Hello, welcome to Common.

We’re a (nearly) registered charity in the UK and Ireland, working on projects to harness big data for the collective good of humanity. In practice, we work with complex or hostile datasets, FOI requests, and self-built datasets to produce insights and toolkits for various applications.

We have leveraged seemingly unrelated financial transaction databases to rescue victims of modern slavery and human trafficking, cross-referenced unlikely datasets to produce 100% detection of illegal HMOs, and reveal predictable bias in our First-tier tribunal system; insights raised out of our ecosystem of products and tools have directly influenced the Renters Rights Act rent repayment order threshold.

But data for good isn’t the norm. Big data feels like noise because it’s not designed to surface utility for the average person. The big data economy seeks to extract as much value from people as it possibly can, converting mood, sentiment, and connections into nodes in a graph. In data-native capitalist markets, feelings become price signals, mood becomes a market, and people start to be valued less than the data they produce.

But the data is out there to make the world work for you, because there are millions of people experiencing the same hardships and friction every day. The insight sits across data, held by people who have no incentive to optimise for human wellbeing, and so remains unactioned.

Until now.

Common is a vehicle to scale up the human virtue of knowledge production from information. We ingest data and we produce actionable intelligence that serves us all, without a myopic and constraining profit incentive. This is data put to good use, by good people, for all.

common.charity