IN-SIGHT presents: Standards in the making

STANDARDS IN THE MAKING: Join us for an active dialogue and co-design session on participatory standard-making

You are cordially invited to take part in a co-design session for the project “In-Sight: Making the hidden visible: Co-designing for public values in standards-making and governance”. The project started in October 2020 and will run until March 2025. It is funded by the Dutch Research Council and it investigates standard-making in relation to democratic values and practices. It asks how the public sphere is governed today through the standardization of the digital and how to support societal values in the creation of standards.

This project investigates three cases of national relevance in the Netherlands and global breadth:

• the development and implementation of 5th generation (5G) cellular mobile communication;
• and the development of cybersecurity standards for the Internet of Things;
• and identity management standards (e.g., DigID).

In so doing, the project contributes to illuminating the values (or lack thereof) into technical standards, the relation and the balance of power between a variety of public (e.g., states) and private actors (e.g., the industry, consumers), informal lawmaking and multistakeholder governance mechanisms.

Session Overview

Participants will be invited to I)reflect on the societal impact of standards and their governance, and II) share their visions and ideas for designing value-responsive and participatory standard-making processes for digital infrastructure.

We will wrap up the sessions by discussing key take-aways and recommendations for designing a methodology for standardization bodies to assess and account for the societal impact of standards and to engage ordinary people in the process of standardization, especially in the field of digital infrastructure.

You can sign up for one of our sessions here: 

• March 18th (Tue) 14:30-16:00 or 16:30-18:00 @UvA Humanities Lab
• March 19th (Wed) 14:30-16:00 or 16:30-18:00 @UvA BG1 Room 0.16

You are also invited to join the In-Sight final event on March 21st which will conclude the project by creating a space to think about what we mean by citizenship and standard-setting in digital networks. Read more about this event here and sign up here.

TIME: March 21st (Fri) 12:30 – 16:00 (lunch will be served at 12:00 and a borrel will follow
after the concluding remarks)
LOCATION: The Humanities Lab (Bushuis F0.01, Kloveniersburgwal 48)

Below is the (tentative) program:

12:00-12:30 doors open; light lunch will be served
12:30-12:45 intro to In-Sight
12:45-13:45 Session 1: Values in tech and standard-making (speakers TBD)
13:45-14:00 coffee break
14:00-15:00 Session 2: Perspective from data science (speakers TBD)
15:00-16:00 Session 3: Perspective from legal and participatory design (speakers TBD)
16:00-16:15 concluding remarks and borrel

We are also planning a workshop on participatory research methods on March 20th at the Humanities Lab. Please read more about the workshop and sign up here if you would like to engage in discourse around how to incorporate participatory design into research!

Please contact Meg Kitamura (m.kitamura@uva.nl) if you have any questions!

More information see: In-Sight Co-Design Workshop Flyer