Workshop includes Adrian Friday, Fieke Jansen, Gauthier Rousillhe, and Srinjoy Mitra.

https://conf.researchr.org/details/ict4s-2026/ict4s-2026-workshops/9/The-True-Cost-of-ICT-Crisis-of-Abundance

Registration info for the ICT4S conference or only the workshop can be found here https://conf.researchr.org/attending/ict4s-2026/registration

Date 2 June 2026
Time 17:00 -18:30
Location SPUI25

Digital Public Infrastructures or DPIs are the latest buzzword in global policy and governance circles, promoted by the United Nations, the World Bank, global philanthropies and governments across Global North and South. DPIs originated from the India Stack model to build meta, stackable digital infrastructures (for identity, payment and data) for seamless flows of public goods and services, where the state is responsible towards building public facing digital infrastructures and actual goods and service delivery are opened up to both public and private sectors. As per recent reports, there are more than 100 countries building DPI or DPI-like infrastructures. While their definition and meaning are fuzzy and contested, they offer new ways of thinking about infrastructures, governance and role of the state in times of crisis for state sovereignty and democratic institutions.

As infrastructures allow the state to translate its political power into everyday features of life and thereby represent its power to its citizens, it thus becomes important to unpack what power constellations DPIs are constituted of, how will they shift existing regulatory, bureaucratic and technical arrangements of governance, and what implication will they hold for state sovereignty and democratic institutions. To address some of these questions, we invite you to a panel discussion with:

Niels Ten Oever Assistant Professor in the European Studies department and co-principal investigator of the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam working on how invisible infrastructures shape the socio-technical ordering of information societies and how this influences the distribution of wealth, power, and opportunities

Carolina Maurity Frossard Assistant Professor in the Political & Economic Geographies, and co-director of the Centre for Urban Studies at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam examining how digital devices and infrastructures shape socio-spatial politics and inequalities at different scales

Nafis A. Hasan Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam studying impacts of digital technology on humans and organizations in the realm of public governance in South Asia

Bidisha Chaudhuri Assistant Professor of Government, Information Cultures and Digital Citizenship in the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, investigating the political economy of digital infrastructures and governance in the Global South

https://rdt.uva.nl/content/events/2026/06/from-india-stack-to-euro-stack-infrastructuring-state-and-governance.html

Day 1 – Monday, June 1st (Room: 1.09)

Day 1 – Monday, June 1st

Energy, Food and Data Justice (Chair: Fieke Jansen, Room: 1.05)

Day 1 – Monday, June 1st

11.15 – 12.45 PARALLEL SESSIONS A: AI and Data Infrastructure (Chair: Jedrzej Niklas, Room: 1.07)

Virtual Assembly of the Critical AI Network, CPCT (27-29 May, 2026, online)

Guided by the premise that under the hood, AI is simply the same technology whether it is being introduced into education or other domains of life, we ask how we might articulate and analyze the relations forged by AI between vastly different areas that hitherto appeared to be unconnected. What insights might be gained from situating AI within an ecology? How does AI compete with others in this ecology for natural resources, and what can be done to mitigate, contain, or reverse this impact? If, as we propose, AI should be evaluated not as a tool with a use value but rather as the latest symptom of misused infrastructures, how might we articulate the counterproductivity that AI adoption represents within its ecology for any green policy?

https://cpct.uk/2026/05/09/programme-how-do-we-break-something-that-is-already-broken-virtual-assembly-of-the-critical-ai-network-cpct-27-29-may-2026-online/

This seminar tackles this interlinkage between data and sustainability and provides avenues for improvement – from a technical and organisational perspective.

Bringing together academic insight and frontline industry experience, this event will explore this most urgent topic. Joining us are:

• Dirk Deridder, CTO of Smals, who will offer his account of navigating these pressures from within a major organisation. Smals is a Belgian ICT organisation delivering digital infrastructure and services to over 300 public institutions in the social security, healthcare, and e-government sectors. In doing so, it operates 4 data centres.
• Fieke Jansen, University of Amsterdam: Dr. Fieke Jansen is co-principal researcher at the critical infrastructure lab, and co-lead of the Green Screen Coalition. Her work investigates how the infrastructure of our digital world, data centres, and AI influence the environment, raw material use, and climate.
• Academic members of the SDM consortium: prof. An Braeken (VUB), prof. Jan Tobias Mühlberg (ULB), prof. Geoffrey Aerts (VUB). They will share their latest insights into how organizations can improve the sustainability of their data management practices.

Audience: The seminar welcomes industry professionals, academics working in related fields, and the wider public interested in the link between data management and sustainability.

Location: Becentral. Upon arrival, register at the main entrance. Event takes place at the FARI auditorium – 4th floor.

Date: 26/05

Time:

· 12:30-13:00 Lunch

· 13:00-15:10 Industry and academic speakers

· 15:10-16:00 Networking drink

This seminar is organised by the SDM (Sufficiency & Data Minimization) consortium, a collaboration between research groups at VUB and ULB. Funded by the Brussels-Capital Region – Innoviris.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/seminar-interlinking-sustainability-and-data-management-tickets-1985288060030

In this workshop, we will explore the possibilities for setting up a decentralized off-grid communications system using the Reticulum communication protocol stack.  We choose to focus on Reticulum because it is designed for heterogeneous networks built from various cheap devices, to be deployed in a bottom-up way by small communities.

https://radical-openness.org/en/programm/2026/low-profile-and-low-energy-autonomous-networking-reticulum

https://radical-openness.org/en/programm/2026/morning-session-how-boil-data-center