July 2026 Fireside Chat

Event Summary

20 July 2026

Democracy now runs on a digital infrastructure — compute, data, platforms, standards, and algorithms — that increasingly organises who can act, who can know, and who can contest. In this fireside chat, Professor Igor Calzada asked not only what these systems can do, but what democratic institutions must become in order to govern them.

Drawing on Josiah Ober’s account of democracy as a knowledge system, Prof Calzada set out the three layers — material, data, and algorithmic — that operate together as one socio-technical system, each shaped by institutional choices about ownership, procurement, and control. Once these are visible, he argued, the democratic question shifts: it is no longer enough to ask whether a system is accurate, but who selected the problem, who controls the infrastructure, whose knowledge enters it, and whether those affected can challenge the result. His concept of “unplugging” reframes AI economics as a democratic inquiry, and cautions that distributing a technical process can still leave governance concentrated — an “elite decentralisation.”

From Concept to Practice: Gipuzkoa

An 18-month action-research programme in the Basque Country worked across a provincial council, six civil-society organisations, and eleven municipalities, situating the work within the region’s emerging quantum-computing ecosystem. A survey of 911 citizens surfaced a consistent pattern — adoption is running ahead of understanding.

73% had used AI tools
46% reported good or in-depth knowledge
~90% AI use among those aged 16–34
60% preferred human oversight in services

 

Five Commitments

  1. Digital infrastructure is techno-political — its layers distribute power, not just capability.
  2. Decentralisation is democratic only when it redistributes ownership, decision-making, and value.
  3. Anticipation must expand civic agency, not concentrate technocratic authority.
  4. Human accountability is non-delegable — explanation, contestability, and appeal must remain.
  5. Advanced computing is a strategic public capability, judged by public value and ecological responsibility.

The discussion that followed — with Dr Zeynep Engin, Professor Marta Poblet, Professor Dwivedi, and the audience — took up the public–private balance, the language of sovereignty, subsidiarity, and whether research genuinely reaches policymakers. Prof Calzada closed where he began: the infrastructure may be new, but the democratic task remains — to organise distributed knowledge, learn collectively, and turn that learning into legitimate public action.

Resources

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Society article “Digital Infrastructures of Democracy”: https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197852712.003.0127
The presentation is available on Zenodo, in keeping with the Data for Policy Community’s open-science approach.
Related work appears in Data & Policy (Cambridge University Press).
Registration is open for the Data for Policy 2026 Conference at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 8–10 September. Register now

About the Speakers:

Prof. Dr. Igor Calzada, MBA, FeRSA, is a Full Professor in Social Sciences and Humanities and Established Researcher (R3) (www.igorcalzada.com/publications). He works as Principal Investigator in Ikerbasque (Basque Foundation for Science) at the University of the Basque Country, Public Policy & Economic History Department (Spain) as well as at Cardiff University/WISERD (UK), being since 2022 Fulbright Scholar in California (USA) collaborating as Fellow with Decentralization Research Centre (Canada). He is currently an Invited Professor at Warsaw School of Economics SGH (Poland), Indian Institute of Technology ITT Delhi (India), and Budapest University of Technology and Economics BME (Hungary). For a decade (2012–2022), he has been Senior Scientist at the University of Oxford, European Commission DG Joint Research Centre, UN-Habitat, and has held academic positions in 14 universities worldwide (particularly, UK, USA, Belgium, Italy, and Spain). From 2002–2011, he worked at Mondragon Cooperatives and held a Director of Innovation & Technology position in the Basque Government (Spain). His research currently revolves around how decentralization as a paradigm shift can change the course of data-opolies and AI through emerging Web3 Decentralized Technologies including case studies in different fields around Blockchain, DAOs, and Data Co-operatives. Google Scholar: 4808 citations, h-index 32, and i10-index 66. He has been nominated as Apolitical’s 100 Most Influential Academic in Government.

Marta Poblet is Senior Research Lead at the Data Tank and Adjunct Professor at RMIT University. Prior to that, she was a Professor at RMIT University’s Graduate School of Business and Law. She is one of the co-founders of the Institute of Law and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and past researcher at ICREA (Catalonia). She holds a JSD in law (Stanford University 2002) and a Master in International Legal Studies (Stanford University 2000). Her research interests cover different areas at the intersection of law, political sciences, and technology, with a focus on  data, AI, distributed technologies, human-computer interaction, and the different theories of democracy and citizenship. She has been the PI of a number of national and international research projects and has published over 80 scientific articles and book chapters on these topics.