Meet Richard Mullane, advisor to the Data Collaboration Alliance

Richard is a California-based architect, urban designer, and urban planner with experience in transport infrastructure, commercial and education campuses, and waterfront precincts.

Tell us about yourself

My name is Richard Mullane and I'm an architect, urban designer, urban planner, and I'm a Principal at Hassell, an Australian and international design practice.

What's your relationship with data?

At Hassell, our mission is to design the world's best places, places that people love. So that obviously means understanding places in our cities and understanding people and their behavior and what they want.

So data is obviously central to a lot of that but increasingly, in times of a changing climate, I have a bit of a focus on resilience and understanding climate risks and how places are changing over time, and that informs design and strategies to protect the places that we love

Why the Data Collaboration Alliance?

Central to what I do is really working with communities and trying to understand them. So a core part of that is trust and that's something that I have in common with what the Data Collaboration Alliance is doing and really about building that trust for allowing people to retain control over their data.

I really believe that will open up more access to our profession and to those who work in the design of places and cities. It'll mean better places created for those communities and more trust and that cycle will go around.

Your invitation

So I'm keen to get as many people within the urban design and planning and cities industry out there to go and check out datacollaboration.org and particularly to look at the iOWN initiative and the potential for more sort of cross-border, cross-agency data sharing through this principle of "access not copies".

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The Data Collaboration Alliance is a nonprofit working to advance data ownership through pilot projects in sustainability, healthcare, education, and social inclusion. We also offer free training in the Data Collaboration methodology. Check out The Data Drop podcast on our website or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.