At the end of last year I got to attend

here in London. Mozilla events are consistently extraordinarily in their format and coordination level. It's a thousand-person unconference that actually works.

The only issue is immense FOMO as you try to pick between attending a roundtable discussion on gendered voice assistants, a panel on The Algorithmic Gaze, or a debate on The Future of Disinformation. You can browse through the overwhelming variety of sessions they ran

---

One of my favourite sessions was on Data Unions and the Future of Data with speakers from

and the

Open Data Institute

I hadn't encountered the concepts of

and

Data Trusts

before. While we're all acutely aware of the current economic-internet-clusterfuck where we seem to pay nothing for services, and invisibly hand over valuable data, you don't often hear reasonable solutions to the problem.

Other than some vague mumblings about blockchain that are swiftly followed up with an offer to buy into an ICO...

I'm broadly interested in the idea of what

might look like.

I sketched out some notes during the session which should give you a general idea of the model. I can't speak to any of the technical aspects or feasibility of this, but the concept is intriguing.

Apologies if the writing gets small - put your browser's zoom function to good use