Abstract: Amidst a digital era marked by privacy and autonomy concerns, the question of data ownership becomes crucial, especially as AI models, built on extensive data, influence global activities. This paper introduces data cooperatives as a transformative model addressing these issues through a human-centric lens. It explores the synergy of data cooperatives, the Small Worlds phenomenon, and 'Social Portfolios' as answers to the trilemma of decentralization, scalability, and trust in digital governance. This synergy seeks to harmonize technical and human dynamics through three integrated elements: 1) the Small Worlds framework, serving as a continuum to foster trust and balance between local clustering and global connectivity, crucial for maintaining social cohesion at every level; 2) ‘Social Portfolios’, offering a dual approach by a) embedding the Small Worlds framework within technological systems, thereby respecting the complexity of social capital, informal interactions, and privacy, and b) aligning individual and communal aspirations by cultivating social capital in networks characterized by mutual accountability, shared interests, and interdependence; 3) and the human-centric approach of data cooperative governance, aimed at nurturing community dynamics without being eclipsed by the prevailing business-centric (web2) or techno-centric (web3) models. Highlighting the European digital research infrastructure as a fertile foundation, the paper proposes Community Living Labs as viable experimental sites and encourages cross-disciplinary collaboration to integrate networking capabilities with cooperative governance, charting a path towards a more empathetic digital future.

Keywords: Community Living Labs, Data Cooperatives, Data Ownership, Decentralized Governance, Human-Centric Systems, Relational Trust, Small Worlds, Social Portfolios, Social Scalability, Trilemma.