Unlocking Digital Success: e-Governance conference 2024, Tartu, Estonia.
DigID researcher Oisin O’Brien attended the 2024 e-Governance conference in Tartu to learn about the existing public services that e-identification allows Estonians to access and the potential of people-centric services.
The 10th edition of the e-Governance conference took place in Tartu on May 22-23. This conference aims to provide attendees with the opportunity to learn from Estonia’s digital transformation experience and exchange ideas with speakers from around the world on topics including e-government services, e-identification and cybersecurity culture. The conference was attended by over 500 participants from 67 countries. The majority of attendees were politicians, policy makers and digital governance stakeholders. 71 speakers from 5 continents took part in the various panels over the 2 days of the conference, and in between attendees had the opportunity to learn about digital services and platforms from around the world in the expo hall.
The focus of the conference was not only on success but rather on how to mobilize failure into future success stories. Erika Piirmets highlighted this in her panel on Estonia’s digital renaissance. Piirmets claimed that the only guarantee with technology is that it will fail you and having a strong digital crisis management plan is what has galvanized Estonia as a digital leader. The talk then turned to the post-digital. In Estonia, the Ai strategy known as Kratt was one element of what will become a larger ecosystem of post-digital services.
The conference highlighted that there are many different names for the same concept. In various panels, the terms personal government, citizen-centric services, intuitive services, post-digital services and proactive services were used interchangeably. This observation encouraged me to explore the nuances of each of these phrases.
Another central issue explored throughout the panels was the European identity wallet. The roles and rights of citizens were stressed in how the project was pitched in the ‘opening Pandora’s wallet’ – panel. The wallet will have to fit into the existing mature ID ecosystem in Estonia, and different stakeholders I spoke with in the expo hall had contrasting takes on how the EU wallet will function. Is it purely an interoperability tool? Or something more? As a PhD student, the conference raised new questions that have led me to explore new directions in my research. It also allowed me to meet potential participants, as I prepare to enter the field.
Ethnographic engagements with the transnational field of identification: ID4Africa in Cape Town
DigID researcher Dr. Laura Lambert joined the ID4Africa conference in Cape Town in May 2024 to get a feel of the transnational field of digital identification.
Over 4 days, more than 2000 delegates convened in the prestigious halls of Cape Town International Convention Centre to discuss the trends of ID products on the African continent. The sheer size and professional ambiance of this 10th anniversary demonstrated what its founder Dr. Joseph Atick, a senior in the biometrics industry, did not tire to perform: that ID4Africa has become the main venue for cutting-edge ID products in Africa.
The conference made sure to put African officials and civil society members frontstage. Yet, a relevant number of attendees belonged to biometrics and other tech companies, International Organizations, civil society and academia. I also met European officials invested in migration control who used the opportunity to learn more about identity processing in individual African countries.
A shared perspective between these diverse actors seemed to be that digital IDs are the way to go and will help African states develop, enhance trust and include citizens. The ID4Africa theme song called on the individual countries: “The time has come, the time is now for every nation to own ID”. Issues of exclusion and policy priorities for states often struggling with polycrises were not part of the conference program.
During the sessions, most African officials gave a rather glossy image of their progress. Most of these discussions can be found on youtube and could save one the conference fee of 800 USD for researchers. Implementation issues such as electricity and internet connectivity problems in rural areas were hardly addressed in these talks. Having just conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Sierra Leone on the actual roll-out of ID, this was a surprising find. The representation of progress, easy fixes and inclusion as the promises of digitalization in the transnational field concealed the many implementation challenges on the ground in individual countries. Its glossy and thus rather superficial presentation reduced the opportunity for critical engagement and mutual learning between practitioners. It also limited the opportunity for us researchers to get a comparative overview on implementation challenges across Africa.
A way to mitigate this was seeking one-on-one conversations with officials during the breaks or with the vendors at the tech exhibition. These informal conversations were often more insightful on actual developments. Another avenue – the informal side events during the conference organized by major tech companies and the World Bank – required researchers to ‘own’ the field, to mobilize considerable social and symbolic capital in the transnational sphere.
These frictions between the local and the transnational, between implementation and representation, methodologically point to the need to investigate both ethnographically.
DigID’s 2nd International Workshop: “Proliferations of digital identification infrastructures in the (post) colonial world: Trust Relations, Methodologies and Translations.
From 31 January to 1 February 2024, the DigID project kicked off the new year with its second international workshop at Leuphana University, Lüneburg.
Around 20 researchers from European and North American universities came together for a 1.5-day hands-on workshop to discuss the proliferation of digital identification infrastructures.
This workshop explored how technical interfaces and infrastructures rapidly adapt into diverse sociocultural, environmental and technical ecosystems across national borders. The workshop highlighted how proliferations feature and hinge on multiple translation processes: reproduction, reassembly and reconfiguration. The workshop addressed many questions including: Are trust generating mechanisms embedded in digital infrastructures? How can we methodologically account for the role of humans in the work of digital identification? Do the proliferation of digital infrastructures in (post)colonial settings generate political contestation?
The team unpacked these questions and observations with a group of selected scholars. We began our workshop with a keynote lecture on "Can Trust be Engineered" by Prof. Keith Breckenridge (University of the Witwatersrand). The workshop itself included two panels and one roundtable discussion on a variety of methodological and conceptual themes.
You can find the programme here.
Keynote Lecture "Can Trust be Engineered?"
by Prof. Keith Breckenridge (University of the Witwatersrand)
31.01.2024 at 6 pm CET in the central building, C.40.704 Leuphana University.
Keynote Abstract: Many countries on the African continent are building powerful new biometric population registration systems. Often matched with new credit scoring regulations and – in some cases -- digital payment switches, these tools are designed to have powerful effects on finance. The advocates of these systems describe them as trust infrastructures, mainly because they can be used to simplify payments and strengthen credit distribution in the context of unreliable identification and collateral systems. But what is trust? And can it be generated technologically? These are especially important questions on the African continent where, as Celestin Monga and many others have shown, trust has been radically curtailed over centuries. In this paper I explore the geopolitics of trust over the last century and suggest what will be necessary if the biometric infrastructures are, indeed, to build trust.
Keith Breckenridge is a Professor and acting Co-Director at Wiser. He holds the Standard Bank Chair in African Trust Infrastructures. Keith studied at Wits and Johns Hopkins and completed his PhD at Northwestern in 1995. He writes about the cultural and economic history of South Africa, particularly the gold mining industry, the state and the development of information systems. For the last twenty years he has been writing about biometric identification systems and their political effects, especially on the African continent. His book -- Biometric State: the Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (Cambridge, 2014) -- shows how the South African obsession with Francis Galton's universal fingerprint identity registration served as a 20th century incubator for the current systems of biometric citizenship being developed throughout the South. In 2017 the book was awarded the inaugural Humanities Book Award by the Academy of Science of South Africa. With Simon Szreter, he edited Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History published by OUP and the British Academy in 2012, a volume of essays which examines the workings and failures of civil registration in twenty different regions and periods around the world. He has published widely on the history and contemporary politics of biometrics, with papers in Africa, History Workshop, the Journal of Southern African Studies, Public Culture and comparative anthologies on systems of identification (the full list is here). This interest in biometrics has also drawn him in to the global institutional history of state documentation, especially the forms of birth, death and marriage registration that are ubiquitous (but very poorly understood) in Europe, Asia and the Americas (see http://wiser.wits.ac.za/futureID).
He is now working to finish several book projects: Biometric Capitalism, which investigates the global infrastructures of biometric civil registration and credit surveillance that are developing in the former colonial world; Power without Knowledge, which examines the very limited forms of official knowledge that supported the state in South Africa in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries; and Mining, Power and Politics in South Africa which interrogates the usefulness of the idea of the Resource Curse in South African history.
International Workshop "Enacting Citizenship in the Digital Age"
From 30 November to 1 December 2023, the DigID project organised its first international workshop at Leuphana University, Lueneburg. About 20 researchers from different European universities came together for a 1.5-day hands-on workshop to discuss how citizenship is reconfigured in the digital age.
This workshop examined how the digitization of border and citizenship regimes – as highlighted by the move towards eGovernance, eDemocracy, eVoting and ‘smartborders’ – affects struggles over the right to have rights and people’s possibilities to enact themselves as political subjects. The workshop focused on three central questions. First, how and where do acts of citizenship occur when public assembly and direct state-citizens interactions become rare in the digital age? Which methods and research practices can we develop to actively engage with these protagonists and follow their struggles and practices of contestation, dissent and negotiation? And how does the digitization of social, economic and political life call for a more thorough (re-)consideration of material citizenship, that is, the material affordances, artefacts and infrastructures that are needed to enact citizenship?
These issues were addressed in three respective panels and a public lecture on "Performing Digital Data Rights" by Prof. em. Evelyn Ruppert (Goldsmiths, University of London). You can find the programme here.
Keynote Lecture: "Performing Digital Data Rights" (Prof. em. Evelyn Ruppert, Goldsmiths/ University of London)
The DigID project organised its first keynote lecture at Leuphana University, Lueneburg on 30 November 2023. It was given by Evelyn Ruppert.
The keynote addressed the following themes: What are the possibilities of performing effective and creative politics in increasingly digitised societies? How do subjects struggle to revolt, subvert and evade digital assemblages that track, troll, visualize, control, discipline, surveil and datify their acts and actions? How might we conceptualise such acts of resistance as data rights claims that subjects make when they act in or through digital technologies? Evelyn Ruppert approached these questions by considering two citizen-led enumeration practices. One was the #NiUnaMenos (Not One Woman Less) movement in Argentina which makes rights claims to the collection and presentation of data about violence against women. The second was the Afrozensus project based in Germany that creates alternative census data about the experiences of discrimination and underrepresentation of African-descendants. Prof. Ruppert suggested that through a complex assemblage of legal, performative, and imaginary forces these practices perform ‘I, we, they have a right to’ challenge and perform alternative data about who we are as citizens.
Evelyn Ruppert is Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on how digital technologies such as smart phones, social media platforms, as well as myriad government databases generate enormous volumes of data about the movements, preferences, associations, and activities of people. While providing new sources of knowledge about individuals and populations, she investigates how digital technologies and the data they generate can also powerfully shape and have consequences for who we are and how we are known and governed. As such, digital technologies are also changing how we understand ourselves as political subjects, that is, citizens with rights to speech, access, and privacy. How citizens make claims to digital rights through what they say and what they do through digital technologies are key questions that she addresses. Evelyn was Principal Investigator of a five-year European Research Council funded project, Peopling Europe: How Data Make a People (ARITHMUS; 2014-19). Recent books are all Open Access: Data Practices: Making up a European People (co-edited with Stephan Scheel); Being Digital Citizens (2015; 2020; co-authored with Engin Isin); Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights (2019; co-edited with Didier Bigo and Engin Isin); and Modes of Knowing (2016; co-edited with John Law).