Digital Governance Design Clinic

By contrast, many of the most important decisions defining digital transformation, and their ensuing impacts on our society, are made in relatively unremarkable offices by a person who has an unrelated or deeply incomplete professional background, a set of unrelated or compliance-based KPIs, and very little responsibility for the integrity of the institution or field their work impacts. Often - and even more often in the pandemic era - the decisions that drive the technological intermediation of relationships are trying to solve administrators’ problems, focused on preserving continuity without considering - let alone being responsible for - the human and practical implications of those changes. 

Unlike the majority of public interest digital governance approaches, we propose that the path towards building meaningful PIT infrastructure starts from these relationships and contexts that currently define our most important services. It is from this historically-grounded and field-specific basis that we can build principles and tools for contextually-appropriate legal, technical, and operational governance of organizations and institutions’ use of digital technology. This presents two foundational approach problems for the public interest digital governance/design field: 

Integrating into Professional Preparation

While there are a number of important and impressive public interest technology programs, they are typically focused on specific implementations of technology and are rarely integrated with professional schools, let alone the professional governance surrounding their corresponding fields. Similarly, field-specific professional training rarely includes any treatment of how to be an effective advocate for values-aligned digital governance - whether in the design of better systems, or organizing to deconstruct problematic systems. There is a significant need for building practice-focused training infrastructure that supports emerging professionals in duty bearing fields to lead the digital governance of their respective infrastructures.

Tactical Focus

One of the largest barriers to progress in achieving the intended goals of public interest digital transformation is not “what” needs to change, but instead, “how” to resolve governance conflicts without violence or wholesale destruction. The work of moving from, for instance, statements of principles to the achievement of more just digitization processes and outcomes relies on the identification and use of contextually-available forms of structural leverage. This points to a need to both develop a systematic approach to intervening in public interest digital governance and to integrate that approach into specific contexts with attendant levers, extant governance structures, and incentives.

The Proposal: