Medellín’s mayor needs a climate-data dashboard with open data standards. He types “open climate data” into the new Datasphere Observatory, filters for Latin-American, Spanish-speaking organisations and, in seconds, three NGOs appear—each backed by a different international foundation. What once required weeks of cold calls and scattered websites and reports now takes a coffee break.

Why “data governance” shapes daily life

Data governance—the rules that decide who may collect, share and reuse data—can sound abstract, yet its footprint is everywhere. It determines how vaccine records travel between clinics, whether air-quality sensors trigger school warnings, and how cloud contracts protect personal files when they cross borders. Each time you tap a health app or read a wildfire alert, an unseen policy has already cleared the path for data to move, —or blocked it.

When governance rules stay hidden or fragmented, systems misfire. Clinics re-enter the same patient data, city halls buy duplicate sensors, and donors pour money into pilots that never scale. Worse, public trust erodes when citizens sense their information is used without clear safeguards. 

Visibility is the antidote: knowing who sets the rules, where they operate and how they connect lets governments borrow proven ideas instead of reinventing them and lets watchdogs spot weak links before scandals erupt.

The Datasphere Observatory supplies that visibility in actionable form. It gathers NGOs, public agencies, start-ups and philanthropic funders on one interactive map, tagging each by theme and working language. The fragmented landscape of actors are structured now as clickable profiles; opaque relationships crystallise as network lines. 

Public and private organization gain an instant global benchmark and inventory, donors pinpoint gaps instead of duplicating grants, and journalists trace influence without days of e-mail tag. Put simply, clearer governance data means smarter, faster analysis decisions for everyone from global philanthropies to community advocates.

From landmark Atlas to living public tool

On 5 June 2025 the Datasphere Initiative published the Datasphere Governance Atlas, the second, updated edition of its peer-reviewed survey of the global data-policy ecosystem. Two years of interviews, regional workshops and document checks yielded 420 in-depth profiles and a map of 778 organisations across more than 100 countries. 

Each profile captures mission, projects, languages, partnerships and topical focus—from health data trusts in West Africa to sandboxes in Europe.

For researchers, the Atlas offers a stable baseline. It quantifies the strength of NGOs in field building (44% of all mapped actors), that the Global South is a shaper (61% of profiled entities focus primarily on Africa, Latin America or South/Southeast Asia) and that hot-button issues, that is,—AI, health, climate, —absorb nearly two-thirds of recent experiments. Those findings anchor policy briefs, grant strategies and newsroom explainers.

Yet a static report —even a data-rich one —ages the moment it is downloaded. As soon as the Atlas launched, new players have undoubtedly emerged: a youth-led data-rights coalition in Nairobi, a health data patient NGO in São Paulo. The Datasphere Observatory answers that dynamism. 

Every Atlas entry now feeds a public database that will be refreshed as users suggest additions or corrections. Editors vet each change, preserving factual rigour while letting the map grow with the field it tracks. The result is authority plus freshness: the Atlas tells the story so far; the Observatory shows the plot unfolding.

Today the live dataset includes 62 philanthropic funders, 200-plus topical tags and multilingual coverage—English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and more. Whether you track digital trade in Asia-Pacific or open-health data in West Africa, the Observatory connects the dots in real time.

How the Datasphere Observatory works

Search

Most visitors begin with a single search box. Enter a topic, an organisation’s name or a funder and the map highlights every match. Sidebar filters let readers narrow the results by theme, language or type of actor.

See

Clicking a dot opens a profile that lists the organisation’s mission, current projects, partners and contact details. Topic tags — climate, infrastructure, economic development and others — offer a quick picture of the full scope of its work.

Follow

Switching to the interactive graph reveals how entries connect. Lines indicate joint projects, common funders or overlapping themes. Users can zoom, pan or isolate sub-networks to trace where collaborations are forming and spot gaps.

Quality Control

Behind the scenes, a light-touch moderation queue safeguards quality. Users propose edits; Datasphere Initiative’s editors—with experience from academia, government, business and civil society—approve, amend or decline with notes. 

Explore the beta and find partners in minutes

The early access version of the Datasphere Observatory is free to explore at this link. Visitors can:

• search the live map by topic, region or language;
• download the 2025 Datasphere Governance Atlas for background and citations;
• suggest new actors or corrections via form; and
• sign up for update alerts as the database grows.

By linking NGOs, foundations, and themes in a single interactive view, the Datasphere Observatory turns a once-opaque field into a shared asset — ready for policymakers, funders, journalists and citizens who believe better data decisions lead to better outcomes.

Subscribe for e-mail alerts so the next time a funder enters your field —or a new NGO speaks your language — you hear about it first. 

One link, countless connections: start exploring today.
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