What if we reimagined technology with people and peoples' rights at its centre?

PDGI is a collective effort to create an evidence-based grammar for principles, standards, rights, and practices covering the entire spectrum of technology from conception and design to deployment and governance. Read more →

Gaganendranath Tagore, City in the Night
Gaganendranath Tagore, City in the Night · c. 1922 A rapid, disorienting, and impersonal transformation of human lives through digital technology.

Three crucial questions at the crux of a “grand unified” people-first approach.

01

Why PDGI?

Digital infrastructure is rapidly concentrating power into opaque systems that mediate human life while excluding people from meaningful agency, accountability, and governance. Without a people-centric framework, there is a serious risk of today’s already unaccountable systems further deepening inequality and democratic powerlessness in the age of AI.

02

What is different?

PDGI attempts to unify fragmented ideas from various disciplines – everything from Free and Open Source Software to UX and accessibility to decentralisation and governance – into a people-first framework spanning the full lifecycle of technology development and deployment, with peoples’ rights at its core.

03

Can it work?

PDGI is ambitious precisely because today’s technological landscape is disproportionately skewed towards concentrating power in the hands of large entities, from states to BigTech. It’s a collective attempt to provide a shared grammar that allows valuable lessons from existing disciplines and frameworks to work together around peoples’ agency, rights, and autonomy.