CREATING DATA SHARING
IN MARITIME
Recently I wrote Initial Thoughts on Maritime Tech, enumerating some high-level thoughts about how systems thinking can contribute to the future of maritime technology.
While reading trade news, I came across an article that shows how two points in the high-level direction phase down from the strategic to the tactical. Namely, the points of "engineer adaptive systems" (and its sub-point: "capture the data you generate in forms other people can actually use, within appropriate commercial and liability boundaries") and "align incentives with long-term system health" are clearly manifest in the article and its supporting white paper.
That white paper is The Floating Balance Sheet (June 2026), researched and written by Sławomir Wyciślak, PhD of Jagiellonian University and Stefan Reidy of Atexxa Group, under the SC-CEOP Research Programme. It takes those recommendations and embodies them in the specifics of the domain, showing in greater detail what a systemic approach to shipping's data-sharing deadlock would look like... and why, structurally, the next few years hold opportunity despite a track record of similar projects that have failed.
Note that the leverage points identified by this paper are not purely technological. Technology, along with governance, is a component of the intervention. In contrast, the innovation is rooted in the game theory of real actor incentives, in a commercial function whose cross-sections flow through multiple actors, and ultimately in shortening and unifying a feedback loop comprised of physical, financial, and technological elements.
