The Omidyar Network has announced a $1.1 million competition seeking transformative solutions that create a new social, ethical, and economic framework and establish greater fairness in the data economy.

In collaboration with Carrot, an online competition platform, the Future of Data Challenge will award a total of $1.1 million to as many as 10 solutions that reimagine the data value chain and help build a more equitable and inclusive data future. Open to submissions from around the world, the competition will look for strategies that combine technology and evidence-based concepts with new business and economic models, institutions, and processes, alongside strategies to engage stakeholders and build alliances toward creating a new data economy.

According to Omidyar, the outmoded concept of “data as property”—where a person’s information collected by a business becomes its property to be used and monetized with little or no consent—exposes people to ever greater social, physical, and financial risk. Data can also be used to discriminate and exclude entire groups of people from opportunity or to make vulnerable populations even more so.

“We need a new data culture,” said Omidyar Network director of responsible technology Sushant Kumar. “We hope this challenge encourages society to reconsider what data means, how we distribute the risks and benefits, and how we can infuse fairness across institutions, technology, policies, and cultural norms.”

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