Emerging ICT for Citizens’ Veillance: Theoretical and Practical Insights

The report explores theories and practices surrounding citizens’ veillance activities, namely a broad range of citizen-driven initiatives for civic purposes. These can aim at creating new forms of knowledge and awareness; building new social communities and commitments; contributing to protection of common goods; empowering citizens in protecting or restoring some fundamental individual and collective rights. The concept of “veillance” is used here to refer to activities performed by citizens broadly and primarily to produce socially useful, empowering knowledge —rather than to control somebody. Therefore, the working definition proposed for veillance is a condition of citizens’ cognitive alertness and knowledge production proactively oriented towards the protection of common goods. Describing the workshop on Citizens’ veillance held on 20-21 March 2014 at the JRC in Ispra, the report further elaborates these discussions and reflections by providing some provisional recommendations while identifying several epistemic and normative issues emerged that require further investigation. Several ongoing changes are reframing the processes of knowledge production. Science and knowledge are no longer produced only in official sites, but everywhere in society, and especially through ICT and the web. Scientists’ (and artists-scientists’) and citizens’ science often merge and converge in producing relevant, reliable and transparent knowledge to complement and in some instances change or redirect official, institutional knowledge. In order to be democratically legitimate and to re-draw the boundaries between the traditional public function of knowledge production and these new forms of lay production of knowledge, the values promoted by these initiatives are to be reflected in more democratic and transparent ICT architectures.