Last month I was invited to talk at the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2023) at the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
I’m trying to think of how to describe this gathering… I had fun and met many lovely people with interesting ideas around governance, representation, voice, power. I shared some new work and research around privacy-preserving data governance, covering:
emerging privacy and cryptography tools and frameworks
models for data collectives, e.g. data trusts, data coops, data commons
interfaces for data consent and collective consent
models beyond “ownership” and “control”
community research and co-design
A summary and detailed notes of the workshop can be found on Bruce Schneier’s blog as well.
My personal highlights include meeting and befriending more sci-fi and speculative fiction writers, learning about community efforts to amend the constitution (which I didn’t consider as a possibility!), chatting with a privacy lawyer, discussing possible models for collective consent, thinking about new frameworks for data governance, and, as always, being in community with others excited to build and collaborate together.
I’ve also been thinking about:
the Creative Commons as a model for the digital commons
open source as digital public infrastructure
cryptography enabling data sharing in a way that can be both open and private
governance archaeology and ethnographic approaches to collective governance
consent as relational, networked consent
“What do we collectively want, and how do we build this shared future?”
Below are the slides from my talk, and here’s a link to them as well if you’d like to see my notes.
Thinking a lot these days about data privacy and digital consent models, especially for vulnerable populations. More specifically, currently working with my friend and collaborator Val Elefante from Lips.social on cryptography-enabled privacy protections, data coops, and collective consent interfaces, by and for sex workers, and excited to share more soon.
Also continuing research on governance archaeology in collaboration with Federica Caraguti and Nathan Schneider, investigating collective governance across culture, history, and geography, and my hope is to bring in a stronger decolonial and international lens to our work.
Wishing to publish more research and writing in this year, stay tuned :-)