Digital Data Sharing Agreement Tool

The Digital Data Sharing Agreement Tool is a templated tool for anyone collecting, managing, or sharing farmers’ data. It is designed for contracts with only a few parties, such as: a research project contract between a farmer and a research institute, or a farm business and a processor, or a farm business and another farm business.
 

Digital Data Sharing Agreement Tool

Background

Farmers and food producers play a crucial role in Australia’s food security. In addition to growing and manufacturing food for consumption, farms generate valuable data. This includes information about:

• the farm’s operations (e.g. data from tools and machinery)
• environmental conditions (e.g. climate and soil)
• other farm characteristics (e.g. transactions and GPS coordinates)

Providers of services, technology and/or equipment, including businesses and research organisations, often seek to use and analyse the data to improve farm yields and outcomes, or to identify potential system-wide improvements. 

The goal of this initiative is to enable food producers to safely and confidently adopt new technologies, participate in research, and share their data, for the benefit of improving the efficiency and quality of agriculture production.

CeRDI, together with the Australian Research Data Commons , created a digital, customisable data sharing agreement (DSA) template, based on the data sharing template created by the Food Agility CRC , incorporating best practices for data sharing and management between farmers and providers. CeRDI’s Data Policy Manager, Gabi Ceregra, led the project.

This Data Sharing Agreement Tool  provides a fair contract template for data sharing between farm businesses and those they share data with.

The Data Sharing Agreement template is for anyone collecting, managing, or sharing farmers’ data. It is designed for contracts with only a few parties, such as a research project contract between a farmer and a research institute, a farm business and a processor, or a farm business and another farm business. Anticipated beneficiaries of the project include the agricultural industry, exporters, researchers and industry.

Overall, the project has delivered the digital, customisable Data Sharing Agreement Tool, and accompanying user guide, to improve data sharing practices between food producers and providers.

This is accompanied by a certification program that intends to create trust and improve transparency when providers meet all the criteria of the Australian Farm Data Code , developed by the National Farmers’ Federation. Our partners are providing training to the food and agricultural industries about the Data Code and certification process. This training educates food producers about the value of their data, best practices for data management, and the benefits of the certification process.    
    
By fostering greater transparency between providers and food producers, this project empowers farmers and food producers to securely and confidently share their data.

For more information: Food Production Data Sharing Initiative | ARDC

Innovation

The original document template was converted from MS Word into HTML with additional markup to permit programmatic insertions, deletions and modifications of the template based on form responses. The logic rules that convert the base template depending on the form responses were encoded as JSON. These rules are applied by the tool to produce the final customised data sharing agreement (DSA).

Technical Features

The DSA tool was built with Laravel, Vue, Inertia, Vite and Tailwind and uses a PostgreSQL database.

It has the following features:

• Users are required to sign up/sign in and basic usage statistics are collected and are available via an admin dashboard.
• A help page explains how to use the tool.
• To create a DSA, a user enters details in a form (primarily selections from dropdown lists). When all questions are completed, a customised DSA is created and saved.
• DSAs can be viewed in the browser (with highlighted annotations), and they can be downloaded as PDF for printing and adding signatures.
• Users can view and manage their saved DSAs via a user dashboard.