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The GDS webinar series, an online seminar series, is organised by our Special Interest Group (SIG) coordinators and board members. They have each invited a leading expert in their research field to enlighten us about the different aspects of governing the digital society. Once a month you will have the opportunity to tune in via our GDS Team or the link to the public stream we will share in Teams and here on our website.

For the 23^rd of March, GDS boardmember José van Dijck has invited , associate professor at ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Amsterdam. The title of his talk is "Towards Platform Observability.

Towards Platform Observability

The growing power of digital platforms raises a series of important questions for democratic life, economic organization, and everyday practices. Algorithmic ordering - ranking, recommendation, automatic filtering - is at the center of many of these concerns and scholars, regulators, and members of civil society are debating how to approach platforms as complex socio-technical objects. A popular principle within these debates is that of transparency, often combined with the metaphor of a “black box” that needs to be opened. But there are a number of both conceptual and technical reasons that problematize simplistic understandings of transparency. Starting from these critiques, this talk proposes the concept of “observability” as a pragmatic attempt to further our capacities to generate knowledge about platforms and, more broadly, "platform life”. It sets out three broad principles as regulatory guidelines for making platforms more accountable, addressing the normative and analytical scope, the empirical and temporal dimension, and the necessary capacities for learning and knowledge generation.

Dr. Bernhard Rieder (UvA) and dr. Jeanette Hofmann (HIIG, Berlin) have on this topic which you can read as background information. The speaker will lecture for 30-35 minutes followed by a Q&A.

Governing the Digital Society

This webinar series is organized by the Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� focus area Governing the Digital Society. Governing the Digital Society promotes research on the social processes of datafication, algorithmisation and platformisation. The focus area's basic research inquiry revolves around the question: How to develop and apply principles of (good) governance in digital societies?