 There all is a pleasure for me to welcome you all to this webinar for the special issue on digital platforms for development in the information systems journal. My name is Petter Nielsen and I'm an associate professor here at the University of Oslo. I'm also a senior editor of the information systems journal and together with Professor Brian Nicholson from the University of Manchester and associate professor Johan Saabö from the University of Oslo, I have contributed as a guest editor of this special issue. My role today will be to give a brief introduction to the agenda and guide us through the program. We will start today by an introduction from the special issue editors by Brian Nicholson. After this the authors of the three papers in the special issue will present their work. After that and finally we will also have a question and answer session. So you will need to keep your questions and comments until the end. The Q&A session will be moderated by Johan Saabö. As you can already see in the webinar controls we have opened up the Q&A functionality in Zoom. So feel free to write your questions there or vote questions from others during the presentations. You can also raise your hands in the webinar controls during the Q&A session if you would like to give comments or ask questions and we will eventually allow you to speak. As you may have noticed we are recording this webinar. We will stop the recording after the presentations of the papers so the Q&A will not be recorded. The recording will be made available after this webinar. So this was my brief introduction and then I give the word to Brian Nicholson to give an introduction to our special issue on digital platforms for development. All right thank you Peta and welcome to everybody. Thanks for coming and thanks to the authors for all the work they put in on these papers which I think are valuable contributions to the debate. I also want to thank Robert Davison who is the editor of the Information Systems Journal for his support with this and particularly to the associate editors and the anonymous reviewers that have helped us through this process. We've named the associate editors but not the reviewers but your help is definitely appreciated by all of us. I first encountered this term digital platform a few years ago and it was via a series of events that were organised by my colleague Richard Heeks the network called Tyode the development implications of digital economies and we travelled around. Tyler was speaking next we're also involved in that and I think it was her work that spurred me on actually through that my old network debates and that was when we first really started to understand the complexities of digital platforms and the void that existed in in development particularly. Now as I'm sure you know that there have been going to move to my next slide there have been very significant contributions in this area in economics accounting entrepreneurship management and information systems and more. However I would argue that when we look at these contributions and you know we can name Jeffrey Parker's work which is really great Michael Kusumano and Alavella Galla's book a special issue in information systems research those always have been really pivotal in our understanding of digital platforms in information systems particularly. My work in the I think 9.4 group implications of information and digital technology for development is focused on that particular area and we in that community felt that a gap existed on platforms viewed through that lens but that's what spurred on this this special issue which to make sense of a digital platform through that lens of development. But I think first of all we need to understand what we mean by digital platforms for those that are perhaps new to the area and I could have drawn on some of those mainstream definitions from management strategy or whatever but I've drawn on one in the editorial the OECD which quite is quite a broad brush definition. Now you can read that of course I'm not going to read it out to you what that brings in is a whole range of different possibilities for analysis of big work of digital marketplaces music sharing dating etc so it leaves us a broad brush to examine the area. What we're particularly interested in here is is development and conceptualizing development when the editorial we we do give a high level description of the paradigms of development and we settle on the 17 sustainable development goals. Now I'm not going to go into this partly because Carla Benina and colleagues do a very good job in their paper of analyzing this so we're delighted when that came through in the paper. What I want to do is just to take you through some highlights of the editorial and what the editorial tries to do is showcase these papers but also point to some dimensions of platforms and development. So first of all the question we're trying to answer is can platform facilitate development when you do the lens of the SDGs and working at University of Oslo with Heather and Johan of course I'm a technological optimist perhaps a cautious critical technological optimist but for any of you that know the work of Oslo and the DHIS2 platform we are optimistic platforms can facilitate development but this particular quote here indicates from Davis 2013 that there's never been a better time an easier time to start a digital business and if we look at the literature that is definitely a feature of this period that it would appear that platforms definitely can facilitate development due to the lens of the economic dimension. So if we look at some of these examples from entrepreneurship Crisanti Avgaru's study of Taobao entrepreneurs setting up is a very good example of that that provides evidence that there is platforms and development. My own work in gig work along with PhD students the great Ryan Goseva my friend at Virtual Ahan who specializes in platform gig work disabled people in the Philippines is a really good example and if you go to the website of Virtual Ahan you'll see stories of disabled people whose livelihoods have been significantly improved. Other work for instance for Issa Malik another of my students looking at Uba Karim in Pakistan which has shown livelihood improvement and female empowerment and then another example of our labs that I encountered through Richard Higgs's child network where in the Cape Flats area of Cape Town in South Africa there is an organization that specializes in training marginalized people to engage in app development to actually engage in digital startups and platform work and platform creation. It's very inspiring place to visit which I did have the pleasure of doing a few years to go along with them with members of that diode network. So along with other examples that I've put into the editorial we can see lots of potential platforms and the SGGs to facilitate development. However that the story doesn't end there and we look at some of the more pessimistic or perhaps more critical literature in the area we can see that there are some serious indications that are detrimental effects that are not facilitating the SGGs. The frightful five platforms monopoly for instance the frightful five is a collective term for the largest platforms that I'm sure you're familiar with and the critique of them as forming a monopoly position and the recent case of Facebook and the rebranding and the whistleblowing and the accusations of hate speech are one dimension of that but the monopoly position is significantly criticized. My colleague Deborah Howcroft in the Manchester School has also criticized the potential throughout development as a offering a long-term career livelihood for those developers who has outcast on that. Christina Zuboff of course has criticized extensively the the chips of power from state to platform calling for regulation and examining the dimensions of surveillance. Furthermore we're seeing the work of Bonnie Roberts our colleague who has examined the state use of platforms for digital authoritarianism and then finally you'll see in the editorial that we provide a flag towards Mark Graham's work in the Fair Work Foundation which is an analysis of big work and the last piece of work I saw from them was an attempt to benchmark all those big platforms against fair work principles and the outcome was rather pessimistic when looking at the overall role. So that's the highlights of our editorial what I'd like to do now is to hand over to the authors of the papers to take you through the highlights of theirs. So thank you very much Brian for the introduction and then I give the word to Carla Bonina and Karikoskinen to present the paper digital platforms development for development foundations and research agenda. Let me unmute myself and let me present here to see it in the right way or almost there there right? Yes excellent good so again thank you so much for this it's my pleasure here so my name is Carla Bonina and I'm part of the Southern Business School at the Center of Digital Economy and as I said it's a real pleasure to be here with my co-authors Karikoskinen, Ben Eaton and Annabel Gower to present very briefly this paper. We're very grateful for the opportunity and all the help from the editors and of course the team of reviewers and also we're very grateful for the support received from the SRC sponsored network Diody that you mentioned Brian and the very valuable feedback we received along you know different phases of this project for the last couple of years and I can see also good friends and colleagues attended this this webinar. So what I would like to do today is again very briefly to present the key points of our paper it's an open access paper that is already having a very good reception and we're very grateful and happy with that and again there's a lot more detail but here you'll have an overview. I think Brian you touch upon something that was for us very very important as an empirical motivation of this paper the role of the big platform so as you say the Fightful Five or the so-called GAFAM this days or although I think the F has changed. These global digital platforms are now valued in 10 trillion dollars right and just to give you a perspective that's 10 times the GDP of Mexico which is a very big country. This doesn't mean of course that the significant of platforms for development has not been out there what we found that was precisely a gap from the the literature taking this more developmental view and of course these platforms do bring a lot of potential to generate socio-economic environmental value yet this was under study and we think that part of the problem was this lack of scoping on what digital platforms really are and what this object is about at least very much in our field and information systems and also in development studies so this was our guiding question right for this conceptual piece what do digital platforms mean for development. We take a broad view on development that is a holistic view that goes beyond of course economic growth and encompass these other developmental outcomes very much exemplified by the sustainable development goals right so with that in mind this paper does three main things right the first one is precisely to scope this object right and to do this we build from the work of my co-authors in this in this project Annabel Gower from the strategic management perspective mainly and also Ben Eaton from the information systems to provide this characterization of platforms we have very much these two types the transaction and the innovation that we think bring a bit more clarity to to our understanding of digital platforms and what we do there and there is a lot more detail in the paper is to explain the purpose explain the focus that each of them take in the literature explain then the line digital characteristics and that's as you know very important for for our field also review the basis for value creation and capture and we provide examples that will link to the developmental outcomes we do not just stop there we also take on board the the literature on ICT4D and this contextual socio-technical idea to also bring some of the nuances that you have in different stakeholders and platform governance for the purpose of development or developmental lens so the second thing we do in the paper is precisely to use this scoping to review the literature as Brian mentioned there were already lots of studies out there that perhaps will not talk about digital platforms in this characterization so we tried to map that we did a very comprehensive review on the major ICT4D outlets and also the isbasket.8 and this is more or less a summary of what we found there of course a lot more detail on the paper but very much the literature was talking about transaction very much this much-making platforms right that we're I think mostly familiar with rather than the innovation platforms those that enable other third party developers to do new things and they are in different ways. A lot of the emphasis of these papers were on removing frictions very much of big importance for the global south of the development context and this is access to information and creation of new markets for example in agriculture or rural settings there was also a trend on more emergent or nascent ideas of you know just simple platforms simple in the sense of less sophisticated use of SMEs and ideas like that and then a bigger presence of what we call non-commercial actors of course this may not be surprising because in the context of development NGOs governments and also you know big donors have a bigger role there. We also find that the significance of context was very important whether it's in the institutional rules regulations the infrastructure issues of access was very much on the papers and again for an ICT4D audience this is not surprising again a lot more detail on the paper but this is a bit of a summary of what we found and with this we do a third thing so using the the scoping of digital platforms and then what we found in the literature we envisaged this agenda in the form of six research questions I'm going to name them here very briefly on indigenous innovation or whether these digital platforms create or destroy institutions whether the inequalities are actually exacerbated by digital platforms the fourth of platform alternatives in the sense of our alternative forms of value being generated or created with this more developmental lens at the dark side things already Brian touch upon concentration of power surveillance and the very you know harmful effects that some of them might be doing at the moment and then a last one on the categorization of that we found you know transaction innovation and the context of development so for each of these themes we define the research question we explain what this is about and we provide examples or potential directions whether theoretically or methodologically or or even some of the studies that are already tackling some of this for future work of course this six research questions are not mutually exclusive and you may see a lot of overlaps for example within the dark side and contrast concentration of power we also may find implications on the exacerbation of inequalities or the the destruction or creation of institutions so I would like just to whoops finish with a big of a you know big umbrella overview of what we think our paper does first we think that this is coping of digital platforms you know this characterization and transaction and innovation with all their characteristics while that might not be new because it's been already developed in other fields it's very important for information systems to contribute to this lack of clarity we spoke at the beginning and this is not just for development we think this is important for the field itself we also we also think that this six research questions together with the scoping will actually help us mobilize a better understanding of these developmental outcomes and what digital platforms mean for development and not just in developing countries and with that I'll let you close there is also this idea of coal we were actually we debated with the team about whether this categorization for example that is very well known and developed for from for the global north what there is applicable whether we need more nuances in terms of development and that's something that that our people call support and with the 30 seconds left and I would like then my co-authors to add something in the Q&A when we have a bit more more space to say I'm also leading a new book project it's an edited volume with already great contributors so if any of you in the audience would like to to you know perhaps get in touch if you're working on any of these six areas do get in touch with me in case it can be considered and with that I would like to to close this and pass it on to the next author and again a pleasure being here thank you very much Carla and Kari Ben and Annabelle then I give the word to Silvia Masiero to present the paper degenerative outcomes of digital identity platforms for development many thanks Pat and many thanks again to the editors for making this webinar possible and to the other authors for presenting their work I'm extremely excited to be here today on behalf of also my esteemed colleague Victor Arbitzon who is co-author on this paper I'm now going to ask the most asked question of this pandemic and that is can you see my screen properly excellent fantastic so it is my pleasure to present the second paper in this special issue and also to make connections in between our paper and the rest of the volume I very much see this special issue in as a set of papers in continuity with each other continuity is that I'd be delighted to highlight in my presentation too our paper is an empirically based work centered on the largest digital identity platforms in the world that's India's ad hoc platform and it is titled the degenerative outcomes of digital identity platforms for development already from the title I think you can see a strong link of continuity in between the critical aspects that both Brian and Carla highlighted in their presentations I want to make a small preamble as I begin this presentation and that's not that we can discuss in the Q&A but the very important for our work note that digital identity platforms that's platforms that encode the demographic and increasingly biometric data of a population of users are platforms themselves so a digital identity platforms works by all means as an innovation platform as Carla just described so a digital identity platform as our paper this sets consists essentially of a core so a core in this case consisting in a repository of users data demographic and again increasingly biometric boundary resources that make it possible to do what to enable complementors to build complements of different kinds as we will see today upon the core and thirdly a set of complementors be them private public non-profit or of different kinds that we will see that actually develop products and services upon the core now why am I making this point so strongly and why is it underlined in red over there is because we noticed in the review that preceded our work that digital identity platforms tend to feature very little in the information systems literature on platforms which led us to wonder why is it so but a second and perhaps a generative item in this research is the fact that digital identity platforms which are not so strongly featured in information systems literature but featured a lot more strongly in for example development studies geography critical data studies literatures are in general widely seen as a means to improve many things among which social protection systems a social protection system is very broadly in development studies terminology a system to reduce livelihood risk for poor or vulnerable otherwise vulnerable populations so think we're gonna talk about food security today but think pensions think health insurance think emergency assistance to the poor all of this goes under the social protection umbrella so why would the digital identity platform that converts people's data into digital data be so important here for two reasons in the development orthodoxy behind them first of all because such a platform can fight an exclusion error okay so if I have the data of all a population for example of below poverty line users I can match their data to their entitlements and make sure people are not excluded from aid from food support from emergency assistance at the same time that's two birds with one stone because I can also include all people that are entitled to the same system and make sure that for example someone who is not entitled might not have access to it now the problem is that this is not what we see in parties in the especially in the development and data studies literature so in many ways and we have a paper about digital identity and refugees just after us so we will see this more I expect but many perverse outcomes have occurred the main ones been exclusions so for example cases of hunger deaths out of people being excluded from digitally mediated food aid exclusions of for example displaced populations that were due to be included in a social protection system and due to be smashed in digital identity were excluded we have cases like for example Kenya's Khudum and Namba were a platform a digital identity platform was actually blocked by the country's supreme court due to the inability to deal with essential issues such as exclusions and this leads us to the research question for our paper which is how do digital identity platforms enable degenerative outcomes so degeneration is a key word in our paper it refers to decline and deterioration of a system okay so deterioration of a system that results in a weaker in an enfeeble state state as compared to before now I think I have five minutes even less so our data our data rely on a 10-year research work that I started in the year 2010 supervised back then by Shirin who is here today thank you Shirin I'm on the Adhar Adhar is India's digital identity platform it enrolls over 90% of India's adult population it consists in the enrollment through a government agency of Indian residents and captures biometric data that's iris and ten finger prints and produces a 12 a unique 12-digit number for every enrolled president the way we study the platform is by its incorporation in the largest Indian food security system it's called public distribution system and that's a subsidy system that delivers subsidies to the below poverty line population so as you see here in my field pictures on the left people can go to the shop where food items are delivered authenticate themselves through their finger prints and receive based on that authentication their entitlements isn't this wonderful well I'll give you an overview of our findings and the and our findings find essentially two families of results the first one is in terms of the layers of the social protection system of the public distribution system affected by Adhar and a lot of the development studies literature focuses on the first layer access so the access of the cities and who enters the system and we did see transformation at this layer as I've just shown access has become biometric however there are two more layers that in fact the literature does not contemplate too much one is in terms of monitoring so how the Adhar system changed the monitoring of the system by the authorities at the back end and very crucially the development policy so what we witnessed is not only a transformation of the system itself but the inscription of the system in a policy that wants to change the subsidy system to a system of cash transfers now where's the degenerative effect that our search is found so this is like this I would say the crux the core of the research and the research those links in between the design properties of the Adhar and in effect we can say one degenerative outcome for each of the layers at the access level we did find an issue of exclusion so a problem of entitled users a problem that is quite confirmed through quantitative studies of the same program a problem of entitled users finding themselves denied the delivery of rations due to the inability of authentication so this very much comes from a system that is designed to combat the inclusion error so I surely won't be able to authenticate in case I'm not entitled but not so much the exclusion error problem the two further layers that we find is that monitoring is very much centered through the biometric system at the level of the shop where the person accesses the system however not so much at the earlier levels of the supply chain where a lot a substantial part of the diversion of food items occurs and a third and perhaps and here I finish my presentation because my time meals are up and a third and deepest layer is the layer of redirectional policy so what our research documents is very much the fact that redesigning the system biometrically enables what is a non-goin shift from a subsidy system giving subsidies to people to a system of cash transfers so bypassing the food security supply chain entirely a system that my our qualitative research reveal is for many reasons feared by many of the recipients for issues including the not so easy access to bank accounts and the immateriality of cash as compared to food this wraps up my presentation and this finance light only is my way to connect our research to Bonnie and I thought that also conceptualize digital identity as transaction platforms so that's a debate I really want to have today and in the future and that links the the generative outcomes of the ad hoc to the discourse on the refugees that she is going to embark so I finish here my presentation with many thanks and handing it over to Sheehan thank you very much Silvia and I then invite Sheehan Madden to present the paper digital identity as a platform for improving refugee management thank you let me just get a presentation can you all see that yes excellent and is it in the right view yes perfect okay excellent thank you well thanks very much for this opportunity and in fact the whole experience for me the whole journey has been such a learning exercise so I really want to thank the entire editorial team as well as having organized this webinar I've learned a lot I think that as Silvia was saying there will be a lot of crossovers especially with the the point about transaction based and innovation based platforms and the the point about digital identity as a key driver for platforms so this is a paper with my colleague Emeriss Shoemaker who unfortunately cannot be with us today and I think it was the sheer intensity and the scale of the refugee crisis and the response to that by humanitarian organizations to be able to transform their earlier legacy information systems into digital platforms and this time momentum and trend which is underway right now is something that inspired us to to study this this particular aspect of digital identity as a platform for improving refugee management so the case was based on UNHCR which as you know is the lead leading global agency it has the mandate for protecting refugees across the world and in 2018 UNHCR introduced its digital identity platform for improving the way in which it managed refugees at that time it was a closed as we call it in the paper a closed transaction based platform in other words it was a platform that enabled information exchange between the various partner organizations that were providing services on its behalf and it was at that time that Emeriss was invited as part of a review team from Caribou Digital to be able to sort of advise and make suggestions on UNHCR's ongoing journey this is not a journey between I think this is not an issue of sort of it's a transaction based and now it's an innovation based it was the journey itself which is ongoing and the paper itself tries to make a contribution to to characterize to theorize and to try to characterize this process of platformization as we know that term from information systems so the way in which we try to conceptualize this opening up process and to draw implications for the main stakeholders and the sub processes which are involved in the platformization process I'll just briefly go over that so the focus would be on the solid line triangle in the center there which it's supposed to represent UNHCR's transaction based closed loop platform as we refer to it in the paper so as I said this is the point about UNHCR working to facilitate information exchange with its partner organizations in camp that that's the way in which it's been working and that's the way it still works with three key stakeholders one two and three first of all the identifier itself which is UNHCR which you know puts forward and proposes identification criteria for the refugees uh number two those who are identified who are the refugees and three the third party service providing organizations so in that first solid line triangle there it would be the closed system now you know obviously the from the closed transaction based system to an an open innovation platform is something that is it's an incremental process and we try to denote that with the shaded triangle as it expands into an open platform discussions are still on the way within a UNHCR as to what it means by an open innovation platform but in the paper we do give examples of what this is so for example this is the ability of refugees themselves to manage their identification portfolio and more importantly the open innovation platform is about opening the digital identity platform to third party market players which is a common phenomenon not just in the humanitarian sector but also for social protection and poverty alleviation so within that schema we then identify and talk about in the paper three key sub-processes the first one is clearly identification itself because how refugees are identified in the first place um has a huge bearing on the entitlements they receive and therefore on their life prospects this is obviously a dynamic process and it is shaped by relations of power and control the second key process right in the center of the triangle there is how is value generated from this platform when we're talking about refugee management well here clearly the issue of value depends on the priorities and the incentives of each of the key stakeholder groups but it's heavily shaped by the identification process itself and it's also heavily shaped by the way in which UNHCR as platform owner orchestrates or puts in place governance mechanisms for the creation of value to its different users of the platform so the paper then goes on to try to use these constructs to see what what we found in the field and it's the interplay between these three processes which I think lies at the heart of our paper so we interviewed UNHCR staff we interviewed service provider organizations which included um uh partners in camp as well as third party market providers service providers mobile network operators and financial providers um and a cohort of refugees itself and this was based on a study in bdbd refugee camp in northern Uganda one of the largest camps in the world so just to briefly touch on some of the findings and I can't even see exactly how many minutes I've got left but not a lot so I'll just briefly go through them the paper then gives more details of this platformization process and the generation of value number one to the UNHCI itself increased efficiency of course that is one of the biggest mandates but there are also ripple effects it's not just the UNHCR but one of the benefits of the platform was clearly to assist the host state ID systems because the credentials could serve as proxy refugee status for for people with passing through and and taking residence in the camp and also beyond the sector so the fact that the platform was opening up to market players it meant that UNHCR's identification criteria were instrumental in creating network effects and therefore including market players as as instrumental on this platform nevertheless tensions were there and even today there are big discussions that you talk about in the paper about to what extent does UNHCR really want to open up its processes and open up its systems to third party players for service providers themselves increased organizational coordination and service innovation is clearly one of the biggest problems one of the biggest challenges before the UNHCR platform however several risks exist even today and some of these have been talked about today service providers are reticence and extremely cautious about this opening up process increased personal data sharing especially for sensitive issues of child protection domestic violence what does it mean when platforms open up for the relationship the trust relationship between the partner organizations and the refugees and also what does it mean for for service provider organizations themselves to to keep as a proprietary data set the data on refugees and activities because at the end of the day save the children action aid they will work in camp but they will compete with other service providers as well for refugees themselves the creation of value yes the platform would increase access to opportunities especially as market players enter the scene so not just for service provision education employment but also for increased targeting and personalization of market-based services they're able to have more management and more control over their own data because if they can manage their identification portfolio then this gives them a sense of of agency and empowerment increased risks there is definitely the risk there of restructuring social relations especially when it comes to certain identification criteria such as female headed households which UNHCR puts in place for a particular efficiency reason but it means something very different for refugees because if if women headed households are if that is the criteria then when the male members come and join in camp they are going this is nearly always going to lead to a situation of domestic violence so it's a question of how sensitive are the identification criteria which are put in place for one reason for the reason of efficiency but means something very different both for partner organizations and for refugees there are limitations of opening up that the first one is one that we've already talked about that is the problem of the lack of host system legislation in place for data protection but also it's the case that there is a lot of reliance on international standards ISO FATF standards for this opening up process so the the selection of criteria by UNHCR which would enable market providers and tempt them to provide market services is still not not decided and finally implications for theory and practice well identification as we know it's a dynamic relationship but as we found this relationship is right now biased towards organizations that UNHCR and other service organizations and it's this bias that unfortunately still gets reflected in the criteria which are coded into the design of the platform value generation we find that the degree and timing of openness is extremely important there's a big difference between opening up to refugees to allow them to manage their portfolio and opening up to the wider market governance this is the issue that UNHCR is grappling with right now to orchestrate this process of platformization and above all to maintain its commitment to refugee protection in the paper we end with a few change management procedures I think the most important one is the first one here which is to ensure that there's refugee and partner organization regular involvement in the design and evolution of the platform and UNHCR is actually working with this to create an oversight board which is localized and the tiered approach to identity proofing is this idea that at the end of the day the UNHCR's own processes are not solid enough to entice market service providers so it needs to be done in a phased manner that's it thank you so much for the opportunity to present I'm sorry I didn't stick exactly to 10 minutes thank you very much Shirin at this point in time I will stop the