Participatory Data Governance in Practice

Workshop @ ACM CHI ‘26

Date TBA — Submit here by 12 Feb

We’re excited to open submissions for our next workshop on Participatory Data Governance, which will be held in April as part of ACM CHI 2026 in Barcelona, Spain.

This is the latest event in a collaboration between researchers at the UC Berkeley Responsible AI Initiative and the Compliant and Accountable Systems Group, along with a number of other collaborators. See our full CHI workshop proposal here.

Participatory data governance is about creating ways for communities to have seat at the table when decisions are made about data—what gets collected, who can access it, how it's used, and what happens when things go wrong. This includes structural approaches like data trusts, cooperatives, and other intermediaries, as well as the day-to-day mechanics of participation: ensuring representation, decision rules, consent and contestation processes, and ways of reaching (or managing) disagreement. These approaches are attracting plenty of academic research and some early proofs-of-concept. Our goal is to bring together early practitioners and researchers to create a community of practice, to better understand and push forward these methods.

That's where the CHI community's expertise becomes essential. This workshop brings HCI perspectives—participatory design, co-design, transparency, and accountability—into direct conversation with emerging socio-legal frameworks for data governance. Our aim is practical: to share what's working, name what's hard, and develop methodological “building blocks” that teams can adapt to their own contexts.

We welcome attendees from both research and practice, including people who are new to participatory data governance but want to bring an HCI lens to this fast-moving area.

Call for participation

This interactive workshop offers insights and opportunities to explore models of participatory data governance, highlighting how existing insights of the CHI community can play a key role in moving this space forward.

The workshop will feature presentations and an expert panel to establish a common ground and language before providing opportunities for exploration and discussion in the form of a co-design exercise, mapping own experiences onto a taxonomy, and reflections on findings.

We invite a broad range of participants from academia and practice and thus offer two different avenues to apply for attendance.

First, we invite participants with existing practical experience or research insights into the topic to submit a short paper (up to two pages) describing their experience, focusing on:

  1. an outline of their project and its context;

  2. how this went / is going; and

  3. key takeaways and learnings.

We will select a subset of these and invite them to present their insights to the group in short lightning talks.

For participants that are interested in methods / approaches to participatory data governance but without prior experience, we offer a less formal process in the form of a motivation letter (max one page) that explains their interest in the topic.

To submit your short paper or motivation, letter, please submit via this form. For any other questions, email workshop.submissions@postanalogue.net