Forming a Responsible Use of Digital Data in Transdisciplinary Process

Main objective: A transdisciplinary learning process for a sustainable practice on owner-ship, access, and the use of digital data in the light of Goals and context of the DiDaT project This draft of a stakeholder analysis refers to the DiDaT project draft of November 9, 2017. The goal of the (two-and-a-half year) transdisciplinary project is to develop socially robust solutions for how politics and practice can cope with unintended side effects and vulnerabilities emerging from the ownership, access, use, and economic value of digital data. DiDaT aims to develop socially robust orientations by integrating the knowledge from science (i.e., academic rigor) and the knowledge from all relevant stakeholder groups (i.e., experiential wisdom) related to this question. The products of the project are socially robust orientations for the principles and processes of using digital data responsibly. This may be expressed in other terms as the development of socially accepted principles of data ethics with respect to storing, retrieving, using (processing), and communicating data. The final outcome will have the status of guidelines or directives for the responsible use of data or data ethics. One of the special features of a transdisciplinary (Td) project is that it takes place in a protected discourse arena. This means that mutual learning among science and practice, as well as learning between the different scientists and the multistakeholder discourse, is able to focus on open, critical issues that are not yet well understood. Thus, special attention will be given to the uncertainties and the unknowns related to the (socially) responsible hosting, ownership, access, and use of data. Based on a long history of transdisciplinary processes, we are optimistic that (i) the present project well complemenst the multiple ongoing processes regarding the responsible use of IT and (ii) that high-ranking stakeholder participants will be involved in DiDaT. According to our experience, this should hold true, in particular, for economic key players (such as Internet platform providers and cloud or social network providers), as reliability and trust in the responsible management of data is a key to a successful and gentle practice of digital services. We want to mention that a socially robust orientation of transdisciplinary processes calls for a ‘wide exclusion of day-to-day (party) politics from the reflections on principles, uncertainties, ambiguities, and potential critical gaps in matters of security, execution, control, responsibility, and liability, etc. Thus, politicians (such as the “digital spokespersons” of all political parties) will play a special role in the Td process.