Mobilizing citizen data for society 5.0

Abstract

Scholars have long been concerned with the question of how the well-being of society and its individuals change in the face of technological progress, and how its ambiguity may be resolved (e.g., Ashton 1948, Crafts 1985, Deane and Cole 1962, Rostow 1960). The pressure and responsibility to find answers have never been greater than today. Despite the complexity and diversity of today’s innovations, a majority build on one key resource: data. Hence, the question of how technical progress can benefit society inevitably implies the question of data governance. Among politicians and academics, a specific term is currently emerging for a vision of society in which data and data-driven technology is primarily mobilized for the goal of maximizing social welfare and individual well-being: Society 5.0 (e.g., Cabinet Office 2016, Deguchi et al. 2020, Salgues 2018). Following the vision of Society 5.0, this dissertation aims to make a small contribution to increasing the availability and quality of data for the benefit of social welfare. For this purpose, it focuses on a promising approach that is currently receiving increasing attention in academia and practice alike: the active participation of citizens. First, citizens may deliberately create new data sets that did not exist before, e.g., through measurements, documentation, or surveys (e.g., Lämmerhirt et al. 2018). Second, citizens may share data sets with social welfare-oriented actors that they already automatically generated through the use of private industry products and services (World Bank 2021). Both approaches contribute to reallocate data and increase their quality in favor of society and its individuals.