We promote exchange about
the future of the digital society

In a 2018 Interview, Mark Zuckerberg announced the Facebook Oversight Board’s introduction as Facebook’s own Supreme Court and subsequently the new organisation began its work on 22 October 2020. This blog post provides an overview of the board’s activities in its first year of operation.

The ifo Business Climate Index is often referred to as a representative study, investigating inter alia German companies’ digitisation progress. The Data collected attracts a great deal of media attention in Germany. However, the survey’s metadata, which is a rich source of information about companies and their behaviour, has so far received little public or academic attention.

DigiMeet took place virtually on 10 June 2021 with the topic “sustainability in digital transformation: charting new terrain, exploring tensions.” The main purpose of this interdisciplinary event was to provide a forum for early career researchers with a focus on digitalisation-related topics and to inaugurate a collaboration between Weizenbaum Institut, CAIS and bidt.

Nudging as a global trend has been used in the past years to face intractable policy problems. It is considered as particularly useful when conventional policy tools based on hard economic incentives and strict legal requirements have failed. The trend is ongoing, especially since policy makers become interested in using digital tools to influence behaviour.

Ordinary citizens involvement in scientific research should not be taken as a matter of course. Nevertheless, the history of science has over time seen various forms of civil society participation, including Citizen Science (CS), which is currently expanding not only on a scientific level, but also within political and social spheres.