The Entities in the Workflow Commons module get their data via Workflow State Change events. There is now an improved set of events and events handlers available (The state change events are deprecated). You can build your own event handlers that collect data in entities you control (i.e. define permissions) and what data should be made available to users outside of the workflow context.
Alternatively what many developers do is add an attribute to the context entity that gives an indication how far in the process the workflow instance is. This attribute (or entire context entity) can be added to the page showing "workflows I initiated"