"The digitization of Danish public sector has taken on the character of an international competition, where it is about taking the top place on the podium."

There is intense work of knowledge-sharing taking place across borders and between countries, which we normally consider very different, and it is the dynamics and consequences of this knowledge sharing of 'best practices' in digitization that a new research project will focus on.

The research project, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, is led by Irina Papazu, Head of Center at CDW and Jessamy Perriam, Assistant Professor at ITU. The project will look at how public digitization in Denmark is affected by ideas and technologies from other countries with which we do not necessarily share law or welfare values. What does it mean, for example, when we take over code from England for the development of Danish citizen service portals, or when we enter an IT policy collaboration with Israel?

Law enforcement constitutes an institution of the public sector that is going through a gradual transformation by applying digital strategies to improve its efficiency and effectiveness. The aim of the project ‘Critical Understanding of Predictive Policing’ (CUPP) is to investigate how values, digital affordances, and organizational politics are embedded in data-driven police innovations, as well as practiced by police officers and developers in Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Norway, Sweden and the UK. CUPP is funded by Nordforsk with DKK 2,2 mill, and the project runs in 2021-2023.

The CUPP project will apply an interdisciplinary framework at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies, Critical Criminology, and Critical Big Data Studies as well as a methodological approach consisting of historiography, interviews, and interventionist analysis. The 3-year project will generate insights about how policing is practiced in the digitalized state, and how scrutiny is ensured in the procurement of digital infrastructures. The research will shed light on what values are inscribed in digital solutions. 

CUPP is an interdisciplinary cooperation between the CDW, the Tallinn University of Technology, the University of Latvia, the Baltic Studies Centre, the University of Oslo, the University of St Andrews, and the Danish labour union PROSA.

To learn more about CUPP, read here or contact the principle investigator, associate professor Vasilis Galis. 

Digitalization in the Nordic countries has largely covered all welfare areas; social service, public schools, and health care. A strong user-perspective has led to a focus on self-service solutions. However, as citizens engage in encounters with the welfare state through educational, health care and social services, it is increasingly clear that there are still needs related to digitalization that are unmet. For instance, citizens who struggle with social, cognitive or health related challenges may refrain from using the digital solutions put in place by the public authorities. Even though they may be able to use mobile commercial digital devices and services through social media etc., their agency as digital citizens remain partial as more or less extensive communicative support is required for them to access welfare services. These are the key issues that the project ‘Infrastructure for partially digital citizens: Supporting informal welfare work in the digitized state’ (SOS) sets out to investigate. The SOS project is funded by Nordforsk with DKK 2,25 mill, and the project runs in 2021-2023.

The SOS project offers a comparative mapping of informationprocessing and communicative aspects of informal welfare work across three welfare sectors. Informal welfare work is unpaid support of citizens in his/her interactions with welfare state institutions and actors. SOS takes as a point of departure that in order to keep their position as world-leading digital welfare societies, the Nordic countries cannot afford to ignore designing support for such work. Not only does a lack of support for the partially digital citizens cut deeply into the overall Nordic value of universal welfare, there is a risk that welfare costs will escalate in the future, if support is not provided.

The project has a strong consortium of universities, public sector, and industry partners in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Its main ambition is to map informal welfare work in three welfare sectors across three Nordic countries and to propose and prototype socio-digital innovations that enable synergy between informal welfare work and requirements of public authorities. With an excellent consortium and a broad and engaged panel of affiliated partners we are well-equipped to offer solutions for an area that is currently invisible and unacknowledged, and help future-proofing digital welfare societies in the Nordic region.

To learn more about SOS, please get in touch with Strategic Project Manager Kitt Plinia Nielsen.

The corona crisis has demanded of individuals, families and societies a complete re-assessment of the functions and boundaries of the home. The lockdown required that private spaces accommodate typically public activities such as work, school, day-care, exercise, concerts, and religious practices. Meanwhile, the everyday life of the household became more segregated and hermetic. These shifts have made visible social, architectural, digital and existential structures of the home, bringing to the fore risks and potential of relevance for future homes.

The project ‘STAY HOME: The home during the corona crisis – and after’ (STAY HOME) will document experiences and initiatives and identify new insights and practices regarding the home which have emerged during the corona crisis. It trawls ethnographic archives collected in projects led by our collaborators and concerned with digital practices, daily life, reading habits and domestic violence.

STAY HOME runs in 2020-2024 and it is funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. Anchored with the University of Copenhagen, the project is conducted by a cross-disciplinary team from the Faculties of Theology and Humanities (UCPH), The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture (KADK) and the CDW which will analyze these data in order to uncover insights that may benefit future homes and the life led there. The interdisciplinary approach is developed in an ongoing exchange with historical research into the home and its social, spatial, technological and existential implications conducted at the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies.

The project ‘Welfare after Digitalization’ (WaD) examines the many and varied consequences of public sector digitization in Denmark. WaD is supported by The Velux Foundations with DKK 6 mill, and it running in 2021-2023.

The WaD-project focuses on four different welfare areas: Law enforcement, primary education, healthcare, and local government. The assumption is that an analysis of the complex relationships between the institutional values, digital affordances and politics of these welfare sectors will help uncover new insights about how both citizens and professionals think about and experience welfare provision. The analyses will contribute to a deeper understanding of the nature of public sector digitalisation, its consequences across different sectors, while also pointing to welfare areas in particular need of attention in the coming years.

WaD seeks to continue building a strong Danish research front on the numerous topics related to digitalization-in-practice, citizenship, platform economies, governance and accountability in STS, anthropology, communication and organization studies. Through different means of contrasting and comparing across sectors, WaD will be the first major research project to undertake a comprehensive study of welfare in practice, and of its consequences for citizens’ relations to welfare institutions in a digitalized state.

CAREinFintech

As green transition becomes necessary for all industry, providing environmental, social and governance (ESG) data becomes increasingly important yet poses great challenges to investors, Fintech startups and clusters. These challenges hinge on startups’ lack of resources and capabilities to curate and report ESG data. The ‘CAREinFintech’ research project proposes such issue should be solved by efforts that come from the Fintech sector, and combine the interests between regulators, investors, Fintech cluster and start-up. The project is funded by Copenhagen Fintech with 200,000 DKK, it partners with Vækstfonden, Tekudo, and Syracuse University and its researchers affiliated with the Center for Digital Welfare are Cancan Wang (IT-University of Copenhagen), Carsten Østerlund (Syracuse University, School of Information Studies), and Yvonne Dittrich (ITU, Department of Computer Science).

The CAREinFintech co-develops a data-driven solution that helps Fintech sector to realise green transition in a collective manner. More specifically, the CAREinFintech researchers address Fintech ESG reporting challenges by developing a Collaborative Data Analytics (CDA) model that utilises a data-drive economy of scale approach associated with a cluster. The CDA method, tackles ESG reporting from three connected angles: data, organization, and governance. To achieve the project goal, we use a co-design approach through 1) interviews, and 2) trial implementations. We are working with start-ups and investment managers from LPs, VCs who are interested in ESG reporting for the Fintech sector.

The expected results from the project are: 1) A list of ESG Data Specifications suitable for Fintech Start-ups; 2) An ESG-specific organizational design for Fintech clusters to coordinate ESG reporting needs with start-ups and investors, and; 3) An ESG data governance setup ensuring continuous policy compliance and alignment between investors, Fintech start-ups and clusters.

To learn more about CAREinFintech, please reach out to Associate Professor Cancan Wang.