Ian Oppermann is Chair of Data Standards for the Commonwealth and Industry Professor at UTS. From a lifetime in AI and driving technology to serve the needs of consumers and their data rights, he is partnering with Charlsey Pearce of the Mortar CAP data standard. They led a sector workshop at AWS in Sydney recently of sector representatives jointly crafting a white paper to guide improved data stanrads to serve the needs of lifelong learners in a harmonised tertiary education system. They reflect on the workshop and the issues it addressed before bringing its progress to a workshop at the HEDx event on November 5.