PhD position Participatory Data Governance for a Just Energy Transition

Job description

We seek a participatory design researcher who can make questions of justice, data rights and shared stewardship concrete in the design and operation of energy data infrastructures.

Job Description

The Delft University of Technology is hiring a doctoral candidate on the subject of "Energy data sharing for city-level policy making using digital twins". The PhD position is a part of the FEDERATE NWO project.
Energy data can help communities, municipalities and grid operators make better decisions about the energy transition. Yet people and organisations who contribute data may have little insight into how it is used, limited influence over the terms of sharing, or no clear way to benefit from the resulting decisions. FEDERATE, aims developing ways to share data across energy systems and digital twins while addressing these questions of trust, power and justice.
We are looking for a PhD candidate to lead the research in Work Package 2: Participatory Data Governance for Equitable and Transparent Data-Sharing Processes of the FEDERATE project. You will work with residents, local organisations, municipalities, grid operators and technology partners to design and test governance arrangements that make data sharing understandable, negotiable and accountable. Your research will connect social and organisational design with the technical work on data-sharing interfaces, privacy, forgetting mechanisms and interoperable digital twins.

What you will do

You will investigate how energy data is currently collected, shared and used, and whose needs, efforts, risks and knowledge are recognised in those processes. Through interviews, data ethnography, stakeholder and power mapping, and participatory workshops, you will build an understanding of both personal energy data and wider energy system data.
Working with project partners and communities in Heiloo and Alkmaar, you will:
Develop a participatory data governance framework informed by Human-Data Interaction principles of legibility, agency and negotiability, and by Energy Data Justice.
Facilitate inclusive workshops with residents, businesses, public authorities and technical partners. You will use methods such as role play, serious games and scenario-based co-design to make competing interests and power differences discussable.
Co-design governance roles, decision processes, data access and control arrangements, and ways for people to question, contest or revise data-sharing terms.
Design and prototype social and digital interactions that help people understand data practices, join governance processes and exercise meaningful influence. This includes approaches for people who are digitally excluded or less often represented.
Explore fair incentives and ways for the value created through data sharing to flow back to those who contribute data, effort or local knowledge.
Develop an onboarding playbook and a practical governance and stewardship toolkit, then help test these arrangements in the project’s joint case study.
Translate findings into actionable governance requirements and data rights constraints for the project’s technical researchers, while learning from what their prototypes make possible in practice.
Publish your research in academic venues and share usable findings with project partners and participating communities.
Job Requirements
You have a master’s degree in design, human-computer interaction, social sciences, science and technology studies, public policy, information studies, or a closely related field. We welcome candidates whose work crosses these fields.
You can demonstrate:
Experience with qualitative or participatory research, such as interviews, ethnography, co-design or workshop facilitation.
The ability to work respectfully with people who have different forms of expertise and different degrees of power, including communities affected by exclusion or vulnerability.
A strong interest in data justice, energy justice, data rights, participatory governance or related approaches to equity and accountability.
Design skills to turn research insights into concepts, prototypes, interactions or tools that people can examine and test together.
The ability to analyse complex social and organisational settings, communicate findings clearly, and work independently as part of a multidisciplinary team.
An interest in learning how data infrastructures and digital twins work, so that you can collaborate closely with technical researchers. You do not need to be a specialist in knowledge graphs, privacy engineering or software development.
Spoken Dutch skills, sufficient to independently conduct interviews and facilitate inclusive, participatory workshops with local stakeholders in Heiloo and Alkmaar, including residents, neighbourhood organisations local business and policymakers.
Experience in the energy transition, community engagement, data stewardship, service design or interaction design would be valuable. What matters most is your ability to connect careful justice-oriented research with practical design and collaboration across disciplines.
TU Delft (Delft University of Technology)