Crisis diagnoses and challenges in digital journalism are often linked to the role of large platform companies. While social media platforms open up new opportunities for participation, they also make it easier to publish information unchecked and delegate important curation services to algorithmic recommendation systems. Talk of a post-factual age or aspects of the brutalization and polarization of public discourse are symptomatic of these developments. As a result, established publishers are forced to react to these developments by adapting, for example, through their business models. In addition, newer players in digital journalism are experimenting with platform models to uncover innovative ways of distributing journalistic content. However, there is often a lack of concepts for platforms and their technical realization that consider the complex aspects of establishing structures that promote democracy while at the same time ensuring economic profitability. Against this background, the BMBF-funded Demokratie-X project is developing relevant design parameters for a non-profit news platform that is intended to ensure economic viability in a model oriented towards the common good. This will lay the foundations for initiative groups and operator consortia wishing to establish similar platform models. The results of the project should contribute to a deeper understanding of how privacy-friendly, fair, and public interest-oriented platforms for news can be designed.

The Department of Sociological Theory (Prof. Dr. Jörn Lamla) and the Department of Participatory IT Design (Prof. Dr. Claude Draude) at the University of Kassel are involved in the joint project. The Institute for Digital Management and New Media at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Prof. Dr. Thomas Hess) is coordinating the project. The Chair of Public Law, Media, and Information Law at the University of Passau (Prof. Dr. Kai v. Lewinski) and the Chair of Software Engineering for Business Information Systems at the Technical University of Munich (Prof. Dr. Florian Matthes) are also involved.

Sub-project Participatory IT Design

The sub-project of the Department of Participatory IT Design deals with the user interface of the platform against the background of participation- and value-oriented design approaches in human-computer interaction. The focus is on an interaction design that implements privacy, data protection and transparency in a usable and human-centered way. Consequently, the sub-project aims to productively explore the tension between individual user acceptance and the realization of normative acceptability with regard to the democratic task of the news platform. Findings from the collaboration with the various disciplines are incorporated into the conception of the user interface and form the basis for design parameters and prototypes. The sub-project thus contributes to current research in the fields of human-computer interaction and socioinformatics, particularly with regard to the privacy-preserving and fair interaction design of data-intensive services.

Involved on the part of the Department of Participatory IT Design:

Prof. Dr. Claude Draude (sub-project leader)

Contact: claude.draude[at]uni-kassel[dot]de