PhD Position: Strategies for building data capacity

This fully funded PhD position is part of the EU Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska Curie ITN project entitled "ODECO: Towards a Sustainable Open Data ECOsystem" (see www.odeco-research.eu ). ODECO is a four-year project involving 15 PhD projects covering each a specific part of the open data ecosystem. The central aim of the ODECO consortium network is to train the next generation of creative and innovative early stage open data researchers, to unlock their creative and innovative potential to address current and future challenges in the creation of user driven, circular and inclusive open data ecosystems.

Current developments in the field of open data are characterised as highly fragmented. Open data ecosystems are often developed in different domains in isolation of each other and with little involvement of potential users, resulting in approaches that significantly limit open data reusability for users. This reduces innovation and the ability to create new valued added goods and services. Isolated domains also undermine interoperability for users acting as a barrier to data sharing. Efforts are also uncoordinated in open data training and research, where multidisciplinary approaches are scant.

Bringing together different sectors (research, private sector, government, non-profit) and different perspectives (public administration, law, business, engineering), ODECO aims to address the central challenge of realizing a user driven, circular and inclusive open data ecosystem. Through its novel research and training programme, ODECO will provide early stage researchers with relevant open data knowledge, skills and research experience.

The offered PhD position - ODECO ESR1 - is to raise data awareness and to build digital capacity to empower civil society in finding solutions and to take actions that improve their lives. By using participatory design methods to include a broader audience of non-specialist data users (e.g., citizens or civil servants) and connect them with data professionals, to co-create new public services, the ESR1 project aims to:

During the PhD, the candidate will conduct this research and prepare scientific articles presenting the research at conferences and in journals. To enable the candidate to do this successfully, TU Delft offers personal and professional training courses in the form of a graduate school, in which the candidate will participate (the fee is paid by the project and there are no additional costs for this). Furthermore, in addition to her/his scientific supervisors, the applicant will receive an independent senior researcher as mentor, to aid her/his personal career development.

As a Marie Curie ITN researcher, you will have the opportunity to conduct practical internships at world leading universities and case studies through the EU ITN network. The PhD candidate will be working at the Human-Centered Design Department (IDE faculty) and jointly supervised by dr. Ingrid Mulder (Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering) and prof. Marijn Janssen (Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management) and co-supervised by dr. Rikke Magnussen (Aalborg University).