| APrIGF 2025 Session Proposal Submission Form | |||||||||||||
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| Part 1 - Lead Organizer | |||||||||||||
| Contact Person | |||||||||||||
| Ms. Disha Verma | |||||||||||||
| Organization / Affiliation (Please state "Individual" if appropriate) * | |||||||||||||
| Tech Global Institute | |||||||||||||
| Designation | |||||||||||||
| Program Manager, Asia Pacific | |||||||||||||
| Gender | |||||||||||||
| Female | |||||||||||||
| Economy of Residence | |||||||||||||
| India | |||||||||||||
| Stakeholder Group | |||||||||||||
| Civil Society | |||||||||||||
| Part 2 - Session Proposal | |||||||||||||
| Session Title | |||||||||||||
| Multistakeholderism and meaningful participation in DPI Governance: What should it actually look like? | |||||||||||||
| Thematic Track of Your Session | |||||||||||||
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| Description of Session Formats | |||||||||||||
| Workshop (60 minutes) | |||||||||||||
| Where do you plan to organize your session? | |||||||||||||
| Onsite at the venue (with online moderator for questions and comments from remote participants) | |||||||||||||
| Specific Issues for Discussion | |||||||||||||
| The question this workshop largely asks and seeks to collaboratively answer, simply, is what multistakeholderism and meaningful community participation in digital public infrastructure (DPI) governance actually looks like. Policy consensus around DPI governance has been difficult to achieve—competing perspectives from global regulators and diverse societal realities of participating states stand in the way of effective realisation of SDGs through DPI. Even though baseline DPI safeguards have now been proposed at international fora, their implementation heavily depends on domestic experiences and partnerships between the state, private entities, and people. Often having taken the form of digital identity projects in many parts of the world, DPIs have long impacted communities and their access to public services and welfare entitlements. Experiences from digital ID systems rolled out in India, Kenya, and South Africa, even though many decades apart, present a common set of concerns with digitalisation at societal scale. The most pervasive of these is the risk of exclusion—the likelihood of at-risk populations to become excluded from availing an essential public service runs high across LMICs and is backed by evidence, especially in India and Kenya. The data-heavy nature of DPI brings surveillance, censorship, and data privacy risks to the fore, especially in jurisdictions with little to no legal safeguards for data protection and privacy. Improper implementation of DPI can undermine citizen dignity and autonomy, thus impeding the very development and inclusion it set out to further. Their lived experience and participation of people and communities, therefore, should become the cornerstone of DPI governance and participation. DPI must be legislated with—and not only for—the people. |
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| Describe the Relevance of Your Session to APrIGF | |||||||||||||
| APrIGF 2025 zeroes in on meaningful multistakeholderism as a tool for technology governance. Representation and participation from underserved and invisibilised communities, who often become subjects of both technologies and their regulation without having a say in either, is paramount to this conversation. The proposed panel discussion fits into the Access and Inclusion sub-theme of this year’s APrIGF. Through this workshop, Tech Global Institute wishes to bring together a diverse mix of digital rights stakeholders across Asia to explore what meaningful community participation looks like in DPI governance. Through case studies and interactive breakout sessions, aim to understand how local DPI models are built and implemented across the region. We will gauge the extent of community participation in these structures—what ‘communities’ entail, how they are brought to the table, and how their perspectives are incorporated into domestic DPI governance. We will conclude the workshop by collaboratively preparing a policy checklist for inclusive and participative DPI design and implementation—a tool for domestic policymakers to rely on when leveraging the DPI approach for socioeconomic development. Post APrIGF, we will continue to hone this resource and release it as a public resource. |
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| Methodology / Agenda (Please add rows by clicking "+" on the right) | |||||||||||||
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| Moderators & Speakers Info (Please complete where possible) - (Required) | |||||||||||||
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| Please explain the rationale for choosing each of the above contributors to the session. | |||||||||||||
| Disha Verma is the Program Manager, APAC at Tech Global Institute. Disha is a technology and human rights researcher with roots in rights advocacy across themes of community health, access to medicine, e-surveillance, data privacy, and rights digitalisation. She currently leads Asia programs at Tech Global Institute, mainly looking at digital public infrastructure and labour justice in tech supply chains. | |||||||||||||
| Please declare if you have any potential conflict of interest with the Program Committee 2025. | |||||||||||||
| No | |||||||||||||
| Are you or other session contributors planning to apply for the APrIGF Fellowship Program 2025? | |||||||||||||
| Yes | |||||||||||||
| Upon evaluation by the Program Committee, your session proposal may only be selected under the condition that you will accept the suggestion of merging with another proposal with similar topics. Please state your preference below: | |||||||||||||
| Yes, I am willing to work with another session proposer on a suggested merger. | |||||||||||||
| Brief Summary of Your Session | |||||||||||||
| The workshop was split across three segments. First, we set context on DPI governance by defining DPIs, identifying actors engaged with defining and governing DPIs, and recognising gaps in current understandings of such systems. Next, we questioned whether the "public" in digital public infrastructure is well-represented—reflected in how we define 'community' when we talk about community participation in DPIs, outlining and articulating "community harms" as distinct from currently understood risks and harms of DPIs, which tend to be more individualistic and based on European human rights frameworks, and questioning how exactly communities can participate in DPI design, implementation, and governance. Here, we also explored how public-private partnerships, which are centric to DPIs, exacerbate community harms, and how people-led movements can push back against it. Finally, we broke out for an interactive session, where 3 groups attempted to design 3 different DPI systems with complete and equal representation from all stakeholders, and come together as a group to share reflections. | |||||||||||||
| Substantive Summary of the Key Issues Raised and the Discussion | |||||||||||||
| We raised the following broad issues in the session: 1. DPIs are not neutral. In the Global Majority, DPIs form the basis of access to essential, often life-saving services. Corporate capture of these services can mean a total collapse of the welfare state and depriving populations of their fundamental human rights. Community participation and true multistakeholderism thus become key pillars of how DPIs should be conceived, designed, implemented, and continuously audited. Session participants engaged in the question: Do all stakeholders need to be in the same room? 2. Community is not a homogeneous unit—current imaginations of community engagement may not be enough. “Users” vs “subjects” of tech: DPI “subjects” people to technological means instead of them choosing to opt it. We need to identify, articulate, and make space for “community” harms (more relevant for Global Majority) alongside individual harms (ICCPR-centric; aligned with Global Minority needs). Session participants engaged in the question: How do you define community participation? 3. We discussed is communities are presently able to participate in DPIs. Factors that structurally impede meaningful participation include low digital literacy rates and poor internet penetration or connection, accessibility issues like one-time-password authentications or non-disability friendly processes, and technological glitches like point of sale machine failures or bank errors, and state-imposed internet shutdowns, throttling, and censorship. 4. We explored public-private partnerships. One tension that arises due to the mixed provisioning model of most DPIs is at the identity layer—who decides the digital identity of a citizen? We may need to shift focus from State-focussed assessment of harms and redress to the private sector. Session participants engaged in the questions: How do you engage with private entities in DPI and digital identity-related advocacy? Does multistakeholderism include giving equal space to the private sector? |
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| Conclusions and Suggestions of Way Forward | |||||||||||||
| We agreed that there are currently gaps in the way DPIs are defined, designed, implemented, governed, and audited—and most gaps are predominantly due to lack of meaningful participation from communities in the Global Majority. Risks and harms to the existence, rights, and cultural fabric of communities posed by DPIs are made worse by the public-private nature of these systems and the lack of accountability mechanisms in domestic contexts, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. There is a need for regulators to create meaningful spaces and grievance redress/feedback mechanisms that place the interest of communities and vulnerable groups at the heart of DPI governance. There is also a need to continue civil advocacy and broaden it to cover private entities, who increasingly play significant roles in the digitalisation of our daily lives. | |||||||||||||
| Number of Attendees (Please fill in numbers) | |||||||||||||
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| Gender Balance in Moderators/Speakers (Please fill in numbers) | |||||||||||||
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| How were gender perspectives, equality, inclusion or empowerment discussed? Please provide details and context. | |||||||||||||
| The discussion was rooted in the need to amplify marginalised and vulnerable voices in DPI governance. | |||||||||||||
| Consent | |||||||||||||
 I agree that my data can be submitted to forms.for.asia and processed by APrIGF organizers for the program selection of APrIGF 2025. |
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