TrustChain Open Call 3 “Economics and Democracy”

Deadline: 7-Feb-24

Calling all developers, innovators, researchers, SMEs and entrepreneurs to apply for TrustChain Open Call 3 (OC3) on “Economics & democracy” to define and build market mechanisms for data exchange and data trading as well as innovative win-win federated business models open data in compliance with GDPR and other regulations that implements techniques.

Specific Objectives

• The objective of this OC is to define and build market mechanisms for data exchange and data trading as well as innovative win-win federated business models open data in compliance with GDPR and other regulations that implements techniques such as:
  • Federated business models that consider fair rewarding of its participants
  • Establish new or enrich the existing marketplaces. Privacy preserving data sharing on third-party platforms
  • Fair data marketplaces: publish, search, discovery, other mechanisms in decentralized environments; negotiation mechanisms for data prices
  • Market competition that is fair and regulated in favour of the innovators.
  • Tokenization of assets and its fair trading, protection against scams such as rug pulls, initial coin offering (ICO) fraud in digital asset trading
  • Establishing the value of the coins based on their quality contents; creating liquidity in the existing data marketplaces.
  • Decentralized governance models that are fair and trustworthy to all the parties in a data exchange ecosystem
  • Use your eIDAS2 on the EU marketplaces
  • Effective data monetization strategies and business models to incentivize data providers to share their data on exchange platforms.
• Applications should cover real needs of the end-users in one a specific sector such as for example banking, education, healthcare, or e-government.

Funding Information

• The indicative budget is 1.755.000 € and will be distributed among up to 15 selected projects led and executed by a critical number of developers, innovators, researchers, SMEs and entrepreneurs among others, actively involved in research, development and application activities in the fields of data economics, data governance, blockchain, semantic web, ontology engineering, software engineering, Cloud engineering, digital twins, edge and fog computing, ecosystem economics, smart applications, cryptography, standardisation and security engineering.
• Selected projects will last for a duration of 9 months.

Challenges to be Addressed

Organizations must grapple with these challenges, ranging from establishing trust frameworks to addressing evolving privacy regulations and ensuring fair compensation for data contributors. Tackling these complexities necessitates collaborative efforts and innovative solutions to create a secure, transparent, and ethical data exchange environment. Some of the challenges to be tackled in this call are the following:

• The current form of data-sharing practises do not fairly reward the data owners/content producers. Data platform owners make decisions around the terms and conditions of data sharing.
• Accurate data discoverability on such marketplaces is a challenge. Precise matchmaking between sellers and buyers on a marketplace can significantly improve its performance.
• Data trading and exchange raise significant concerns about data privacy and security. There is a risk that sensitive or personal data could be mishandled, leading to privacy breaches, identity theft, or other malicious activities.
• Establishing enforceable data marketplace contracts for data exchange is missing; Clear and fair service level agreements for both sellers and buyers needs to be in place for a trustworthy marketplace. There is no standard pricing model for data, making it challenging to determine the fair market value of different data types. Mechanisms to ascertain the data quality and hence its price fairly is a challenging issue as the value of data can be subjective and context-dependent.
• Issue around data provenance exist as it can be difficult to verify the data source. Techniques to inspect the provenance of a specific product, service or data is missing. Open reputation management can be one of the solutions, but it requires careful design considerations.
• Establishing clear data governance practices, including data access controls and usage policies, is essential for responsible data exchange. Data governance frameworks can be complex to implement and enforce.

Mandatory Deliverables

• Projects selected and funded by the TrustChain consortium will have to deliver four mandatory deliverables during their lifetime. The four deliverables are defined below:
• D1: State of the art overview, use case analysis and preliminary technical specification of the solution. The deliverable should clearly specify how the proposed solution extends and/or upgrades the state-of-the-art.
• D2: Detailed technical specification of the solution, software implementation work plan, demo scenarios, number of end users that will be involved in any pilots, and preliminary business plan.
• D3: Implementation, deployment, testing, demonstration, and validation roadmap in a reallife application (e.g., banking, education, healthcare, utilities, defence or cross-border travel) and result of the validation process.
• D4: Modularised software components ready for distribution, full documentation for developers/users, final business plan.

Specific Requirements

• Only applicants legally established/resident in any of the following countries (hereafter collectively identified as the “Eligible Countries”) are eligible:
  • The Member States (MS) of the European Union (EU), including their outermost regions.
  • The Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT) linked to the Member States;
  • Horizon Europe associated countries

• Technical Requirement
  • The proposed solutions are intended to be co-created with end users focusing on online user privacy and data governance, adopting a user-friendly design. Therefore, they should be designed, implemented, piloted, and validated using a specific predefined and justified set of end users in an identified use case. The co-creation and validation approach should be clearly elaborated in the applicants’ proposal. A citizen digital vulnerable collectives’ approach that puts in the centre the needs of the general population and vulnerable people, instead of technical/experts’ users should be considered. It is intended that the solution is accessible for the general population as well as for the marginalized/vulnerable communities.
  • To this end, the applicant should show collaboration with an EU end-user organisation (i.e., banking, healthcare, education, policing etc.) as well as consider vulnerable groups for the evaluation /validation process if possible.
  • The focus should be on what is currently missing (e.g., trustworthy data access, ensuring clear and informed user content and expanding what already exists, thus scaling) rather than building something new from scratch. It is desirable that the selected projects be able to demonstrate their solution at TRL 7 in a real end-user setting. If something completely new must be built (see point above), then it should be well motivated why the nature of the problem warrants a new solution and why the state-of-the-art solutions do not solve it today (i.e., barriers to technology adoption).
  • The proposed solution should work within a specific business context and emphasis should be put on its scalability, on its energy efficiency and its minimum value proposition. Cross-border data sharing, moving data across EU-international borders should be carefully considered. It should be also compatible with existing data sharing frameworks, standards and demonstrate the energy efficiency through measurements that are quantifiable.
• Sustainability requirements
  • Various emerging technologies currently pose huge environmental impact. This negative impact should be assessed against the benefits from using these technologies. The applicants are requested to provide a short assessment of the trade-offs, considering from one viewpoint the benefits when using the technology, and from another, the potential energy-inefficiency.
• Regulatory and standards requirements
  • New economic/business models for the ecosystem economy, user centric data management, addressing privacy aspects, legally and regulatory compliance (e.g. GDPR-compliance, verification and certification of records of data processing activities).
• User centricity Requirements
  • A first step is to establish target groups of users. Once this is done, the users should be involved in the co-creation process. Then, accessibility standards should be incorporated through the onboarding according to the vulnerable collectives’ approach.
  • Following that, a roadmap with the appropriate methodologies should be set up. The roadmap should include the approach, objectives and phases of the testing, and sample size. The sample needs to be representative and randomized but within the relevant characteristics of the target population.

For more information, visit TrustChain.