IN-SIGHT.it
Making the Hidden Visible: Co-designing for Public Values in Standards-making and Governance
IN-SIGHT.it
Making the Hidden Visible: Co-designing for Public Values in Standards-making and Governance
Report
Read our October 2025 report Standards in the Spotlight: Making Governance Work for All to see how more transparent and inclusive standards-making can ensure digital technologies reflect public values.
Citizenship and standard-setting in digital networks
While deeply woven into our everyday life, digital infrastructure—from network switches to public administration databases—is typically invisible to users. The process of standard-making, in particular, remains a blind spot.
Standardization describes and uniforms a set of criteria, often of a technical nature, the associated practices and methods enabling the interoperability of networks and datasets. Standards thus mediate societal life, thus our ability to enact our citizenship and enjoy human rights in the digital age. Straddling computer science, sociology, law, and media studies, this project investigated standard-making in relation to democratic values and practices. It asked how the public sphere was governed through the standardization of the digital and how to support societal values in the creation of standards. Specifically, it examined at standard-making as a sociotechnical practice, analyzing technology development and implementation, the related governance arrangements and legal aspects.
This project investigated three cases of national relevance and global breadth:
In so doing, the project contributed to illuminating the “wiring” of values (or lack thereof) into technical standards, the relation and the balance of power between a variety of public (e.g., states) and private actors (e.g., the industry, consumers), informal lawmaking and multistakeholder governance mechanisms. It resulted in the co-design of mechanisms for technology and governance, and in standards which are “value- and rights-respecting by design”.
Research Report
Download our research report on public values concerning digital technologies published Februrary 2024, and relive our report launch event and roundtable discussion at SPUI25 in Amsterdam, from February 21st 2024.
