Research
In my research, I'm trying to understand how we can represent people in data in a way that doesn't make it difficult for people to live in this digitised world.
Explore my researchInformation systems shape how organisations see people.
How do information systems represent people, and what happens when those representations become consequential?
Explore my researchWhy this matters
When an information system represents a person, it captures particular things about them. What gets captured depends on what seemed important when the system was designed.
But what seems important can change. Organisations change, different people have influence at different times, and decisions made years ago can continue to shape how the system works today.
Organisations use these representations to make decisions. They might decide whether someone can access a service, or use data about many people to decide which services to fund, close, or create. By the time those decisions are made, the person themselves is often missing. What remains is the information systems representation of them.
Research Agenda
What I'm trying to understand with my research is how to balance the rigidity of infrastructure and data systems with the fact that people's lives change, organisations change, policies change, laws change.
The problem isn't always that the data is wrong. It can be that the same person has different accurate data in different contexts.
Where I work
Writing
I write for a wide audience because there are many different people who make consequential decisions about people and data in their everyday work lives.
Consulting
In my consulting work, I help organisations make changes to their information systems by working across the technical side and the data governance side.
Visit WyerworksAbout me
I'm an information-systems researcher, software engineer and consultant based in Scotland.
I completed my PhD in Information Systems at the University of Oslo and am currently a Visiting Researcher at the University of Edinburgh.
Before my PhD, I worked in information systems development in health, refugee data management, and education, including USAID-funded work in Myanmar and Thailand with Save the Children, World Education, and Shoklo Malaria Research Unit. I also worked on an UNESCO-funded project in South Africa and a UNICEF-funded project on universal health coverage.
On the technical side, the work involved writing VBA, PHP, and C#, working with Access databases and Excel, and dealing with data quality and data validation. The work also meant speaking with many different stakeholders, handling mismatching records in the data, and working in difficult organisational situations.
I co-founded Grassroots Lab CIC because we saw a need for community programmes based around the problem of standard measurements not fitting real bodies. It grew mainly out of seeing how my life changed when I started making clothes that fit me instead of relying on what the shops sold.
Get in touch
I'd particularly like to hear from you if you want to discuss how infrastructure can include people better, especially if you're thinking intersectionally or about marginalised communities.
I'd also like to hear from you if you're an organisation making changes to a data system and you're concerned that the way people are represented might no longer be sufficient, causing incorrect data or exclusion.
You can email me at hello@katherinewyers.com or contact me using the form below: