Fair digital services [EN]

Companies that market digital products or services are often faced with the dilemma that their interest and need for customer data conflicts with their customers' desire for privacy. For consumers, having to disclose too much data or having their behavior guided unnoticed by digital surveillance is an infringement of their right to self-determination. The project "Fair digital services: Co-evaluation in the design of data-economic business models (FAIRDIENSTE)" takes this structural conflict as an opportunity to explore different ways of fairly conveying values in the course of business model design using sociological and (business) informatics approaches and to relate them to each other. Firstly, the extent to which different values can be translated into an economic language of prices and fairly offset (offsetting) is examined. Secondly, we will work out how companies can use their economic design power to channel value conflicts (design). Thirdly, it will be examined to what extent the negotiation of value conflicts can be outsourced via social media elements in order to promote a culture of fairness among users (cultivation). The aim is to develop and test in practice a multidimensional methodology of "co-evaluation", i.e. the cooperative communication of values, which helps companies to harmonize their economic business models with aspects of data-economic fairness.

The project is a cooperation between the departments of Sociological Theory (Prof. Dr. Jörn Lamla, network coordination), Gender/Diversity in Informatics Systems (Prof. Dr. Claude Draude) and Knowledge Processing (Prof. Dr. Gerd Stumme) at the University of Kassel, the Institute for Digital Management and New Media at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Prof. Dr. Thomas Hess), the company BurdaForward (Dr. Richard Weber, Munich) and the Institute for Technology and Journalism (Miriam Ruhenstroth, Berlin).

GeDIS sub-project

The GeDIS sub-project focuses in particular on the design level. It examines the extent to which a fair coexistence of different value systems can be realized through the use of economic organizational and design power with technical means of separation and coupling. To this end, the potential of IT-based tools that can support the development of fair digital services is being researched. Fairness and democratic value orientation in the context of digital services not only touch on questions of mediation and regulation, but also represent a challenge for the design of information technology itself. In computer science, there are various design methods that aim at a decidedly value-oriented development or for which, as in participatory design, the democratization of digital artefacts and the empowerment of users are fundamental. The aim of the sub-project is to build on these design directions and make them usable and applicable for the subject of the overall project. This means that existing methods of participatory IT development must be updated with regard to fair business models, and existing IT tools must be tested and, if necessary, further developed. The special focus of the sub-project is on the hub of technical development and social, normative values.

The people involved in the GeDIS department are Claude Draude, Viktoria Horn and Nils Knoth and formerly Nana Kesewaa Dankwa.