The World Internet Conference’s data working group held a meeting with over 30 experts from the global data field in Beijing on Dec 22 and engaged in in-depth discussions on the proposed framework of a research report on international data cooperation.

The report framework summarizes the main challenges in the international data cooperation right now, proposes the consensus in principle to promote international data cooperation, and outlines an action plan to build an international data cooperation ecosystem accordingly. The research report will also include industry best practices and cases extensively, as well as enterprises’ problems and solutions in cross-border data cooperation from the three aspects of policy, technology, and governance.

The meeting’s participants agreed upon the current report framework's clarity and comprehensiveness. 

Given the increasing awareness of data security protection globally, it is the right time to study the construction of an international data cooperation ecosystem, which will help address the challenges faced by enterprises in cross-border business operations, they said.

They also suggested that the research report focus on specific scenarios of cross-border data flow to seek practical solutions.

At the meeting, member institutions and enterprises expressed their willingness to actively participating in the subsequent research and report writing.

The working group’s senior consultant, a professor from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Ji Weidong, provided content suggestions for the subsequent writing of the report. About 20 experts and scholars from WIC member such as the British Standards Institution, IBM, SAP, Tesla, Alibaba, Qualcomm, State Grid Corporation of China, Hangzhou Anheng Information Technology Co Ltd, Lenovo, Ant Group, Cisco, China Unicom, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, and China Mobile, as well as representatives from related units in the data field, including Swiss Re Group, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and CITIC Group discussed the report framework and research outline.