PHAIDRAcon'26
Wednesday, October 28, 1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Closed meeting for PHAIDRA partners. Not intended for the public.
Location: Large Meeting Room, Neues Institutsgebäude (NIG), Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna, Austria.
Thursday, October 29, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Location: Sky Lounge (top floor), University of Vienna - Faculty of Business, Economics and Statistics and Faculty of Mathematics, Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, 1090, Vienna, Austria
PHAIDRAcon26 - Exploring Data Sovereignty
Sovereignty is an increasingly loaded and emotive word. In today's geopolitical climate, it has been adopted, adapted, co-opted and deployed by voices across the political spectrum until its meaning has become almost as contested as the concept it describes.
PHAIDRAcon'26 is diving into this contested territory. We are not planning to ride the digital sovereignty bandwagon, more to interrogate the driver and its passengers. We want to explore both the rhetoric and its real world implications. We welcome opinions and debate. And as a community with shared needs and objectives, we want to search together for common ground on data policy, practice and the standards and infrastructure that underpin it all.
Got insights on digital sovereignty? Let’s hear them!
Sovereignty on three levels: International, Institutional and Infrastructural
Throughout the day we are planning to examine how data sovereignty operates across these three different levels. Each has its own nuance, poses its own challenges and raises different questions, while in practice all three levels are deeply and unavoidably interconnected:
Data sovereignty has exploded onto the international policy agenda. The current re-emergence of nationalism and realpolitik has forced governments to confront their dependence on digital infrastructure they don't control.
- What does this growing digital sovereignty policy agenda look like in our different regions?
- What does it mean for data management in universities, cultural heritage organizations and other memory institutions, especially those outside of the USA?
- Is it possible, practical and necessary for organizations to sever ties to the monoliths of the US technology industry?
- What does a proactive (rather than purely defensive) digital sovereignty agenda look like - and is it even achievable?
- How does an increasingly protectionist agenda fit with the core principles of globalized open scholarship, open science and open access?
Memory institutions in academia and cultural heritage safeguard the epistemic record that underpins truth and knowledge in our society. So in a world where both politicization and unchecked corporate power are creeping into institutions where they don’t belong, there are few areas where data sovereignty has a more significant long-term importance.
- Open access, open scholarship and theories of public good have been promoting sharing - but does this apply to sharing state funded research with foreign AI, bots, and commercial proprietary LLMs?
- What are the opportunities and dangers for institutions in grasping tighter control over their digital assets?
- How does asserting greater institutional sovereignty over data fit with more open scholarship?
This is where we want to champion the primacy of data itself, and its sovereignty over the software and infrastructure used to manage it. It is where we plan to get practical, technical and unapologetically prescriptive. We would love to hear your experiences, challenges and best practice examples exploring data-first strategies as an approach to sharing, stewarding and preserving data.
- How do we protect data against inevitable and increasingly profound changes in the technology and infrastructure that we use to manage it?
- How do we choose between different data technologies, APIs, standards and formats? What are the trade-offs between sharing or short term accessibility and long term preservation?
- And coming full circle: Can APIs and Standards even become social and political acts?
Across all three levels, there is a common tension: between sovereignty and openness, control and collaboration, and between legitimate desires to protect and the equally valid reasons to share. But these are not contradictions to be resolved, they are polarities to be navigated. Navigating them well requires the kind of rigorous, cross-disciplinary conversation that brings data stewards, librarians, academics, curators and policy makers into the same room.
