Events

2023

IT for Change and the Kerala Development and Innovation Strategic Council (K-DISC), held a half-day expert roundtable on 9 September 2023 in Thiruvananthapuram, India, bringing together 30 stakeholders (the list of participants is attached in Annexure 1).

The aim was to gather perspectives on how to move towards an enabling environment…

2023

IT for Change and Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC), along with Kerala Development and Innovation Strategic Council (K-DISC) co-organized the conference, ‘Roots of Resilience - Building Platform Cooperatives for Sustainable and Feminist Local Economies,’ which was conducted at the Kerala Arts and Crafts Village, Trivandrum, Kerala between…

2023

In this paper, the authors argue that there is substantial scope for data governance policies for the Global South to draw from theories and practices informed by the idea that data can be a subject of decentralized, community-centric governance. First, the paper highlights the importance of recognizing communities and groups as agents with…

2023

As procurers of all the civic tech that surrounds us, municipal authorities today find themselves in a unique position — they have become the custodians of personal and aggregate data generated by the world’s largest human concentrations. Rich or poor, large or small, democratic, autocratic, or otherwise, cities — mostly in the Global South —…

2023

In the last few years, data has been likened, aside from the hackneyed comparison to ‘oil’, to any number of tangible entities such as mineral deposits, dividend deposits, and even the Alaskan Permanent Fund. Metaphors as a tool could re-entrench existing power asymmetries or resist them, depending on how they impact and influence our…

2023

A data-propelled tendency for economic concentration and the policy deficits that have fueled the rise of Big Tech companies have brought to the fore a critical realization – market power is coterminous with data power and the entrenched control of Big Tech over the data value chains is at the heart of the problem of economic inequality. The…

2023

The entry of generative AI applications in the digital marketplace has intensified recent public debates about AI. Silicon Valley’s ‘move fast’ techno-optimism is now under the scanner. A humane and just AI system requires a radical restructuring of the global political-economic regime of knowledge, innovation, and development. In an era…

2023

Over the past two years, there have been concerning instances of excess and malpractice by Big Tech, leading to serious social, political, and economic consequences. These include data extractivism, increased worker precarity, setbacks in gender justice, the domination of developing countries' infrastructure, manipulation of global governance…

2023

Shifting macro-level trends are restructuring the conditions under which platforms have operated for long, and are redetermining their actions and choices. Furthermore, a shrinking financial and tightening legislative landscape has created significant roadblocks for the growth-first model that has been key to the rise of Web 2.0. Additionally,…

2023

JustJobs Network recently published the report, 'Empowerment or Exploitation: Global Perspectives on Women's Work in the Platform Economy', which examines the impact of the platform economy on women's work experiences. The report features a collection of essays from various economies, highlighting how platform work frequently results in…