Digital Identity Data Infrastructure
From Intersectional Principles to Infrastructural Practice
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About the Digital IDI project
The Digital Identity Data Infrastructure project is an open-source codebase designed by drawing on the state-of-the-art research on intersectionality, digital identity, and data infrastructures. The projects builds a practical solution to explore how data infrastructures and digital identity systems can be designed from the perspective of harm reduction using current understandings about theories of identity and data.
The Digital IDI is an open-source project. Once it is launched, it will be hosted publicly on GitHub. The project will feature a live version demonstrating the practical implementations of the concepts underpinning the infrastructure.
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Theory Meets Practice
Large digital data infrastructures operate over long periods of time. Infrastructures become embedded within the fabric of our everyday lives. They become invisible, and only become visible when they break, or when they fail to deliver on the services that we expect.
Identity data is inherently difficult to collect, store, and transfer. Each of these stages shapes the meaning of the data. Alongside this, human identities can change over time, and the identities can become misaligned with the digital data. When this happens, this can create major issues for people whose identities don’t match with the digital identity data.
The Digital Identity Data Infrastructure project is a practical software project for exploring how to work with these challenges. The project draws on the state-of-the-art research on digital identity data, data infrastructures, software engineering, and systems design to look for ways to work on these kinds of problems.
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Who Is Behind the Digital IDI Project?
Katherine Wyers has a PhD in Informatics studying public digital infrastructures and identity data. She has worked for 10 years as a software engineer and data management consultant in the commercial and humanitarian spaces.
During her PhD, she studied how changes to identity categories in public digital infrastructure lead to challenges for certain types of people, and that the people who were most disadvantaged by these changes were the people who were already disadvantaged by their other social identities like race, gender, or sexual orientation. The Digital IDI is a project to find practical, pragmatic solutions to these challenges.
Follow the Project
The project will commence in Spring 2026.
The open-source codebase will be available on GitHub
Contact katherwy@ifi.uio.no for further information about the Digital Identity Data Infrastructure project.
