DAY 9 - technology is not good, bad, nor neutral

Thursday July 16th was the second and last day of Governance. The summer-school is close to the end but there is still room for learning and attending inspiring lectures from the speakers. As a follow up of the workshop we made during day 8, Mark Latonero from the Research Institute Data & Society started the day with a lecture on tensions in data and human rights. One of the main assumptions has been that technology is not good, bad, nor neutral but it can be addressed for different purpose.

After the usual coffee break in which we exchanged interesting opinions about the insights just received, Nathaniel Raymond from Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, took the floor to speak about the ways of addressing risks and harms in the field of big data. During his inspiring presentation, Nathaniel underlined six important lessons and thirteen primary threat vector types. As he stated, preparation and procedures are the tools that can help addressing risks and attacks. Moreover, it has to be remembered that not all the answers for the future rely on the present.

After lunch, for the action lab session of the day, we continued the workshop started on Wednesday under the supervision of Danna Ingleton from Lead Responsible Data Forum. With our groups, we concluded the loop to promote critical thinking about data and increase data ethics according to the projects we took into account the day before. During the last hour each group presented its findings and discussed its conclusions. 

The day finished in a great way in a beach club in Scheveningen. There, we had some drinks looking at the sunset and discussing about our future projects and all the things we learned in the past days.

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