Francesca Bria

Data Democracy and the Green Transition

“This systemic change needs its own aesthetics.”

Innovation economist and digital policy expert Francesca Bria is working at the intersection of technology, geopolitics, economics, and society to make digital innovation more socially responsible. Bria is the President of the Italian National Innovation Fund. She is honorary professor in the Institute  for Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL in London and a Senior Adviser to the United Nation (UN-Habitat) on digital cities and digital rights. Bria is leading the DECODE project on data sovereignty in Europe, and is a member of the European Commission high level expert group Economic and Societal Impact of Research and Innovation (ESIR). She is the former Chief Digital Technology and Innovation Officer for the City of Barcelona in Spain. As Senior Programme Lead at Nesta, the UK Innovation Agency, she has led the European Union’s D-CENT project, the biggest European project on digital democracy platforms and digital currencies. She also led the DSI4EU project, advising the EU on digital social innovation policies and purpose-driven innovation. She has taught in several universities in the UK and Italy and she has advised public and private organizations as well as governments on technology and innovation policy and its socio-economic and environmental impact.

Bria has been listed in Forbes magazine’s Top 50 Women in Tech, and Apolitical’s “World’s top 20 most influential people in digital government.” She has also been featured in the Italian magazine Repubblica D as one of the “100 Women Changing the World.”

As a mentor, Bria is interested in working with people who seek to articulate a strategic vision of how digital technologies can facilitate the transition from today’s digital economy of surveillance capitalism and data extractivism—whereby a handful of US- and China-based corporations battle for global digital supremacy—to an alternative political and economic project based on data democracy, digital sovereignty, and citizen participation. The possible focus of the application can be on rethinking smart cities to meet citizens’ needs, using technology and data at the service of people and the green transition. “This will kickstart a creative and interdisciplinary movement that develops political, aesthetic, as well as functional standards—in sync with state-of-the-art technology, environment, and climate,” she says.

“I am looking for a candidate with a strong interest in economics and geopolitics of technology, and those with a good grasp of current technological developments, especially big data, AI, industrial automation, decentralized trust protocols, distributed ledgers, and so on,” she explains. “This systemic change needs its own aesthetics, blending design, arts, and sustainability. It’s at the intersection of these worlds that many of the emerging technopolitical issues, from global trade to economic national development to the future of welfare, are to be tackled.”

francescabria.com

Watch the video statement to find out more about what Bria is looking for in applications:

Nominees

Walter Palmetshofer

Trust Zone Experiment

Economist and Net activist Walter Palmetshofer's project focuses on the small Austrian village of Zwetll (population under 2,000) to create a scalable, data-driven plan to reduce CO2 emissions by 55 per cent before 2030. The data and knowledge gained there would then be presented to local municipalities in the Mühlenviertel region (population 200,000) to implement community-organized and trust-based measures to reduce its carbon footprint. As nearly half of Austria’s population lives in rural areas, the model could be replicated across the country. Building on the village’s existing social structures and self-reliance mentality, the project builds on locals' sense of responsibility and community to achieve self-sufficient energy supply and food sovereignty as an enhancement to the top-down approach of government regulation.
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Pamela Breda

The Unexpected

Artist and filmmaker Pamela Breda proposes a visual and theoretical exploration of the impact of AI interfaces and digital assistants on human rights, with a focus on the field of mental healthcare. AI employed to enhance well-being and overcome mental-health issues is creating new social and ethical questions about how AI affects human rights through data storage and analysis. The project considers possible benefits of digital assistants to enhance healthcare and social support. However, AI can potentially undermine or violate human rights protections, in particular the right to equality and privacy as well as the prohibition of discrimination. Breda will study the emotional responses users have in interactions with AI, to consider how digital technology can serve people and protect their rights. Find out more

Jaya Klara Brekke

Dashboards for Posthuman Life

Typically used for intelligence by security and advertising agencies, in scientific research, or in governance, dashboards present visualisations, insights, oversights, settings, and controls over data. They are a lens into constantly changing data-scapes over which there is an ongoing battle to establish sovereignty. In her project for Forecast, Brekke creates a speculative fiction around a data dashboard for an ordinary person living in posthuman times. What if people could have a say in how a given AI is trained using their data? And a say over what it is used for? What if people could have real-time insight into the well-being of companion species? What if such a data dashboard could offer an understanding of how one‘s actions and data affect others, human and non-human, elsewhere? Find out more

Mentee

Dashboards for Posthuman Life

Jaya Klara Brekke

Mentors Edition 6

Tatiana Bilbao

From Stories to Spaces

Francesca Bria

Data Democracy and the Green Transition

Sofia Jernberg

Sound as Organized Time

Ulli Lust

Translating Sensations

Mathilde Monnier

Unlimited Gestures

Emeka Ogboh

Sensing the World