The Data Donation Symposium 2026 brings together applied researchers, methodologists, legal and ethical experts, research engineers, and software developers with an interest in using digital trace data for scientific research purposes.
Visit the symposium website for full details.
Researchers are invited to submit abstracts exploring data donation as a research methodology. Topics of interest include:
Collection, Ethics & Infrastructure
Methodological Innovations
Submission requirements: PDF, anonymized for double-blind review, maximum 500 words including references. One first-author submission per person.
View the full call for abstracts – contact lion.wedel@weizenbaum-institut.de with questions.
| Abstract submission deadline | April 30, 2026 |
| Notification of acceptance | July 31, 2026 |
| Symposium | October 1-2, 2026 |
Data donation is a promising method for studying online behaviour at scale, but navigating its legal and ethical landscape remains a significant challenge. Issues related to personal data collection, platform terms and conditions, and ethics approval procedures are often handled differently across institutions, with limited shared standards or templates.
This workshop brings together stakeholders from across disciplines to address these challenges collaboratively. Through presentations, discussions, and scenario-based breakout sessions, participants will explore emerging approaches to data donation research within the RIGHTS project, review draft legal and ethics templates, and provide feedback to help refine them for broader use.
The aim of the workshop is to support the development of more consistent, practical, and ethically sound frameworks that can be adapted across institutional contexts, and to strengthen collaboration between universities working in this area.
]]>After a succesful 2024 Data Donation Symposium in Amsterdam, our colleagues in Germany hosted the 2025 Data Donation Symposium. The event took place on October 9 and 10 at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Please find all information about this event HERE!
]]>May 30-31st at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
We thank all participants of the symposium for their contributions! Photos to the symposium can now be accessed here.
An overview of the program can be found here. Find here an extended version of the program including all abstracts and authors.
The symposium takes place at Zoku Amsterdam, Weesperstraat 105. See here for more details on the location.
We are happy to announce Melinda Mills as the keynote speaker for the symposium, where she will talk about Data4Science, a platform for individuals to take control of their own data, donate, understand it, shape their own behaviour and share it for broader health and behavioural research.
Mills is Professor of Demography and Population Health and Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford. She also holds a part-time position as Professor of Data Science and Public Health Policy at the University of Groningen. Data4Science emerged out of her ERC Consolidator Grant SOCIOGENOME, ERC Advanced Grant (CHRONO) and ERC Proof of Concept Grant DNA4Science. She has written 7 books and over 150 articles, including two applied statistics books, in the areas of demography, genetics, inequality, sociology, statistics, health and policy.
See the program to read the keynote’s abstract.
In the morning of the 30th of May, a course is organized where we teach the basics of how to prepare your own data donation study using the data donation software Port. A document providing further information about the course can be found here.
The course is currently fully booked. Please email l.boeschoten@uu.nl to be added to the waiting list.
Registration to the symposium is now closed.
Both the symposium and the short course are free of charge.
Below you can find the program of earlier data donation symposia:
]]>The 2023 Data Donation Symposium took place on 11–12 September 2023 in Zurich, hosted by the University of Zurich. It offered a platform to discuss data donation as an approach to make digital trace data accessible for academic research.
The keynote, “Beyond data donation — some practical examples,” was given by Paul-Olivier Dehaye. Five sessions covered empirical studies, legal aspects, bias in data donation studies, data donation collection tools, and methodological considerations.
For the full program, abstracts, and registration archive, see the original event page on datadonation.uzh.ch.
]]>Data Donation Day, held on 11 March 2022 at Utrecht University, brought together applied researchers, methodologists, research engineers and software developers with an interest in using digital trace data for scientific research. The event ran in hybrid format at the Boothzaal of the University Library in Utrecht and on Microsoft Teams.
The organizing committee was Laura Boeschoten, Daniel Oberski, Kyuri Park, Qixiang Fang, and Marianne Geelhoed.
For the original event page, including the full program, speakers, and abstracts, see the Data Donation Day announcement on hds.sites.uu.nl.
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