What is the role of researchers in technological studies? How can we collaborate across different fields and stakeholder groups? Together with 45 other researchers, journalists, and NGO professionals, we sought to answer these fundamental questions in a workshop hosted by the Center for Tracking and Society at Copenhagen University. In this blogpost, we would like to share some of our discussions and a list of actions we plan to implement.

The central theme of this workshop was impact. The role of researchers in data-related studies is becoming more and more a topic of debate as we face a huge transformation of society driven by new technologies. This is deeply intertwined with research ethics and social value of research itself. Should we be actors of change or trying to apply a value-free approach to knowledge generation? There is no end to this debate, but there are few points on which we agreed.

From an open data perspective, we are both drawn to a critical perspective in our research. For instance, we recognize that open government data enables citizens to obtain information about the use of public resources by governments, and, thus, they can use this data to hold governments accountable. This is widely recognized by scholars as one of the objectives of open data. But, as many researchers of critical data studies and science and technology studies have shown, the distributional benefits of open data are not equal. Citizens with a higher degree of technical skill (often white male) are the more dominant stakeholders in finding open data, creating and maintain applications from it like OpenStreetMaps, and conducting open data hackathons. Similarly, indigenous communities draw attention to the ways in which existing open datasets either don’t represent these communities, or represent them inaccurately.

There is also a politics involved in what data is made ‘open’. For instance, as Caterina notes in another blog post, in Belgium, the availability of spots in childcare bodies is open data does not reflect their accessibility by public transit. Scholars of science and technology studies have undertaken ethnographic research into how meteorological data and public transportation data are made open – the kinds of organizational decisions about how to source this data within government departments, merge them, format them, and release them as an open dataset.  From this ethnographic research, it’s useful to identify what motivates a public administration to release a certain dataset, and what datasets are not released as open data. This, in turn, allows us to critically examine the impact of open data on society.

Beyond just the traditionally discussed benefits of open data as boosting transparency and accountability of public administration, as well as encouraging innovation, a critical approach to open data allows us to probe into more specific questions – why a certain dataset is made open, what datasets are not open, who benefits, and who is missed out. This allows us to integrate concepts of social equity, vulnerability and justice into the open data agenda – which can allow the open data movement to move beyond techno-solutionism.

As researchers also interested in policymaking, this workshop on translating critical data and algorithm studies has been enriching for us in how to expand our interest in these disciplines, while finding more effective ways of communicating complex concepts from these disciplines to policymakers.

Some takeaways worth mentioning are:

• Participants in studies can benefit from our insights.What if we started including an “Impact Appendix” in our consent forms? In this appendix, we could detail how we believe our research might benefit both participants and society as a whole.
• Focus on communicating the social value of our researchrather than just listing publications. This can be reflected in our resumes or through informal/social media communications (e.g., LinkedIn).
• Be mindful of the fact that much of our research is behind paywalls.As critical scholars, it’s our responsibility to connect with society and find ways to communicate science that consider varying resources and levels of research literacy. This could entail publishing in different avenues (beyond just journals) and through different mediums (e.g., audio and video), depending on time and resources available to us as researchers.