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The 2024-2025 online seminar series on the future of human-centred Digital Governance aims to amplify leading analysis into the emerging state of digital governance and its impact on people and to incorporate the analysis into an ongoing policy advocacy process.

Over the past five years, there has been an increasing focus on digital governance frameworks by most countries and international organisations. The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the following global wave of similar legislation marked important steps towards empowering individuals in the digital economy. A recent second wave of legislative development, including the rough consensus on artificial intelligence (AI) norms, could give citizens more control over their digital experience.

With the acceleration of the digital economy, including the generative AI boom, it is necessary to analyse how well digital ecosystems can protect and empower citizens. This is important to support human flourishing – to promote growth but also equity, solidarity and agency for individuals.

In general, digital ecosystems are too novel to assess if they can deliver humane-centred outcomes in an environment flooded with an unprecedented scale of threats.

In Europe, it is too soon to tell whether recent legislation can solve the systemic failures of their digital governance regime. Indeed, while the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, and the Digital Governance Act are about one year old, the Data Act will only be enforceable in January 2025. The Artificial Intelligence Act will gradually enter into force in August 2024.

However, systemic failures of the European ecosystem still remain unresolved. Huge data aggregators are still decoupled from the digital society, and citizens are still not part of the digital market; the digital barter between them and data aggregators has only strengthened, and data collection has grown exponentially with the massive adoption of generative AI.

These failures can manifest in many different ways. From the well-known number of data breaches and unresolved procedures, there are questions about how new technologies can impact citizens’ engagement with public institutions., cybersecurity, and how the EU regulation has not protected the most vulnerable members of our societies.. Moreover, countries, including Italy, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands, have also suffered from the shortcomings of the EU’s digital regime. Even Estonia, which enjoys a higher level of trust in institutions among European countries, and leading Data Protection Authorities such as Norway’s Datatilsynet, have struggled to keep up with challenges posed by big data aggregators.

The seminar will ask leading researchers to analyse aspects of the challenges and other systemic failures identified by GIDE and propose how the emerging digital ecosystems need to change to benefit all people. The speakers will also contribute to a policy agenda which the GSI and GIDE will advocate to international policymakers about how to best approach challenges posed by new technologies.

Key themes include the future of European digital legislation, the interplay between new technologies and human-centred digital governance frameworks, international pathways for the deployment of GIDE-type personal data markets, how new technologies impact trust in public institutions, cybersecurity, and democracy, how labour markets are affected by emerging technologies and how best protect vulnerable people in the digital world.