[Air-L] CfP: Data for Policy 2022 Special Track - Deadline: 1 June

[Mamello Thinyane]

Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to submit to the Data for Policy 2022<https://dataforpolicy.org/data-for-policy-2022/> special track on Citizen-generated Data for Policy, Innovation, and Democratic Participation<https://dataforpolicy.org/special-track-6/>. The conference will use a hybrid format with in-person sessions held in three locations: Hong Kong (5th Dec), Seattle (9th Dec) and Brussels (13th Dec).

The deadline for submissions is 1st June 2022.

Session Overview:

Data innovations are having a growing effect on the participation of citizens in both political and non-political issues of public concern around the world. Initiatives to engage citizens through data platforms and systems are having an impact on numerous sectors, such as science, public health, humanitarian interventions, activism, and much more. At the same time, countries are beginning to develop policies that affect these systems, covering issues such as cybersecurity, data protection and privacy, and artificial intelligence. As we have observed in this regulatory process globally, citizens are not always at the centre of these policy processes, often competing with diverging national and corporate interests.

Citizen science is a way for citizens to engage with and learn about scientific processes, contribute to issues they care about, and effect change. Engagements commonly occur both in person – e.g. through environmental monitoring – or online. Crowdsourcing is a technique used both within citizen science and innovation, allowing either volunteers or paid crowd-workers to engage in activities such as data categorisation, often for later use in machine learning algorithms. Open source projects in many fields use similar approaches, including collaborative projects such as Open Street Maps or Wikipedia, where groups of users with specific interests contribute to achieving common goals. What all of these activities share is that citizens generate contribute or process data.

The motivation for this proposed track is therefore to allow researchers to highlight citizens' uses of data innovations, with the hope of placing citizens at the centre of future policy-making initiatives. The track aims to discuss challenges and opportunities in developing data platforms, systems and policies for civic participation, including for participation in global development processes, democratic participation and inclusion of marginalised communities. The aim of this special track is to explore and showcase the full potential of citizen-generated data in its many forms, for both policy and innovation. We will go into more depth on the specific challenges related to the generation, processing and use of citizen-generated data for policy and innovation; connections between policymakers, innovators, and citizens to enable the use of such data; and case studies of both successful and unsuccessful connections.

Possible topics might include (but not be limited to):

  *   Consultations and monitoring for regional or global development (such as the Sustainable Development Goals);
  *   Civic participation in democratic governance and other decision-making processes;
  *   Citizen-centric data governance frameworks (such as data trusts, data commons, and data collaboratives);
  *   Citizen science or participatory research;
  *   Citizen generated data for innovation;
  *   Citizen perspectives on emerging data and technology policy challenges (such as cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, blockchain, etc.);
  *   Tensions between grassroots data collection and monitoring and high-level engagement and policy;
  *   Perspectives on the above in relation to gender, age, ethnicity, or migration.

More information is available on the Data for Policy 2022<https://dataforpolicy.org/data-for-policy-2022/> website.

We look forward to receiving your submissions.

Kind regards,

--
Dr. Mamello THINYANE
Principal Research Fellow
United Nations University

Casa Silva Mendes, Estrada do Engenheiro Trigo No 4, Macau SAR
Tel: +853 2871-2930 | Skype ID – mthinyane
LinkedIn<https://www.linkedin.com/in/mamellothinyane/> | Twitter<https://twitter.com/MamelloThinyane> | Website<http://cs.unu.edu/>| www.unu.edu<http://www.unu.edu/>