DIASCA Virtual Learning Series - Session 1: Data Islands
Digital public infrastructure is gaining currency as a way for industries to coordinate at the level of whole sectors and value chains. Government-led models are not the only path. Drawing on examples from a diversity of global contexts, including telecommunications, pharma, and compliance with the EU deforestation regulation in producer countries, this opening session aims to surface the incentives, triggers, and levers (regulatory and/or otherwise) that help industries move from fragmented data islands towards shared infrastructures in service of the public interest.
Does anything other than regulation move a sector to build shared infrastructure?
Date: Thursday, September 24th, 14:30-16:00 pm CEST
Welcome & framing — Fragmentation ("data islands") worsens information asymmetry and threatens supply chain integrity; shared infrastructure and pre-competitive collaboration offer a way forward. We'll examine this through three lenses:
- Telecom inflection points: How regulation, falling revenue per user, and regional market integration pushed African telecom from siloed monopolies toward shared infrastructure.
- Three forces for pre-competitive collaboration in pharma: Pandemic rapid response, scaling through sustained engagement, and mobilizing the broader market.
- The game-theoretic case: Research on how repeated interaction among industry actors can drive movement toward pre-competitive collaboration.
We'll close with a discussion of cross-sector incentives, levers, and shocks: how to help shift industries toward pre-competitive collaboration more intentionally.
About the Learning Series:
The DIASCA Virtual Learning Series examines how the agri-food sector can build shared, pre-competitive infrastructure and services for more trustworthy supply chains. This can happen not only through government-led digital public infrastructure, but through a range of public, private, and public-private mechanisms that industries may leverage to realize this goal.
Each session opens with a central question to resolve, and each contributes to the next. The series moves from recognizing the triggers, incentives, or shocks that may move an industry to collaborate; to consolidating shared interests into a shared mandate for building solutions; architecting solutions at a sector level; building the governance that guides their evolution and growth; and finally applying it all so that shared infrastructures can make supply chains themselves more trustworthy at scale. Four threads run throughout: supply chain integrity, mediation and co-design, shared infrastructure, and governance.
The Series will include 5 Sessions starting in September 2026. It is organized and facilitated by Brian King (Senior Manager for Technology Integration) & Federico Ceballos Sierra (Postdoctoral Fellow) from the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT (CGIAR) and John Keogh (Professor of Practice) from McGill University Center for the Convergence of Health and Economics.
Disclaimer: Please note that the Sessions takes place in English only and will be recorded and transcribed. The recording will be published on the SASI YouTube channel and website and shared with the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT (CGIAR) team.