Data + Elections Workshop

TheDeveloping Data?project is organised by the Collaboration on International ICT Policy in East and Southern Africa (CIPESA), Strathmore University’s Centre of Intellectual Property & Information Technology (CIPIT), and the University of Edinburgh’s Centre of African Studies (CAS).

Developing Data?

Data is a resource that is remaking elections in East Africa and beyond. Join us to explore the themes in workshop format.

East Africa’s digital data are not only a commercial resource. Records from mobile communications, finance, and media are also reshaping governance, democracy, and elections. With Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya all holding elections by 2022, this is a particularly pressing topic. The granularity of information available about individual voters, their behaviours, and proclivities is transforming the practice of politics in East Africa and beyond. The accumulation of data from voters may offer an opportunity to develop policies that respond to citizens’ interests, desires, and demands. Both Uber and IBM, for instance, are using mobility data in Nairobi to improve traffic management. Yet there is also a dark side. Cambridge Analytica, the infamous political consulting firm, developed many of the methods it was to later use during the Brexit referendum and the 2016 American elections when working in Kenyan elections. They are not alone: politicians, parties, and consultants are pioneering new forms of online data gathering and advertising. A recent report from Senegal, for instance, explains how the incumbent gathered dozens of data points on 3.5 million voters in order to structure his campaign.How do the business models of social media (focused on engagement and virality) change the nature of political discourse? Does this represent a more responsive electoral system, or one characterised by elections designed by data engineers in a lab? What are the options for storing securely and controlling this information within a democratic system? And how might data ethics inform politics in contexts of gendered and classed inequality?This event will start 12:30 UK time, 15:30 EAT and 13:30 WAT, and is expected to last 90 minutes. The event will be digitally recorded. Platform and accessThis event will run on Zoom Webinar. Registered attendees will receive links for access to each session; the necessary links will be available in the confirmation emails as well as in reminder emails in the same week as the workshop. If you are registered but haven&#x27;t received the confirmation and reminder emails, please check email filters (for example junk filters). For security reasons, you must have (or create) an eventbrite account in order to access the login details. Technical information about attending a Zoom event is available on the <a href="https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004954946-Joining-and-participating-in-a-webinar-attendee-" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Zoom website</a>. About the projectThe Developing Data? project is organised by the Collaboration on International ICT Policy in East and Southern Africa (CIPESA), Strathmore University’s Centre of Intellectual Property &amp; Information Technology (CIPIT), and the University of Edinburgh’s Centre of African Studies (CAS). The Developing Data? project will host several workshops in 2020, on the economies of digital data and the influence of digital on politics. The Devloping Data? team can be contacted at DevelopingData@ed.ac.uk. Information about you: how we use it and with whom we share itThe information you provide will be used by the University of Edinburgh to communicate with you ahead of the event you have registered for. This includes emailing you access details for the event itself. It will also be used to inform ourselves and our partners of the audience profile. Furthermore, we may choose to do an online evaluation of the event in arrears, in which case we will use your email address to contact you for that purpose.Information about your name, organisation and role/job title might be shared with our event partners in the Developing Data? network so as to inform everyone involved in the delivery of the event about the audience and their background. We will hold the personal data you provided us until the end of the Developing Data? project. If you have any questions about this statement or about the event, please contact DevelopingData@ed.ac.uk.

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Data + Elections Workshop

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Data + Elections Workshop

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