Institutionalising data solidarity? The making of expertise in the EU Social Economy Code of Conduct for data sharing

Data sharing has become a cornerstone of EU digital policy. Beyond legislation, informal regulatory arrangements like codes of conduct are used to guide practices across sectors. In the social economy, where organisations follow collective purpose and governance, this raises the challenge of institutionalising solidarity-oriented data approaches. In this paper, we examine the drafting of the 2024 EU Code of Conduct for Data Sharing in the Social Economy (CoC), a rare case in which CoC development was led by civil society actors with support from, but explicitly no authorship of, the European Commission. The question remains how and to what extent solidarity-based economy principles can be institutionalised. Drawing on participant observation and archival sources, we retrace how the CoC took shape, what was left out, and how expertise was co-produced and contested. We identify three institutionalisation dynamics (generating, grading, ghosting) through which solidarity-based expertise was institutionalised in contingent ways. Our analysis shows the CoC’s provisional achievements but also its dependence on formal approval and symbolic endorsements, like forewords and logos. The paper contributes to debates on data solidarity, digital solidarity economies and the sociology of expertise by clarifying both the potential limits of voluntary instruments in institutionalising solidarity-based data sharing expertise.