Speculative Data Futures
Tuesday 28.8.2018 at 13:00-17:00
Kulttuuritalo, Sturenkatu 4
Speculative Data Futures is a half-day pre-conference workshop for MyData 2018 that sets the participants into conference mood. Particular attention will be paid to the following questions: What if people had the right and the possibility to freely access and use their own personal data? How would that affect and shape personal data futures?
The workshop has limited space, please sign up asap. Participants are expected to do a short pre-assignment for the workshop: these will be used for setting the agenda of the day. The pre-assignment deadline is August 19th.
Motivation
A casual visitor of the MyData conference website might interpret that the spelled-out aim of the conference is to implement a vision of a fair digital society. In practice, however, there is not one such vision. Instead, the conference draws together participants driven by a plurality of visions for the future, be they explicitly articulated or more intuitively strived for. Simultaneously, when the technologies developed within the community interact with society at large, a wide spectrum of possible futures opens up, and some of those futures might not correspond with ideals of fairness at all. Whatever we understand fairness to signify, future developments are difficult to predict, incoherent, paradoxical and messy.
Workshop aims and scope
With this workshop, we invite and challenge MyData participants to think about Speculative Data Futures and the roles we can have in shaping them. We invite participants to create and share speculations and imaginaries about what our personal data futures might look like, and to explore the spectrum of possible futures. Besides acknowledging the plurality of future visions and their role of directing action, we aim to make sense of the technological advancements and where they can guide us. The workshop combines short keynote introductions, hands-on work and imagining of future directions – with both positive and negative outcomes.
The workshop covers topics such as:
– What could a future digital society where the “Mydata” perspective plays a role look like?
– What alternative futures emerge with GDPR and data portability?
– How could we characterize “fairness” in a Mydata future?
– How should we think about our data futures, and what is the role of MyData in collective imagination?
– How could these different futures come alive and concretize?
How to participate
Use the form at the end of this page to sign up. The space is limited, and we welcome 20 participants in the workshop. By signing up you agree to do the pre-assignment (see below). The workshop is organized for MyData 2018 conference participants. There is no additional fee to participate in the workshop.
Pre-assignment
Craft a short story/fictional account/description or visualisation on personal data/MyData futures for the workshop. Those who sign up for the workshop will be contacted with more instructions and material for inspiration. There are no strict requirements or limitations for the format or length of the pre-assignment: anything from a couple of hundred words to longer accounts will work, and other types of media in addition to or in place of a text can be used to describe and express it. We will ask participants to send in their contributions before the workshop, by August 19th (note, the deadline was extended from August 10th).
The materials produced are used as inspiration for the workshop, and elements drawn from them will act as a basis of discussion.
Workshop organizers and contact details
The workshop is organized by Minna Ruckenstein, Tuukka Lehtiniemi, Daniel Kaplan and Linda Turunen. If you have any questions concerning the workshop, you can reach the organizers by email: ourdata-workshop at mydata.org
Schedule
(to be updated later)