The Digital Good Network: exploring equity, sustainability and resilience in people's relationships with and through digital technologies

Digital technologies are not always good for societies. Across research, policy, industry and civil society, how to define, measure and build good digital societies needs urgent attention. The digital good is ill-defined and contested, and the resulting lack of consensus can be harmful.

For example, algorithmic decision-making can introduce bias under the guise of fairness; policies designed to make social media safer are experienced by users as doing the opposite. To limit future harms and ensure that digital technologies have positive outcomes, The Digital Good Network (DGN) will deliver an interdisciplinary, social science-led research programme centred on the urgent, neglected question of what the digital good should look like and how it can be achieved.

DGN bridges disciplines and institutions and is global in outlook. It is led by transdisciplinary researchers at different career stages and by partners from policy, industry, community and cultural sectors. DGN will: support research projects and methodological innovation across disciplines and various dimensions of the digital good;

offer internships, fellowships and training; host technology design sprints and workshops; co-produce research with policy, industry and communities; and produce a Digital Good Index, based on original research, horizon scanning and open data. Ultimately, DGN will lead to a step-change in enabling societies to realise the digital good.

DGN?will generate new insights into urgent normative questions relating to people's relationships with and through digital technologies (or 'digital relationships'), by focusing on three societal challenges that are crucial to envisioning good?relationships with and through digital technologies:?equity, resilience and sustainability. The House of Lords' Beyond Digital report highlights the first two: 1) equity, because digital relationships take place in conditions of power asymmetry and structural inequity and 2) resilience, because individual and collective wellbeing, wellness and coping strategies in the face of pandemics, political conflicts, natural disasters, digital misinformation, online hate and everyday life matter in digital relationships and for our realisation of the digital good.

The third societal challenge is sustainability, because planetary challenges like climate change demand that we consider whether our digital relationships are sustainable (as highlighted in UK, EU and UN policy goals). Digital relationships unfold within, are shaped by and shape societies and structures, so addressing these three pressing societal challenges is crucial to envisioning good digital relationships.

DGN will expand research capacity and deliver a step-change in digital society scholarship and its impact on policy, industries and communities. It will build a network of researchers from social science disciplines and beyond, including eg cultural studies, anthropology and design from the arts and humanities, and computing and engineering from STEM.

DGN activities are designed to engage researchers from diverse career stages, with expertise in diverse domains, and stakeholders from policy, practice, industries, cultural sectors and communities, to ensure research is co-produced with, responds to, and feeds into these sectors. These disciplines, career stages, domains and sectors are all represented in the DGN core team and College of Experts, who will link DGN to people, organisations and networks within and beyond these groups.