Three Potential Project Directions

Throughout the last month, I’ve been developing and considering three possible project directions for my thesis project. They all have themes in common—and I’ll definitely end up doing a project that pulls from a number of different ideas here. I’m excited to get them all on paper and share them with you all.

All comments and suggestions welcome, as always!

Project One: Digital Citizens

At my work at Community Energy Scotland, I’m working on a project around how energy and decarbonisation data is shared between organisations to accelerate decarbonisation activities. Through this work, I’ve done a lot of thinking about extractive data practices, and how the data subjects can retain some form of agency over the world their data is being used to create.

Ever since I encountered the concept of a Public Data Trust in Morgan Currie’s excellent module Datafication, Accountability and Democracy, I’ve been considering the relevance of creating a public data trust for such data in rural Scotland. A particular example of data that might be included is home energy consumption data which is very valuable to organisations working on grid flexibility projects as well as understanding heating and heating emissions. I’d love to explore the creation of a trust that allows the community to aggregate, analyse and control as an asset this dataset. They could choose to share it with whatever companies or organisations they feel are carrying out work that will support a just and equitable transition for themselves and others; as well as vetting on how the data is handled and the overall approach of the data processors.

In terms of methodologies, I’ve got another blog post coming up soon that will explore these in more depth. However, I’d like to quickly document two methods of asking a question around the relevance of data trusts or their potential impact on society:

Can I build such a data trust and demo it for people?
Can I use a speculative experiential process that I’ve created for participants in which I help them to imagine the existence of such a trust and to evaluate their response or to understand how it might impact their lives?

Project Two: Sensing Citizens

Over the last month, I’ve been reading Jennifer Gabrys’ book Citizens of Worlds. The book is a write up of Gabrys’ work implementing and analysing community environmental sensing projects. I intend to do a proper write-up of my thoughts on this book soon as I’ve found so much relevance and interest in the depictions of positive uses of data by grassroots groups. Gabrys describes in detail how data is used by these organisations to build the worlds they want. This will be a key theme in any project that I eventually choose.

A particular project direction I’d like to explore on this theme is the importance of existing and developing community relationships and processes in such sensing activities. This is something that (in the 60% of the book I’ve covered so far) the author does not cover in as much depth, beyond discussing the emergent processes that happen as a result of sensing activities.

My colleague Rebecca Ford has recently shared with me her thoughts on seeing the process of community as a tool for decarbonisation. This is not just when communities are engaging in directly decarbonisation activities; but is inherent in the activity of communities who engage people; build resilience and understand their landscapes better than anyone else.

In this project, I’d analyse (or carry out/ prompt) sensing activities carried out by communities with this lens.

I’d also be interested in exploring how communities move beyond the sensing behaviour to modes of sharing data; collaborating with other communities and using platforms—though this probably ties in best with Project One.

Project Three: Connected Citizens

Earlier this year I was in communication with Michelle Thorne, founder and editor of Branch Magazine, about the possibility of doing a dissertation project with The Green Web Foundation. As I haven’t heard back from her recently, I’ve slightly put this idea on hold but I’m documenting it for now anyway.

In this project, I’d like to explore the potential for community-led models of the internet. I am interested in building on the Orkney Cloud Project as a piece of work and would like to explore connectivity and data in rural places. My core inspiration for this idea is the book Internet for the People by Ben Tarnoff. In his last chapter, he so beautifully describes an internet that’s been “rewilded” with community activity and I couldn’t resist incorporating this into my project ideas.