negotiate with the partners to gain access to the necessary data. In some cases, this may also mean working with the governance authorities of data spaces that may limit access to certain data products and services.
- Hire an intermediary (named NovaHope), which can organise all of the agreements to get access to the necessary data. NovaHope has both technical and legal expertise to negotiate on the developer’s behalf. NovaHope, with experience in the field, may bring some expertise to the table to shorten the amount of time it takes to get access to the data, but will incur the additional costs of paying for its intermediation services.
- Convince a national government or other stakeholder to work as an orchestrator, ensuring that all data products and services are available via a data space and create a federated structure across the data spaces through which this developer can gain access. This is likely the more time consuming option, but produces longer-term benefits.
An in-built premise: a Member State would drive federation
An important component of the role play is that each actor in the play receives a briefing that outlines not just the scenario, but also their motivations. We, as the builders of the role play, try to accurately reflect the intrinsic motivations of each stakeholder, but we also provide individuals with enough incentives to move the scenario forward and potential conflict points to reveal frictions.
In this role play, we had actors from both the private and public sector, including two national governments, two privately oriented data spaces, one city (with both data and the land for the smart community), and one private-sector consultancy with expertise in data spaces. We expected that the mix of public and private goals and incentives for participating would reveal some of those important frictions. This is a tension that we see every day in projects funded by Horizon Europe. As such, it was pretty easy to write a briefing to bring these elements out.
What was not immediately clear was how to drive the discussion of federation forward. The use case around which we build the scenario provided the impetus to bring together disparate data sets that might benefit from a federation that eases burdens accessing data. But just because there is a reason for people to come together does not mean that going through the inevitable negotiations around federation would make sense. After all, the status quo of negotiating with individual data holders–a process that would still be necessary even when dealing with data spaces–is a viable option with less initial overhead.
After much thought and debate, our belief was that an individual Member State was the most likely to start a conversation around federation, at least within our scenario. And so, as a part of the briefings, we gave a Member State clear incentives to drive federation and to be seen as a leader. It was made clear that money was available. The smart community was described as a test case and part of a broader digitalisation drive for economic competitiveness, meaning there was also political capital to spend. It was hard to put more motivation in their to lead the case for federation, and the actor playing that role certainly tried their best to make the case.
But, the Member State never did get any traction for federation.
The private sector took the lead (eventually)
It was, in fact, the consultancy and the two private-sector data spaces that presented the more credible case for co-operation and started to talk in terms of signing deals–though this only took place after some hours of discussion and debate. Despite the clear incentives and motivations of the leading Member State, private actors wanted to see the national government only play a steering role, distributing resources rather than being an orchestrator or leader of the community.
Even the local government from the Member State did not become a natural ally for a public-sector driven solution. They did not pick up and support the national governments desire to lead, rather viewing them as one stakeholder of many, focusing on their own needs rather than national ones. This makes sense, too. At the end of the day, the public sector is not a monolithic entity, and there are always frictions between different governments, whether that be disagreements between national governments or disagreements between national and regional ones. And the local government was looking for the most viable solution that would protect its interests.
Why did the private sector lead?
Despite the briefings explicitly mentioning public-private partnership—and even an intervention where we made it all the more explicit that all actors had ‘honest intentions’ in the negotiation—there was an ongoing disconnect between the actors that were public and privately oriented. Public actors simply had larger and more complex motivations to participate, looking to not just offer data and services that the developer would need, but also wanting to ensure that a broader public good was met.
These wider interests led to discussions that were, for the real-estate developer, outside of the scope of their interest and sometimes even felt like they could be a distraction. Importantly, it also increased the number of problems that would need to be resolved before any work could begin. The narrower focus for the private-sector parties helped them to stay on a more focused path, which allowed them to progress more quickly and not get pulled into wider discussions about digital sovereignty, data rights, and other (legitimate) public interests.
An added wrinkle: the weak value proposition for federation (and data spaces in general?)
While six hours of role play did see some convergence, the players ultimately came to option 2, forgoing federation. One point that was made clear was that the value proposition for the federation (or even the data spaces) was weaker than expected—and this came down to a key legal point. While joining a data space created obligations for onboarding, it did not resolve a significant obstacle, namely the need to make agreements with each of the data holders within those data spaces. Some participants assumed that the negotiation was unnecessary, and that signing up for the data space meant that all data would become available. In some cases, it was suggested that the governance authorities of the data spaces could help facilitate those discussions, but given the nature of the data (which in many cases would be personal), any kind of generic agreement would not suffice.
Incomplete lessons: an n of 1 and letting it play longer
Of course, this is only a single exercise, and the role play could have played out for longer to understand better whether the Member State would accept a secondary role, helping to lay conditions to facilitate distrust between private actors that would undoubtedly come to the foreground the longer that a negotiation would take place. And of course, lessons here need to be put into a broader context of data spaces (and federations) of differing scopes and purposes. I would expect, for example, that if we ran a role play on digital product passports, where compliance to public sector requirements is a driving goal, that it would have led to a completely different dynamic. Nonetheless, in a context where private interests are a driving factor, the private sector seemed best placed to move things forward.
Next step: supplementing lessons with Agentic AI?
While it would have been great to have our actors for another day or two to continue the negotiation and see how the scenario would continue, people’s schedules (and perhaps energy levels) simply wouldn’t allow for it. It would also be helpful to run the scenario with different people to see if the same results would come about. While this does not seem to be a realistic option in a face-to-face setting, it doesn’t preclude using agentic AI–using our briefings for the appropriate prompts–to re-run the role play, tweaking the scenario and briefings to what changes it would bring about.
I’m currently using crewAI and have run the scenario once or twice using gpt-4o-mini to see what the result would be. I would hope my next post will address some of the results.
Now, does someone want to give me some tokens to play with?
