Taking stock of the digital good: learnings from the 2025 Digital Good Summit, Johnny Swierczynski
Johnny Swierczynski writes about his experience of the 2025 Digital Good Network Summit. Published 8 April 2025.
Last month digital society researchers and practitioners from across the UK gathered at the BBC offices in the heart of Media City, Salford. Despite coming from very different disciplines and areas of interest, we all came together with one shared goal: to advance our progress towards the ‘digital good’. This annual network meeting was incredibly important to allow everyone involved to meet with friends and colleagues (both old and new) to take stock of how far we’ve come, and figure out where we’re heading to next.
When I first heard about the Digital Good Network a couple of years ago now through an email newsletter that a colleague at Bath forwarded to me, I was inspired by their (our) mission, to understand what a good digital society should look like and how we get there. At the time, I was only about six months into my PhD programme, where I was grappling with the same grand questions about society and technology. The core pillars of the ‘digital good’, or ‘societal challenges’, of equity, resilience and sustainability seemed important, but understanding how technology can help to support their realisation was overwhelming. I knew that I had found the right crowd of people who could help me work towards answering these questions, and who I could support too.
Since then, the Digital Good Network has funded two cohorts of researchers who have investigated questions around defining the ‘digital good’, and more recently around evaluating this somewhat abstract concept. The summit was an opportunity to hear updates from project leads who I’d met at the previous network meeting when their research was just beginning, and to hear about new projects that were just underway. We heard from projects working across a range of topics such as queer joy in digital spaces, sustainability in the textile sector, or advertising metrics that forefront wellbeing. The network’s research spans across a range of contexts: in my own work through the network’s internship scheme at BBC Research and Development I was able to investigate and review a range of approaches for evaluating and measuring the public good of AI in the public media space.
Whilst all these projects explored ‘digital good’ within their specific context, it wasn’t until we all came together for the two-day summit that we did the hard work of abstracting-out from the preliminary findings to understand how insights from one project might apply to another. This was a deeply fulfilling exercise, where I felt that we were truly making progress towards answering the questions that the network set out.
We also had the pleasure of hearing from the keynote speaker, Nancy Baym (Partner Research Manager at Microsoft) titled “Bridging disciplines, academics, and industry: lessons from years of trying”. Whilst we often hear about the importance of research being interdisciplinary, it wasn’t until Nancy’s talk that I really started to understand what this commonly-used word truly means. She spoke about the hard work that is necessary to actually understand another discipline’s approach or perspective, especially when working on challenges that are inherently socio-technical. It involves transparency and vulnerability, to know what you do know, but also what you do not know. She highlighted how pivotal collaborations with computer scientists will be in order to move beyond defining and evaluating the digital good, towards actually building it into the technologies we use currently, and will use in the future. I look forward to seeing such interdisciplinary collaborations in the work we do moving forward.
About the author
Johnny Swierczynski
Johnny is a PhD student associated with the Bath Institute for Digital Security and Behaviour. His research generally contributes to the discourse on responsible innovation and adoption of smart home security technology, advocating for technological developments that are equitable and respectful of all people’s rights and well-being. His work is part of the wider ESRC-funded Discribe Hub+ research programme, which investigates the adoption of security technology.
Johnny completed the ESRC’s Digital Good Network internship programme at the BBC, where he worked within the Responsible Innovation Centre, investigating methods for evaluating the societal benefits of AI in the public media space.