Digital platforms and ecosystems are increasingly contested spaces, especially when it comes to issues of governance, competition, data flows and rights. The Asia Pacific (APAC) region has its own set of regulatory, social and cultural challenges and opportunities, yet features less prominently in the global discourse.
Through a new program on Platform Futures, the Digital Asia Hub convenes a network of academics and experts studying multiple aspects of platforms, and to create a space for dialogue on opportunities, challenges, and governance best practices in the APAC context.
Expert Network to Amplify Domain Knowledge
DAH convenes a network academics and experts working on a variety of aspects of platforms, and creates a space for dialogue on opportunities, challenges, and governance best practices in the Asian context.
Research and Scholarship
DAH will provide a platform for the generation of new ideas and scholarship, with a view to anticipating and getting ahead of emerging questions. DAH will curate and facilitate communication of the experts’ perspectives on these subjects to the policymaking community.
The Platform Futures program will focus on two themes critical to thinking about platforms:
- Mobile Ecosystems: including aspects relating to market structure and competitive dynamics; consumer benefits; “open” vs. “closed” business models; ingredients of successful policy frameworks; challenges for policy makers.
- Data Challenges and Opportunities: including aspects relating to accountability and transparency; user choice, safety and autonomy; innovation and collective/societal benefits; privacy and security; data flows and business models.
Domain experts will be invited to share insights on developments and issues related to these two themes, through interviews, commentaries, or other engaging and accessible formats. These outputs are geared at knowledge sharing and capacity building of multiple audiences while helping to elevate APAC-focused insights within the global discourse.
(i) the global nature of digital platforms, and the pros & cons of global consistency vs. localized rules
(ii) factors driving the growth and influence of platforms, and how greater competition both within and between platforms can be promoted
(iii) the benefits that platforms and data can enable, while mitigating against perceived risks
(iv) unique features of platforms and ecosystems in the region,
(v) the diversity of cultural and regulatory contexts
(vi) trends and emerging questions
Interviews and commentaries
Visit the media page for interviews and commentaries with our network members as well as other leading scholars and academics in the field.
Small Books for Big Platforms [coming June 2021]
Small Books for Big Platforms is a ‘small book’ series that invites a comparative overview and dialogue about the role and place of platforms in the Asia Pacific region. It invites scholars studying the policies, regulations, implementation, digital cultures, and usage of emerging and existing platform structures in the region to provide a critical insight into the multiplicity, potentials, and ramifications of platform societies.
The small books are meant to be sharp, critical, located studies that help map the field as well as develop an inventory of questions that emerge from the localisation of platforms and the regional geo-political landscape within which they operate.
The books simultaneously want to foreground the specificity and difference in emerging platform societies, thus demanding for granularized and located understanding of platformization, as well as the larger shared concerns and connections that help strengthen the continued conversations around safety, security, privacy, ownership, and distribution of data driven practices on algorithm driven digital platforms.
The Small Books are produced in collaboration with knowledge partner, the ArtEZ University of the Arts.
Events and workshops
Digital Asia Hub will host public events with network members to share their latest research and speak on themes Mobile ecosystems and Data Challenges and Opportunities in the Asia-pacific region.
📢How to engage with the network
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