We hosted our 2026 Digital Good Network summit in Birmingham last week.
It was great to hear from our Digital Good Research Fund recipients and other network members about their work exploring what a good digital society looks like and how we get there.
Professor Amy Orben, Research Professor at the University of Cambridge, joined us for our keynote talk, sharing her work on the impact of digital technologies on the mental health of young people, and the challenges of shaping policy. Visit our website to watch the recording of Amy’s lecture.
Thank you to our partners, Birmingham Museums Trust, for hosting us, and to everyone who attended, shared their ideas and contributed to the work happening across the network.
In a new report, Reema Patel argues for a fundamental shift in mindset to address deep-seated challenges in data governance. The report maps ten different mental models of thinking about data governance, and demonstrates that many are failing. In the report, Reema proposes Data Stewardship as the foundational ‘meta-mental model’ for a just and viable future.
Read the report on our website.
We are pleased to announce the 15 successful projects for the fourth and final round of the Digital Good Research Fund. Each project will produce a blueprint and a briefing document for a good digital society in a particular aspect of social life.
Platforms like @Kickstarter and @CrowdfunderUK offer social entrepreneurs ‘crowd power’ for mobilising resources towards social and environmental challenges, yet crowdfunding platforms have mixed success rates.
This new report follows Digital Good Network Fellow Catherine Wang’s project on crowdfunding and social entrepreneurship, and investigates the critical success factors for platforms like these, drawing on interdisciplinary insights and sharing best practice for digital crowdfunding.
Read the report on our website.
🇧🇷🇵🇭We’re looking to interview current and former media / democracy / development workers and discuss how they’ve worked thru foreign aid shocks in the past year.
🫶🏽 Our interview compares the civil society landscape in Brazil and the Philippines in terms of resilience and sustainability. Our project’s human-focus is especially keen to explore themes of worker wellbeing and activist burnout: How do media/development workers imagine democratic futures in their societies. How do they see themselves participating in political or civic life? Or have they grown disillusioned from both shocks and slow-burn of democratic backsliding in global context?
🙏 We hope y’all share this call for respondents far and wide and help us put together practical proposals pertaining to organizational sustainability as well as worker justice and movement-building in the Global South.
👋🏼 We wanna hear your story! Pls contact [email protected] / [email protected] / [email protected]!
Advising policymakers on young people and digital technologies: reflections from the front line
Amy Orben, Research Professor at the University of Cambridge, will be delivering the keynote lecture as part of the 2026 Digital Good Network summit.
Join us in-person or online as Amy discusses the growing interest in the impact of digital technologies on the mental health of young people, and the challenges of influencing policy in this space. Amy will share what she has learnt from providing scientific advice to the UK government and ways to better understand the needs of different stakeholders to ensure that scientific insights are heard and translated into meaningful change.
The event will take place at Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum, where we will also be hosting a drinks reception from 17:30.
Visit our website to register.
Join our next 'Digital good in progress' webinar, exploring digital healt.
Access to quality healthcare remains a major problem in sub-Saharan Africa. Digital technology can overcome barriers; but it can also create ethical dilemmas for healthcare workers, decision-makers and communities who want affordable services without compromising quality or losing control over health data. The Digital health project articulates and conceptualises these dilemmas through a series of vignettes, while developing a shared language and framework.
25 February, 14:00, online. Visit our website to register.
In this new blog, Dylan Yamada-Rice discusses the ways in which young people interact with and understand AI imagery.
This follows Dylan's work as part of a team researching children's attitudes towards digital good/bad. The project developed a number of zines and visual prompts for children to explore the use of AI and other technologies.
Read the blog and download the zines on our website.
Are you a teacher, parent or youth worker looking for a fun, engaging way to get young people to think critically about digital technologies?
Use our new zine series, which provides arts-based activities and prompts for children to explore the personal, social and environmental impacts of the technologies that shape their lives.
And tell us if you use them, we'd love to hear young peoples' reflections - children are often overlooked as emerging digital citizens.
Visit our website to download the resources.
Join our next webinar to explore the challenges around the ethical reuse of research data from research with marginalised and minoritised people. Łukasz Szulc will be leading the discussion around research ethics and data stewardship.
Visit our website to register.
Gabriel Belo Pereira dos Reis, Gabriel Bastos Rabelo and André Gabriel Costa Gomes attended WebMedia 2025, sharing their work on the community mobile and web platform Reapp.
Read more about the project, the importance of trust and communication in digital technologies, and their work to help strengthen donor relationships with civic society organisations.
Read the blog on our website.
Join us for a webinar that goes beyond frameworks and technical fixes, sharing emerging insights from Elgon Social Research’s research and practice based programme on data stewardship and AI governance, developed in partnership with the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Civic Data Cooperative.
14 January, 14:00-15:30
Visit our website to register.
