Description: During this welcoming session, the organizing team will introduce the program, engage participants in fun activities to get to know each other, and offer an initial opportunity for Q&As.

Learning Materials After This Session: 

Necessary and Proportionate 

#WhyID Open Letter, Access Now

Digital ID, ID2020 

Moderator:  Valerie Gomez

Speakers: Adam Nagy, Lis Sylvan, Ellen Willemin

This session introduces the concept of digital identity and explores its purpose and use in different contexts, highlighting examples from ongoing policy debates and initiatives. It will also discuss how conceptions of digital identity shifted during COVID. The session seeks to create a working definition of the concept and its dimensions. 

Learning Materials Before This Session: 

Necessary and Proportionate 

#WhyID Open Letter, Access Now

Digital ID, ID2020 

Donner, J. (2018), The difference between digital identity, identification, and ID

Moderator: Lis Sylvan

Speakers: Marianne Díaz Hernández, Ethan Veneklasen, Stefaan Verhulst

How might we define and realize a better reality with regards to digital identity? 

Learning Materials Before the Session:

Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life, Cracked Labs

Data Portraits, metaLAB (at) Harvard

Moderator:  Jeffrey Schnapp

Speakers: Judith Donath, Joana Moll

Who are the key stakeholders in digital identity? What is their motivation and stake? Governmental actors, nonprofit activities, tech companies, data subjects.

Learning Materials Before the Session:

Required

Learn about our speakers and provide a question for the panel (Instructions here)

(Optional)

Digital identity: Our five calls to action for the World Bank

Big Data and The Self: Exploitation Beyond Biopolitics

Moderator: Sue Hendrickson

Speakers: Armando Guio Español, Jeremy Grant, Sabelo Mhlambi

Learning Materials Before the Session: 

Hopepunk, Optimism, Purity, and the Futures of Hard Work (Ada Palmer, 2021)

Learn about our speakers and answer questions in the table (Instructions Here).

Speakers: Fabro Steibel, Florian Martin-Bariteau, Ankur Patel, Malavika Jayaram, Amy Johnson

Description: This session will focus on the dynamics created by the use of digital identity systems in managing territories and collective (public) spaces. For this we’ll hear from experts about how digital ID is changing people's relation to physical limits within territories and physical borders in times of heightened security and public health concerns. On the other hand, the session will discuss how Digital ID is changing governance and management of human flows, territory controls and peoples relation to collective spaces. We will explore how these changes impact trust and alter the social fabric. 

Objectives

• Describe two sides of security: some people have a need a responsibility to control an protect a territory, and others have a need to enter and move in that territory

• Understand how the use of Digital ID can be used to define collective spaces. 

• Explore what these dynamic mean for the urban social contract

Facilitator: Yves Daccord

Speakers: Eduoard Bugnion, Marie-Claude Sawerschel, Juan Castañeda, Jennifer Hauseman

Optional Further Resources: 

• Deploying decentralized, privacy-preserving proximity tracing - Recommended by Edouard Bugnion

• How India is Reimagining Consent to Empower People (Digital Impact Alliance) - Recommended by Jennifer Hauseman and Nick Gates

• Digitalisation for recovery in Ukraine (OECD)

We’ve covered the realities and alternative realities of digital identity. Now we switch our focus to its very real risks and harms. In this current session, we will focus particularly on surveillance including the technologies and social systems that surveil, how those systems are used to monitor, influence and control, and the impact these systems have on the surveilled. 

Learning Materials Before the Session:

Part 1: Read about the speakers

Daniel Lefeur

Yasodara Cordova

Anna-Verena Nosthoff (optional resources: Mastodon; Academia page) 

Part 2: Review a learning resource - select at least one, and optionally more, of the learning resources below to review.

• • [Listen; 54 minutes] Spark with Nora Young: 512 Biometric Surveillance (June 4, 2021): We have technologies for identifying many physical characteristics, from DNA, to facial recognition, and even voice. But how accurate are these techniques? And can the same tools for identifying us be used to control and surveille us? The future of biometrics.

  • [Watch/Listen; 1 hour, 16 minutes] AUTOMATED GENDER ATTRIBUTION: IT’S A BOY! IT’S A GIRL! SAID THE ALGORITHM (January 29, 2021): Machines are increasingly being asked to classify individuals on the basis of their presumed gender. Daily online activities are interpreted as signs of belonging to a gender category, often without data subjects knowing about this at all, and relying on opaque grounds that can hide extremely problematic gender stereotyping. 

  • [Read] Watching Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: Immersive Technology, Biometric Psychography, and the Law by Brittan Heller

  • [Read] The Misgendering Machines: Trans/HCI Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition by Os Keyes. 

Part 3: Provide a question for the speakers - After examining a learning resource and reading about the speakers, add your name and a question for the speakers to the pre-work table. Your questions will be shared with the speakers as a way to get to know you before the session, and you can draw on them in your breakout conversations with speakers. TIP: consider the session topic, a deep dive into potential harms of digital ID and biometric data.

Part 4:  We will be doing a mid-point output check-in during the session on November 17. Policy track participants will connect with at least two other Policy groups, and Data Visualization and Speculative Fiction track participants will be mixed together into their own groups. Please come prepared to speak briefly about your output idea (no slides, think elevator pitch!), and also come with at least one question or challenge you or your group would like feedback on. 

Speakers: Anna-Vereona Nosthof, Daniel Leufer, Yasodara Cordova

Description: In this session we intend to zoom-in into two specific communities – youth and transgender people – that are facing unique complexities when it comes to digital identities and proving who they are and, in turn, being identified.

Learning Materials Before the Session: You will be in dialogue with the speakers during session 8.  Please review speaker bios (part 1), three learning resources (part 2), and answer the questions in the table provided in Google Docs. Your responses will be shared with the speakers as a way for the speakers to get to know you and you can draw on them in your breakout conversations with them.

1. Part 1: Read about the speakers who will be joining us.

   1. Ashley Lee

   2. Leah Plunkett

   3. Savita Bailur & Hélène Smertnik

   4. Alejandra Caraballo

2. Part 2: Review three (3) learning resources - Everyone will read the required reading (1 article) and you will select a learning resource from each category (2 learning resources) - children & youth and transgender. 

1. Required -Review required resource (1 article) 

• [Read] Identification and identity for children in a digital age by Savita Bailur and Hélène Smertnik (Estimated Time: 8:00)

2. Choice - Select one learning resource from each category (2 learning resources) 

• Category 1: Children & Youth

  • [Listen] Sharenting: How much should you share about your kids online? (Audio Time: 25:32)

    • Note that one of our speakers, Leah Plunkett, is featured beginning at the 11:00 mark.

  • [Read] But how do they know it is a child? Age Assurance in the Digital World by the 5Rights Foundation - Read the Executive Summary and peruse the report. 

  • [Read] Select one of the blog posts focused on youth from Savita Bailur and Hélène Smertnik

    • Financial inclusion, identification and identity for children in Kenya

    • Refugee identification and identity for children in Lebanon

    • Biometric identification and identity for children in Thailand

• Category 2: Transgender People

  • [Read] Identification, identity and sexuality for youth in Brazil by Savita Bailur, Cecília Peres, and Hélène Smertnik

  • [Watch] How transgender inclusive are digital identity systems? The impact of data for development on gender justice in India (Video time: 19:14)

Part 3: Provide a question for the speakers - After examining three learning resources and reading about the speakers, describe one thing you found interesting, provocative, or important from the learning resources. Then, consider how the two populations we’re exploring, youth and transgender people, differ and overlap with regard to digital identity. Is there anything that struck you about common (or unique) needs and challenges of these two populations? Answer in the provided Google Doc.

Learning Materials Before the Session: TBD

Speakers: TBD

The Fall 2022 Research Sprint will end with a public event. Building on the theme of the “Reimaginations” from previous research sprints, this gathering will offer an opportunity to reflect on the findings and learnings, discuss and “reimagining” digital identity either in theory or practice and embedded in the communities on which focus.