The increasing reliance of society upon prevailing digital systems and the magnitude of their impact on our daily lives necessitates an adaptation to our governance approach to these systems. We believe that this should be done in a manner that accounts for the need for reflexive creation within digital ecologies as well as modularity for their constituent elements. To that end, we believe that formulations of ‘infrastructure’ thinking for data and digital systems present promising avenues. Terminology around ‘infrastructure’ is not new in the digital ecosystem. However, it is a growing yet scattered notion.

To explore this opportunity, Aapti Institute undertook a study on “Landscaping Infrastructures for the Digital Ecosystem”, supported by Omidyar Network. Our research investigated the notion of infrastructure, drawing from traditional socio-legal understandings of infrastructure, and the systems, impact or structure that make it so and built on this to develop a holistic governance approach for key elements of the digital ecosystem that can support diverse regulatory priorities. A short piece summarising our research can be found here.

The full research deck is below.