Second round of Digital Good Research Fund projects announced
Earlier this year we invited research proposals for the second round of our Digital Good Research Fund.
We are delighted to be able to reveal the nine successful projects chosen to be funded.
The aim of the Digital Good Network is to enhance our collective understanding of what a good digital society should look like and how we get there. In our second year, we invited research proposals that would help us continue to lay the foundations for this collective research.
Our first, 2023 Digital Good Research Fund call, Foundations of the Digital Good, was an intentionally broad invitation for researchers to help lay the foundations for the network, by exploring how to define the digital good across different technologies, dimensions and perspectives.
This year’s call, Evaluating the Digital Good, builds on those foundations. By evaluation, we mean the systematic assessment of or judgement about whether digital developments and deployments contribute towards a good digital society.
The nine successful projects are:
Speculative Woolgathering: anticipatory evaluation of digital good
How can digital innovation help ensure that the supply chains in the textile and fashion industry are sustainable? And how can these digital futures be collaboratively co-designed and co-evaluated with key stakeholders?
Digitising Identity: navigating the digital immigration system and migrant experiences
How has the digitalisation of immigration status impacted migrants in the UK? How can different methodological approaches help evaluate these systems as a ‘digital good’ and, therefore, potentially improve them?
Exploring sustainable computing education with primary and secondary school teachers
Given the multifaceted role of computing in climate change, it is increasingly important to support children in thinking about connections between sustainability and technology within school curricula. But how are topics of sustainability currently integrated into computing education and how can teachers be involved in improving this?
Towards a sustainable Internet of Things (IoT)
With the rise of smart homes globally, it is anticipated that there will be over 29 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart homes worldwide by 2032. Given that most of these devices are increasingly treated as disposable, ending up as eWaste in landfills prematurely (particularly in the Global South), how can we build ‘repairability’ into the IoT?
DigiAdGood: creating digital advertising metrics for good
Online engagement is routinely measured by levels of ‘engagement’. But this basic metric encourages online advertisers to use attention-grabbing methods that don’t always align with human wellbeing. DigiAdGood seeks to create new digital advertising principles and measurement frameworks that go beyond this and better align human and business goals.
Evaluating civic technologies for local political engagement
Civic technologies are those tools and platforms that can, for example, provide information about community initiatives or allow citizens to raise local issues with councillors. Do they enhance public inclusion? And to what extent is this dependent on their design and meaningful integration within a system of representative institutions, community organisations, advocacy groups and research organisations?
Datatesting: co-developing computational methods for socially evaluating public data infrastructures
To what extent can datasets from open data initiatives address questions related to urgent societal issues? How can computational methods be used to evaluate this?
Can digital goods be neutral? Evaluating OpenStreetMap’s equity through participatory data visualisation
Using a transformative and empowering participatory process with Geochicas, a collective of women and LGBT+ mappers, to evaluate and surface how minoritised demographics are involved, recognised, or excluded from data production and decision-making in OSM.
What are they thinking? Developing a protocol to measure meta-perspectives in online environments
Prejudice is significantly prevalent in online communities, with 62% of internet users experiencing some sort of online abuse. This project investigates how meta-perceptions can be used to encourage felt understanding between potential abusers and minority victims online – and thereby help tackle online abuse.