Stefaan G. Verhulst | Search arXiv

arXiv2026

From Voice to Leverage in Data Governance. Building Enforceable Social License for Data ReUse

Contemporary data governance has converged on participation. Citizens assemblies, deliberative polls, codesign workshops, and community advisory panels are now routinely suggested to build trust and secure a social license for the reuse of data. Yet this consensus rests on an unexamined assumption: that giving affected communities a voice will, on its own, change what data holders do. This paper argues that the field needs to complement voice with leverage: the capacity of individuals and communities to make their participation consequential by attaching credible legal, institutional, contractual, economic, or reputational costs to being ignored. Drawing on labor relations bargaining theory, the sociology of disputes, and James C. Scott's account of legibility, we develop leverage as an analytic category defined by three properties: it is counterfactual, enforceable, and durable. We further argue that leverage presupposes epistemic legibility affected publics can rarely impose costs on a system they cannot see, document, or contest; and that most existing transparency instruments equip regulators and procurers rather than the governed. We then map six sources from which communities and data subjects can derive leverage (legal and regulatory; institutional decision; contractual; economic; data access; and political and reputational), examine the intermediary structures that aggregate and sustain it, and propose a six dimension evaluative framework: obligation, enforceability, consequence, monitoring equipment, revocability, and institutional durability for auditing whether any social license process actually redistributes power. The paper's central claim is that a social license worth the name must share the properties of a legal license: conditions, a licensor, and enforceable remedies for breach.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

From Open Standards to Openly Governed: Standards-Setting Organizations as Stewards of Openness amid Platformization and Digital Sovereignty

Open geospatial standards let data, services, and systems work across platforms. But openness is not just a property of specifications. It also depends on the institutions that produce them and the infrastructures in which they operate. Standards may function as digital public goods and, once embedded in public systems, as digital public infrastructure. Those roles can diverge. This paper asks when open geospatial standards remain public infrastructure rather than becoming channels of enclosure. It makes two claims. First, standards-setting governance matters: institutional design shapes whether open specifications retain their public-good character. Second, geospatial coordination is shifting toward proprietary location stacks, APIs, and cloud platforms, where roadmaps, pricing, and service terms increasingly set the rules. Sovereign-cloud and sovereign-AI strategies relocate this power rather than remove it. These dynamics reinforce each other. Weak governance pushes coordination toward the implementation layer; platformization, in turn, reduces incentives to invest in open standardization, weakening portability and FAIR reuse. Standards bodies cannot reverse platformization, but they still control the specification layer. Where legal safeguards are limited, internal governance becomes key. We frame this through four dimensions: Purpose, Principles, People and Processes, and Policies and Practices (the 4Ps framework) while stressing the limit that internal governance cannot solve alone an external structural problem.

cs.CY↗