Dear Friends and Colleagues,

After ten years of research, teaching, convenings, and investing in postdoctoral scholars and community-based fellows, the Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL) will be paring down its operations over the 2024-25 academic year and sunsetting in June 2025. No research initiative is designed to last forever, and DCSL has had a glorious decade. With the departures of several of our key leaders and with our institutional home, Stanford PACS, at a moment of strategic reinvention, we feel that the time is right for us to rethink the structure within which to continue our work to understand the impact of digital technologies on civic life. We take enormous pride in what we accomplished and a firm commitment to continue producing original ideas that will inform civil society in a digitally dependent world.

Launched in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, the Lab became a global leader in understanding, informing, and improving the ability of civil society organizations and funders to use digital data and systems safely, equitably, and effectively.  In the past decade, Lab affiliates have published several books, changed public policy at the municipal and federal levels, launched new enterprise forms such as data trusts, and supported thousands of nonprofit organizations on six continents to integrate data governance and responsible data practices into their organizations. The Lab pioneered data philanthropy in building DigitalImpact.io and The Upgrade Initiative, a suite of resources for data governance developed and donated by foundations and nonprofits from across the globe. At the beginning of the pandemic, the Lab launched the Digital Assembly Research Network, which connected hundreds of scholars and community leaders whose understanding of digital harms extends beyond speech to issues of association, assembly, and free space for collective action. The Lab’s key insights – that digital dependencies challenge both individual and collective rights and that civil society is a promising source of alternative, rights-respecting technological systems – remain critically important. We have stood proudly and unflinchingly for the independence of associational life from both the government and Big Tech, and we will continue this work through research and community partnerships. 

The Lab has been more than a few people and classes at Stanford. It is a global community of critical technologists and technology scholars, more than 40 community fellows working to protect the most vulnerable people from digital surveillance, 12 postdoctoral scholars doing leading edge research and teaching, undergraduate students and graduate RAs, and countless guest speakers, faculty affiliates, conference attendees, funders, and charrette participants. We are grateful to all of them and will continue to find ways to engage and support them.

Technologies change, but the evolving role and need of civil society organizations is ever present. We’re confident that the Lab’s alumni network will continue to produce path-breaking research and to build civil society organizations, practices, and legal structures that catalyze collective action and strengthen democracies around the world. In the coming months, we will share more details about how we will reorganize this work at Stanford to continue to advance DCSL’s mission to work with scholars, students, practitioners, and policy makers to help support a thriving and independent civil society.

Meanwhile, as our valued supporters, we encourage you to continue to follow along the Lab’s evolving work this year as detailed below: 

• Angèle Christin will continue her research, teaching, and scholarship as a faculty affiliate at Stanford PACS.
• Lucy Bernholz will continue her research and scholarship as a senior research scholar at Stanford PACS; and will continue to publish the Philanthropy and Digital Civil Society: Blueprint. 
• All current and former Practitioner Fellows and Postdoctoral Fellows will continue to share updates on Stanford PACS channels; please subscribe to the PACS newsletter, follow us @StanfordPACS and connect with us on LinkedIn.
• We invite you to join our new Technology, Culture, and Power (TCP) speaker series launching in October 2024, convened by Angèle Christin and co-hosted by Stanford PACS and the Cyber Policy Center, by opting into the TCP mailing list here; the Lab’s past speaker series video recordings will continue to be accessible on our website here.
• All Lab resources such as the AI Civil Society Database, Dark Patterns Tip Line, and DigitalImpact.io will continue to be accessible on our website here. 

The Lab’s contact email (digcivsoc@stanford.edu) will also remain active for any inquiries.

Rebecca Abella

Lucy Bernholz

Angèle Christin

Toussaint Nothias

Rob Reich