[DATAGOV Core] Living Lab - draft mission statement

[Federico Bonelli]

Great Stef!
I send it back with some of my thoughts about it. I layered them a bit 
as they came.


f


**DATAGOV Living Lab: Draft mission statement**

**Stefi first run – 25/2/2026, Switzerland ;-)**


- Interrogate governance by data infrastructure by making regulatory 
data systems (primarily: biometrics, digital ID, health tech, edu tech) 
tangible, experiential, accessible (?), and publicly debatable.

- Center citizens as co-investigators _on equal footing_, creating a 
safe space where non-experts critically engage (and experiment?) with 
the data infrastructures that increasingly govern their lives, while 
meeting experts for cross-fertilization and mutual learning.
     - Creating that "safe space" requires immense facilitation skill 
and a conscious dismantling of traditional hierarchies. It's about 
creating conditions for _mutual_ vulnerability and learning. I am not 
sure that "safe spaces" are more than mythical houses for spoiled gods. 
Is not the right term. In therms of post dramatic performance we should 
define them differently. I use the term "situations".
     - To design situations that not only allow but foster equal footing 
access to investigation by all participants I have divided the practice 
into a structured approach in 7 phases: radical observation, situation 
setting, active exploration, opening, transformation, communication, 
care. ( i refer to this as the trasformatorio: a situation based 
laboratory for transformations)

- Foreground and value the lived experience of people when investigating 
regulatory data infrastructure.
     - critical data shadows digital infrastructure. Because 
infrastructure character is to being liminal (when it works), 
maintenance is delegated to "specialists",  "lower people" and "working 
class" and is expensive to fix when it brakes.
       Both hard shell and digital infrastructure is encrusted into 
nature and society in complicated ways. A thunderstorm or a strike proof 
it. To move in this complex field between digital and real 
infrastructures was the activity of hackers.  At this intersection 
developed mostly in autonomous ways a different type of sensibility. Is 
the zone of digital art forms and hacktivists. Is a "hot compost pile" 
to talk with a metaphor from Donna Haraway, were many processes are 
supposed to live at the same time.

- Translate complex data assemblages and the associated social costs 
into lived experience through, among others, interactive art, playable 
citizen science, infrastructure walking, and co-design methods.
     - About the compost pile mentioned above, to allow real 
participation any presence has to be treated from the perspective of the 
process and identity has to stay as fluid (as processes are). In 
trasformatorio methodology i set this by crafting the situation for 
participation as i have learned from guided improvisation and 
storytelling. Many artists have worked in this way in many fields: 
musical improvisation, dance, installation. As well many technically 
rich fields have developed in established practices starting from these 
activities. I make some examples: lighting a stage for a play with 
unplugged live music, an exploratory walk in nature, filming a stunt 
scene, allowing "audience" to interact in a dance performance.
     - When the focus shifts, as we want, to complex data assemblages 
the associated social costs and the structure of power and governance we 
walk into a hybrid territory: the meat world touches the real one and 
viceversa. Internet of things and humans and non humans and ... all 
agents with a degree of agency within and outside the limits of complex 
governance systems depending on complex infrastructures. As I see it is 
almost as complicated as religion (hihihi).

- Experiment with democratic futures for governance by data 
infrastructure, enabling participants to collectively imagine and 
prototype (?) alternative socio-technical arrangements.
     - Play. Invent by playing, learn by playing. Who plays? Is a game 
you cannot hack fair? Wich rules can be changed and which if changed 
destroy the game? Who owns the ball can go home leaving all idle or to 
own a ball is a responsability to the survival of the game? How do you 
learn to play?

- Bridge research, policy, and public life, fostering dialogue between 
citizens (people), scholars, technologists, and decision-makers.
     - defuse identity, carve situations that question rank, make role 
fluid, detour, disrupt your own organisation, live in the world, learn 
from non humans, plants, engineered machines, see the world as a poet, 
see poetry to be in "words" made by stuff that does not have any yet.

- Expose and contest inequalities embedded in data infrastructures, 
foregrounding issues of exclusion, bias, discrimination, and sovereignty 
(…).
     - design in spaces were exclusion and discrimination  is 
impossible, biases are noted, observed and bypassed. Show the way you 
think is best to live together by being the way is best to live 
together. Be self sovereign by acquiring and respecting the knowledge 
and the social awareness that is necessary to be self sovereign. Be human.

- Develop and openly share innovative participatory methodologies, 
contributing reusable blueprints for critical data studies and civic 
engagement worldwide.

- Develop a play-based approach to participatory methods, where 
first-hand experience and leisure contribute to make complex, intangible 
issues accessible to the general population.

- Cultivate literacy, agency, and collective capacity, empowering 
participants to articulate claims, resist harms, and shape datafied 
democracies.
     - To cultivate you need to respect the land and design within the 
land. You need to live part of the product in the land, you want it or 
not, to grow you need soil and soil is generational long process. Same 
thing for the digital world. It has to be intelligible, therefore has to 
be open to inquiry and not close by corporate greed and predatory use of 
copyright law. Let's take Data. Sometimes is like dust in a ray of 
light. The air is calm and moves or is visible on the scaffold because 
of the sun touching it. Similar to what we are allowed to know and feel 
by bones and blood, neurons, societal constraints and conscience. The 
movement and consistence of this type of data follows our body in the 
space, leaves telling traces can be codified. See the movie "Gattaca" as 
a reference to a society that uses exactly dust as a mean to control 
people's behaviour.
     - Our hectic times use data as they have used oil. High entropy 
fuel for extractive knowledge. Knowledge is valued according to 
exploitative principle in his own virtual space. This concept deserves 
more investigation offcourse. I just want to point to the feeling that a 
datafied democracy cannot coexist with a capitalistic highly volatile 
economy that has no interest to control externalities. Be it digital or 
physical or both. The perspective of infrastructure, be it 
infrastructure for society, for digital economy or for human "knowledge" 
production is the right starting point.
     - In my own adaptation of the process "empowerment" is less than 
"participate" and the latter less than cultivate. I think that to get a 
yeald there is much more to be involved than articulated knowledge. 
There is capacity of observation and social awareness for example, but 
also capability to play within the world acknowledging its power. There 
is a need for a different type of wisdom based on different premises.

- Contribute to establishing citizen-generated experiential data as a 
legitimate and authoritative form of knowledge, on equal footing with 
institutional and technical expertise, recognizing its essential role in 
decision-making on governance by data infrastructure.
     - I feel we need to be super critical on what we measure, when we 
measure and what are the properties of our measurements. Too long to put 
out here as a side note but relevant. Institutional technical expertise 
is important but is actually mostly outsourced on the base of risk 
management to high cost corporate structures. Practices are wider then 
what is advertised as a practice as any lawyer knows well.
     - Algorithms can be more transparent than democratic work in opaque 
institutions. But they tend to be hard to bend to real world cases. 
Injustices exists in and out of any bureaucratic hell.
     - I feel that the ethical, the logical and the physical perspective 
on power should emerge from practice.  A "do" were coexisting, sharing, 
growing and respecting the soil were life burst into behing define the 
way to live. And I feel that to get into this is a task were learning is 
shared within a wide group of peers should be open *de facto* and *de 
iure*. The free software movement was seminal in the digital world to 
establish this as its de-politicisation and actual sidelining indirectly 
proof.






Some of the questions for us to think about:

- What name/label? Is Living Lab what we want to convey? What would be 
added-value of being a Living Lab? What are the alternatives?
     - A living lab is a good term because is used widely and is 
accepted european slang for about everything under the sun. In my view 
will always be to interpret it as a trasformatorio. a situation (defined 
by people, place, time and intentions) to pray and work together (labor 
as work and fatigue in the sense of the benedictine monks, finalised to 
the glory of a collective end with spiritual connotations). And it has 
to be structured to archive "transformation". Transformation of 
energy-structure-mind-awareness-society-people-life. This is the core of 
what deserves to be remembered an told around the fire.

- Any role for prototyping? Is it strategically good to keep it in, or 
shall we remove it?
     - is important and vital. Because happens in the complex real 
multidimensional world were anything can happen and is not confined by 
human languages and singular desires. Works or does not work yet it 
teaches all the times. What is the sense of producing and reharsing a 
play that never gets staged?

- Shall we refer to “citizens” or avoid it for its exclusionary nature? 
What is a good alternative? “People” does not work everywhere.
     - i use participants. They walk into a situation, aware or not. And 
respect and care for participants is paramount.

On 25/02/2026 22:59, Stefania Milan via Core wrote:
> Dear all
> I took a stab at drafting a minimal bullet-point list for a mission 
> statement for the DATAGOV “Living Lab”.
> Essentially, there are 3 goals:
> 1_ gather qualitative data through participatory methods
> 2_develop and experiment with new participatory methods (play-based, 
> innovative…)
> 3_contribute to awareness raising on the DATAGOV agenda
> (4_bonus: enable conversations between people and decision-makers)
>
> My draf, very messy and unstructured, has been compiled as next to me 
> people are deciding where to go skiing tomorrow—which means I cannot 
> even complain if I don’t like the place (next time I go with Mattéo) 
> ;-) So, it is quick and dirty, as they say, but it is a start.
>
> If you want to know more about what I mean re: “on equal footing” and 
> legitimizing people’s experiential knowledge, check out this 
> <https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC139026> (my 
> chapter) and this 
> <https://www.sustainabilityperformances.eu/ethical-data-governance-for-a-just-transition/> (none 
> of them particularly relevant to DATAGOV, so you can also ignore!). I 
> got more sources if you want to read more 😉
>
> TAKE IT APART! and thank you for your good vibes and precious inputs.
>
> ~st. (who comes to CH to ski and it is 15C and today skated on 3cm of 
> water… But there is a stunning blue sky!)
>