Empowering Digital Citizens

Human-centred Digital Governance

Governance That Serves People

A key difference between GIDE and other efforts seeking to influence Digital Governance is our Unit of Measure. Most take an institutional approach.  We focus on the outcome on humans.

Many researchers and competition bodies take market participants as their main unit of attention.  Other non-profits take the power relationship between nation states as their focus.  Most economists focus on issues of inefficiency and inequality within a market framework.  Even consumer organisations take the material benefits to consumers as their unit of analysis. But our focus is on the human – not just consumers but also those who are still not users.  

Importantly we see humans as more than mere units of economic consumption and production.   The last two centuries of capitalism have taught us that social solidarity, personal agency, environmental sustainability, as well as material gain, are each important and separate contributors to human flourishing. 

Our Priorities

Committed to advocating practical solutions to pivotal policymakers, the GIDE community is addressing three key areas:

Promoting humane markets, empowering users as real consumers, and countering the negative impacts of surveillance capitalism.
The misalignment between digital consumers and those who collect and monetize data about them has led to a wide variety of serious problems. Over three years, GIDE members have developed an economic, legal and political analysis and concrete proposals that aim to shift digital policies away from massive surveillance and data aggregation towards a regime that empowers all users as market participants with the market power and the access to skills to approve who access their data and on what terms. The full report, ‘Empowering Digital Citizens’, and related materials are here.

Human-centred artificial intelligence governance for the Global South.
Through economic, legal, and political analyses, research, and discussion led by GIDE’s Latin American and African chapters, our members are currently exploring the future of citizens’ digital rights in the age of AI in the Global South. We focus on developing actionable digital policies that ensure citizens’ needs are met as digital transformation and AI adoption progress while ensuring a robust respect for their fundamental rights. We recently launched the podcast series “Fantasmas en los Algoritmos”.

Developing a new narrative for Internet Governance.
Recently, some actors have promoted a critique of the original narrative of the multistakeholder Internet governance model as one that serves the interests of Silicon Valley.  Members of GIDE are working on a new bottom-up narrative that reinforces how the Internet’s technical coordination benefits ordinary people in developing economies.

The Global Initiative members

Our members represent 24 countries & cover the following areas of data governance: