The Data Knows Us, But Does It Understand Us?

This year, 13 selected Fellows from the Public Policy New Voices Europe cohort attended sessions and panels across the festival, while two of them, Ruby Haji Naif and Shawgi Omer Nawai, also hosted a cruise workshop titled “Who Gets Seen in Digital Systems?”

The workshop by Fellows Naif and Nawai challenged participants to look closely at how digital systems represent us - what they know about us, what they miss, and what they may misunderstand.

By collecting information about people, data systems also create interpretations of them. In a sense, this gives each of us a “digital shadow”: a version of ourselves assembled from government databases, financial systems, platforms, social media, and algorithms. The shadow can be useful, but it is never a comprehensive picture of the whole person.

The danger of digital systems, therefore, is not only bias. It is false certainty, as incomplete information can lead to overly confident conclusions.

This raises an ethical dilemma for citizens and governance systems alike: If institutions collect more information to make better decisions, where does the citizen's right to privacy begin and end? An even more useful question may be: What do institutions need to know to be most effective, and what should they accept that they cannot know?

The question of who gets seen is also a question of who gets left out of the data used to make policies for everyone. Digital exclusion is often discussed in terms of access: who has a device, connectivity, or digital skills. Conversations at CBF pointed out another form of exclusion: being visible to a system but still being misunderstood by it. When institutions design services around fixed categories, people whose lives do not fit neatly into those categories can fall through the cracks.

The question for digital governance is therefore not only, “Do we have enough data?” but also, “What realities disappear when we decide what counts as data?”

Traditional bureaucracy is built around rules, procedures, and predictability. But technological change is increasingly rapid, while social problems rarely follow neat timelines. As technology is changing faster than institutions can regulate it, the most important institutional capability is adaptation.

Instead of less bureaucracy, the answer may be bureaucracy that can learn and adapt to the people it serves. This is where creative bureaucracy moves from an idea to a practice: creating enough room within institutions to question rules, experiment with alternatives, and continuously learn from what happens.

Digital transformation is ultimately not just a technology story, but a broader story about how institutions relate to citizens. There is a lesson here for public leadership. The most successful digital institutions will be those that understand the limits of what they know and create opportunities for citizens, practitioners, and communities to question and improve the systems that serve them.

As emerging leaders working across public policy and the digital space, this year’s cohort of Public Policy New Voices Europe Fellows will be the ones designing policies and governance systems for the future. For this generation of public leaders, the challenge will be to shape institutions that recognize the limits of data, bring in perspectives that data cannot capture, and listen when the data does not tell the whole story.