Almost every business or organisation generates or consumes events in the course of it's day to day activities. These businesses collaborate with others that share a common domain of interest but the value in this collaboration tends to be low and the friction is high. Organisations are silos, the technical and governance means by which data is shared are bespoke, inextensible and duplicative. The default information sharing approach in industry and across regulatory authorites at this time favours the sharing of raw data. This increases duplication in the storage of data and the processing over it and raises the barrier to entry in information sharing forcing consumers to make sense of the data and increasing the chance of semantics leaking over the boundaries of large numbers of organisations.
- join expertise across organisations and individuals participating in mutually beneficial ecosystems to improve decision making
- give control to participants over how and when they contribute their insight and expertise and what is done with it by others
- minimise data - reducing duplication in the administration and storage of and inference over information
- provide more scalable and extensible alternatives to the current high-friction share mechanisms
Information Sharing Networks (ISNs) allow organisations to securly exchange information in the form of signals. Signals are simple messages that conform to an agreed specification and allow for replies or contributions, enhancing the shared information by accumulating endorsements, corrections, opinions and so on.
The network sharing infrastructure is very lightweigt and is designed so that data is held securly and can only be viewed by authorized participants. New networks and the associated infrastructure can be set up in minutes.
The initial implementation can be found in the isn-ref-impl repo. Version 2 can be found in signalsd
To support the deployment of this type of a technology we have created a Framework Agreement that allows information to be exchanged between groups of public and private orgnaisations with a shared interest or objective.
The Framework Agreement makes it easier for organisations to cooperate by minimising the paperwork needed when a new information sharing requirement is identified.
