Designing Collective Technology Governance

  • Panel
  • Grande Halle
  • Thursday 21.05 — 17:20 - 18:40

Organising Institution

Max Planck Institute For Security And Privacy

Germany

The mission of the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy is to design, build, and analyze security and privacy technologies from foundations through systems to society. By combining our strong foundational research with our expertise in empirical research, we build new systems, refine existing technologies, and assess their real-world impact. We continuously explore emerging challenges for security and privacy, pushing the boundaries of research to find creative solutions.
  • Academic 3
  • Business 1
  • Policy 2
Current technology and data governance frameworks center on individuals. Yet, these approaches face fundamental limitations: they place a burden on fine-grained individual decision-making, ignore the interconnected nature of data, and struggle to address harms that are inherently collective. Beyond simplistic fixes, these limitations may require the development of new governance approaches that align with the collective nature of contemporary technologies and their impacts. This panel brings together experts in computer science, social sciences, law, and policy, to explore collective approaches to technology governance. We examine the forms collective governance might take, from data trusts to consent assemblies to participatory policy processes, and interrogate the socio-technical infrastructure, legal foundations, and legitimacy conditions that these approaches require. Rather than abandoning individual rights, we ask how collective mechanisms can complement and strengthen them while addressing governance challenges that individualistic frameworks cannot.

Questions to be answered

  1. What forms can collective technology governance take, and what opportunities do they create?
  2. What socio-technical infrastructure can enable meaningful collective governance?
  3. How can collective governance approaches achieve (legal) legitimacy?
  4. What are the risks and limitations of collective technology governance?

Moderator

Asia Biega

Max Planck Institute For Security And Privacy - Germany

Dr. Asia Biega is a computer scientist and a tenure-track faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP), where she leads the interdisciplinary Responsible Computing group. Her research explores the intersection of computing and society, with a focus on technology governance. She is a principal investigator in the CASA Cluster of Excellence and the FINDHR consortium, and has collaborated widely across disciplines and sectors. She has served as an external expert for the European Commission, and the General Co-Chair of FAccT 2025, the biggest academic conference focusing on the societal impacts of computing. She now sits on the FAccT Executive Committee. Her work has been recognized with the Council of Europe’s Rodota Award for innovative research in data protection, the Annual Privacy Forum Best Paper Award, the SaTML Notable Reviewer Award, the GI-DBIS Dissertation Award of the German Informatics Society, and she has been named one of the 2025 "100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics".

Speaker

Jane Suiter

Dublin City University - Ireland

Professor Jane Suiter is the Director of DCU Institute for Media, Democracy and Society (FuJo). She is a social scientist whose research interests focus on the public sphere. Her present research is focused on the social, political and communicative aspects of citizen participation, empowerment and direct and participative democracy. She has a particular interest in the potential of deliberation and has worked on and researched a number of real-world deliberative assemblies, including We the Citizens, the Irish Constitutional Convention, and Citizen Assembly (2012-2023) in Ireland and internationally.

Speaker

Kristina Zenner

BFDI - Germany

Kristina Zenner is a senior advisor at the German Federal Data Protection Authority, focusing on topics related to technology and its social implications. Kristina has a background in political science and political sociology. Previously, she had held positions at the Federal Office for Information Security, the Berlin School of Economics and Law, and as an employee of a Member of the German Parliament.

Speaker

Nicholas Vincent

Simon Fraser University - Canada

Prof. Nick Vincent is an Assistant Professor in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. He studies the content ecosystems and data supply chains that fuel data-dependent technologies like search engines, recommender systems, and generative AI. This involves exploring avenues for people to control how data flows and participate in the governance of AI systems. The overarching goal of this research is to work towards highly capable and widely beneficial AI technologies that mitigate -- rather than exacerbate -- inequalities in wealth and power.

Speaker

Six Silberman

University of Oxford and International Trade Union Confederation - International

Six Silberman is a postdoctoral researcher studying regulation of algorithmic management at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights (University of Oxford) and a consultant on digitalisation with the International Trade Union Confederation. Silberman has previously worked for IG Metall (the trade union in the German manufacturing sector) and as a software engineer.