Leveraging or Exploiting? Breaking through data colonialism and ethnocentrism when building a diversity-aware social platform.

The extractive logic of Big Data-driven technology and knowledge production has raised
serious concerns. While most criticism initially focused on impacts on Western societies,
attention is now increasingly turning to consequences for countries and communities in
the Global South. To date, most criticism has focused on private sector activities. In this
paper, however, we argue that publicly funded knowledge and technology production
projects must also be viewed through the lens of a neocolonial critique. To do so, we
analyze the dynamics of collaboration in an EU-funded research project that is
collecting data for the development of a social platform with a focus on diversity. The
project includes pilot sites in China, Denmark, the UK, India, Italy, Mexico, Mongolia,
and Paraguay. We present the experiences on four of the pilot sites and reflect on the
original conception of the project, the challenges, ambiguities, and missed opportunities
we encountered, as well as our progress and results to date. We then analyze the
different experiences in comparison. As a result of our analysis, we identify key actions
needed to counter prevailing logics of data colonialism and eurocentrism, which we
believe are rooted in both historically grown structures of inequality and current
constraints ingrained in recent EU-funding policies.