Digital Good Research Fund ‘Building the digital good’: call for applications

@Jorge posted to the Patio Mattermost;

The aim of the Digital Good Network is to enhance our collective understanding of what a good digital society looks like and how we get there.

In the third year of the network, we invite research proposals that focus on ‘Building the digital good.’

Proposals should build on our prior research and our discussion paper Evaluating the societal outcomes of digital technologies: building blocks and reflexive questions.

Deadline to apply: 26 June 2025 16:00 UK time

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I have a research project that I believe would cut energy usage for security operation centers (SOCs) by at least half. Problem is, I am not UK-based so I’d need a Project Lead with at least some experience and interest in this area.

@shaun from CBN and CNI is a member of CoTech / workers.coop, he might be able to help or have some suggestions.

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@shaun from CBN and CNI is a member of CoTech / workers.coop, he might be able to help or have some suggestions

Thanks @chris

@murdoc Happy to help if I can. I have some data centre experience and working on projects for eg heat re-use and with immersion cooling. No direct experience of SOCs though, so not sure how helpful I can be.

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Just to warn people about this kind of thing, sadly UKRI funds are pretty much inaccessible for tech practitioners. They all assume you have an academic lead, who is the PI (principle investigator), who is the one with the Big Idea who gets credit. As a practitioner-studio, you at best get to be Co-I (co-investigator) and are just seen as a subcontractor who does implementation and doesn’t really contribute to theory (and probably doesn’t own any of the IP afterwards).

If you come up with a really good project idea and want to be on the academic side of this, the job post has to be publically advertised and you need to apply to it. It’s a very frustrating setup that keeps research nice and neoliberal, imo, and yes to me its quite antithetical to the overall goal but what can you do really.

Oh and just to add in an extra complication, academics often have to go through an internal bidding process against their colleagues to be the one idea submitted by their host institution to any given UKRI callout.

On the offchance anyone from UKRI is reading I would love a conversation about this!

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