NGI Move Salon @ SMART CITY PLAZA

NGI Move Salon: TOWARDS A FUTURE INTERNET THAT BETTER RESPONDS TO THE EXPECTATIONS OF THE CITIZENS!
AGORA STAGE @ SMART CITY PLAZA

November the 15^th from 10:00am to 10:45am

MODERATOR

Marta Arniani (Founder of Futuribile)

SPEAKERS

• Marc Pous (thethings_io)
• Oleguer Sagarra (decode Tech coordinator)
• Mara Balestrini (IDEAS FOR CHANGE)

Methodology: awareness and education, narrative drivers for stories, examples to create immediate action

There is an even bigger divide between explaining the current drivers of the Digital Transition to a lay audience than the original Digital Divide (having access and primary skills). Paradoxically the effects of the hybrid nature of the digital are visible and present in everyday life and interactions: fake news, depression among youngsters, addiction to social media, sexting, and on a more economic scale, fear of job loss because of robotic automatization, lack of agency on a political level (fining innovative companies or legally trying to regulate fat protection, (GDPR). The dominant narrative is fear, even from the policy perspectives that should try to create enthusiasm for opportunities and possibilities. We lack a possibilist framework. Without it finding good examples to explain the opportunities of a hybrid reality for everyday life and Europe as a 500 million zone is very difficult. NGI.eu should be part of the solution to this.

Plurality

• Which stakeholders are involved concretely in the concept and implementation of data sovereignty – as data is new oil – what is the process of of granting data ownership?
• Why are citizens unable to see themselves and their networked identities as central to organizing building-blocks around that level of agency, but keep outsourcing this level of agency to another state building scenario? Why, in other words do people take to the streets for abstract notions such as ‘Spain’, ‘Catalonia’, ‘England/Great-Britain’, and why if they refuse to be ruled from ‘outside’ can they not see that they themselves always posit this notion of ‘outside’, not from a position of the individual – themselves – but from a previously fixed set of rules that they have come to view as such?

We acknowledge the fact that before we can offer tools of decentralized data management from the point of view of the ‘citizen’, that citizen first has to emancipate his or herself into the level of primary agency, or rather citizens have to own the framing of their subjectivity. This is not the case now as we can see clearly played out in the streets of Barcelona, England and other EU nations.

Hannah Arendt recognizes that plurality can best be experienced at city-level. “The larger the population in any given body politic, the more likely it will be the social rather than the political that constitutes the public realm” (Arendt 1959, p. 39). With big numbers, plurality degenerates into mere and unendorsed interdependence, while natality and its inherent openness and unpredictability are perceived only under the categories of uncertainty and risk.

Can the notion of plurality help us understand the current situation in which citizens instead of decentralizing to the level of their subjectivity, engage with a new level of state agency?

Territorial identities seem to be the last binary that remains relatively acceptable as a social agent. Whereas discrimination in terms of gender, race, age is firmly addressed and sanctioned, it remains acceptable still to identify as a person from a particular territory, a binary as one either is in or out.

Blockchain

In Smart Decentralisation: Moving From The Cloud To The Fog, Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder — IOTA Foundation, asks what the evolutionary transition towards smart decentralisation means for both the internet of things and our society: “With the introduction of blockchain, the internet of things will actually move away from the cloud and towards the fog – something that in turn could give rise to a fully autonomous machine economy, one that no longer needs the intervention of human managers.”

Can individuals build and maintain social networks through which they “negotiate” their identities and subjectivity that brings them together in a different way that bridges the current gap between authorities and end-users?

decodeproject.eu

DECODE is about giving people ownership of the personal data so they can secure their privacy and reclaim their digital sovereignty. It will create new technologies which put them in control of how their data is used so they can decide who has access, and for what purposes. In doing so, DECODE will create a new digital economy ecosystem, enabling in particular the rise of platform cooperatives and data commons. The new technology will be piloted in Amsterdam and Barcelona. A key principle of this will be the pursuit of social value over purely economic return. It will also enable governments to be more responsive to citizen needs.

DECODE is a response to five key problems created by the use of personal data in the internet economy:

1. The way that many internet-oriented companies use personal data erodes people’s privacy and creates threats to their online security
2. The abundance of personal data and lack of control over how it is used and shared exposes people to discriminatory and exclusionary practices
3. The integral role personal data plays in the internet economy means there are barriers to entry for new firms
4. Personal data contributes to network effects which make it possible for companies to become excessively dominant. This is especially problematic in the sharing and collaborative economy.
5. Personal data, if anonymised, could have considerable benefits for society, helping us to live more sustainably and deliver better public services. Without individuals having control over personal data, these benefits can’t be realised.

DECODE will create a number of practical tools as part of a technical infrastructure. This will include personal data storage options, the ability to specify in granular detail how data is shared and with whom, privacy-preserving tools which enable authenticated digital participation without revealing private information, and a mechanism for anonymised data to be pooled so that it can be used by governments, researchers, innovators and not-for-profit organisations.

NGI – Towards a future Internet that better responds to the expectations of the citizens!

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