[DATAGOV Core] Living Lab - draft mission statement

[Giulia Campaioli]

Hi everyone,

Picking up this email thread to add my two cents. I actually just took
Stefi's proposal and Federico's comments and put it together in a
document, then added a few 'practical proposals' for how the Living Lab
could approach its goals.

Attached to this email, to keep the conversation alive :)

Best,
G

On 26/02/2026 13:01, Federico Bonelli via Core wrote:
> 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!)
>>
>
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