2025 has been a busy, transformative year for data stewardship. We’ve seen new trends emerge, familiar themes evolve, and long-standing priorities gain fresh momentum. Across the globe, one message has come through loud and clear: the world needs more common-good–driven initiatives that place people and the planet at the heart.

To wrap up the year, our co-founder, Stefaan Verhulst, hosted the final edition for the year of our “Data Stewardship Trends to Watch” series for our growing alumni community, now 180+ strong and spanning the globe.

On December 3rd, Stefaan distilled the year’s most notable developments into the 10 S’s of 2025, spotlighting new research, field insights, and global discoveries across the following ten categories:

• Simplification Narrative; 

• Smart Data;

• Scraping Concerns; 

• Shifting Science; 

• Sovereign vs Self-Determination; 

• Scarcity Narratives; 

• Sustainability; 

• Social Responsiveness; 

• Synthetic Worlds; 

• Safety and Security. 

Check out a recording of the full conversation here. The following resources were discussed during the session:

Simplification Narrative

Digital Omnibus, Data Union Strategy, EU Business Wallets, The rise of simple, modular data governance templates (Data Safeguards, DPI Safeguards, AI transparency templates) 

• Simpler EU digital rules and new digital wallets to save billions for businesses and boost innovation

• Simpler digital rules to help EU businesses grow

• Building a fairer digital future starts with trusted data: A governance assessment framework for digital public infrastructure

• Commission presents template for General-Purpose AI model providers to summarise the data used to train their model

Smart Data

UK Legislation, Smart Data Research, Social Data for Health 

• Data (Use and Access) Act 2025

• Smart Data Research 

• Social Data for Health: Advancing health and wellbeing research across disciplines

Scraping Concerns 

• Wikipedia urges AI companies to use its paid API, and stop scraping 

• The Company Quietly Funneling Paywalled Articles to AI Developers

• Reddit will block the Internet Archive

• Cloudflare Blocks AI Bots from Scraping Web Content Without Permission

• CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI

• Responsible Data Collection Alliance 

Shifting Science

• OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2025 Driving Change in a Shifting Landscape

• After science

• President Trump Launches the Genesis Mission to Accelerate AI for Scientific Discovery

Sovereign vs Self-Determination

National DPIs (India, Ukraine, Africa AI Council) and sovereign AI infrastructure, AI-sovereign clouds, sovereign LLMs, and domestic compute strategies, and Eurostack

• India has big plans to export its e-government technology

• Regional Power, Policy Shaping and Digital Futures: Norm Externalization through the Delhi and Beijing Effects

• The Smart Africa’s Board Unveils the inaugural Africa AI Council to Lead the Continent’s AI Transformation

• The Digital Public Infrastructure Map: Ukraine

• Google Sovereign Cloud

• EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework

• At the Sovereignty Summit, Europe Put Start-Ups on Stage and Kept Big Tech in Control

• SOOFI: Europe’s answer to ChatGPT

• Eurostack Report

• European Network for Technological Resilience and Sovereignty (ETRS) to strengthen Europe’s Digital Future

Scarcity Narratives

Data Winter

• No, AI hasn’t run out of data

• The Emergence of a Data Winter: The Growing Enclosure of Data at a Time of Rapid AI Advances

• Why We Need a Carnegie Moment for the Age of AI

Sustainability

Environmental Sustainability: Carbon Cost of AI Training and Data Centers, Financial sustainability of open-source, public media, and civic data ecosystems. 

• Germany’s Data Center Boom is Pushing the Power Grid to Its Limits

• Environmental impact and net-zero pathways for sustainable artificial intelligence servers in the USA

• Governance and Business Models for Sustainable Health Data Collaboratives

• Open Source: The Surprising Engine of Profit and Sustainability

Social Responsiveness

From Open Data to Data Commons for AI

• A Blueprint to Unlock New Data Commons for AI

• The New Commons Challenge proves the power of data collectives

Synthetic Worlds

Explosion of synthetic datasets for health, mobility, labor, and training, Rise of simulated worlds (e.g., DeepMind’s Genie 3, Weather Lab AI), and Debate over synthetic data governance and its lifelong risk footprint. 

• Synthetic Health Data

• Synthetic Mobility Data: The Future of Smart Urban Planning

• Genie 3: A new frontier for world models

• Weather Next 2 by Google Deepmind

• Governing synthetic data in medical research: the time is now

• Opportunities and challenges of frontier data governance with synthetic data

Safety and Security 

Security and Vulnerabilities

• Cloudflare apologises for outage which took down X and ChatGPT

• Amazon’s global outage exposes major vulnerabilities to American life

Interested to learn more about data stewardship trends? Sign up for the Data Stewards Network mailing at this link. Or contact [email protected] to learn more.

Back to the Blog