APOLOGIES FOR CROSS POSTING The Institute for Information Law (www.ivir.nl ) at the University of Amsterdam is looking for a postdoctoral socio-legal research scientist *Job description* As a research scientist, you’ll be working on the social and institutional aspects of trust in and by technological systems. Multiple technologies emerged to produce trust (such as global reputation systems, (self-sovereign) identity systems), or minimize the need for trust (DLTs). Trust, as produced by technical systems has many possible sources: strong cryptography, censorship resistance through decentralization, good governance, or legal legibility, certainty and compliance. Some of these trust sources, like technology governance and regulation, can complement each other. Others, such as compliance and decentralization, seem to be in contradiction. As a social scientist, you will be working with legal scholars on answering the following two questions at the intersection of trust and technology: - How do (decentralized) technologies produce trust or minimize the need for trust? - What makes these systems trustworthy? You will answer these questions by studying various aspects of trust and trustworthiness in technological contexts. In particular you will: - conduct empirical research among technology developers on the trustworthiness of technology: - design and implement surveys, and conduct qualitative analysis on how technology developers see the trustworthiness of technology they build and operate, and how they implement and balance different sources of trust in technological systems (system design, governance, legal compliance, etc.); - conduct empirical research among technology users on the topic of trust: - design and implement surveys among users of blockchain based systems on the issue of trust and trustworthiness; - conduct a qualitative analysis of the discourses around trust and DLTs; - work on the problem of institutional embeddedness of decentralized technical systems: - conduct empirical research on how existing societal stakeholders (such as businesses, the media, various professional groups, regulators, policymakers) see the trustworthiness of decentralized technologies, and their ability to produce trust; - study the institutional change that may be necessary to better incorporate technical trust producers in systems of accountability and oversight; - work with legal scholars on new policy proposals aimed at building trust in decentralized technologies, and between users of such systems; - contribute to the development of research methodology and infrastructure; - organize workshops to discuss and disseminate the research findings. *Requirements* Candidates are expected to meet the following requirements. You have: - an interest in researching social diffusion/application/regulation of digital technologies; - a background in one or more of the following disciplines: - Sociology; - Economics; - Political Science - Computer Science, - Media studies with special focus on sociology of organizations, sociology or economics of innovation, or science and technology studies; IVIR is the host institution of the Blockchain & Society Policy Research Lab (https://blockchain-society.science/) , founded in 2018 with the help of an ERC starting Grant by Dr Balázs Bodó. The work of the Lab focuses on the regulatory challenges around the latest iteration of decentralized technologies, such as blockchains and DLTs. We use the term ‘blockchain technology’ as a placeholder concept for technological ordering regimes, which, among others, promise impartial, automated, and ex-ante enforcement of technology-encoded rules and norms, and thus have the potential to enable new forms of trust-dependent activities. While blockchain technologies go through the cycles of hypes and busts, the ongoing innovation in this domain produces often highly contentious, and increasingly plausible visions of how our social, political, economic relationships could be re-organized. Please apply here: https://www.uva.nl/en/content/vacancies/2020/02/20-080-postdoctoral-socio-le... ---------------------------------------- Balázs Bodó, PhD Associate Professor Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam http://www.ivir.nl/ Blockchain & Society Policy Research Lab (funded by an ERC Starting Grant) https://blockchain-society.science/ Latest publications: Bodó, B. (2019). Selling News to Audiences – A Qualitative Inquiry into the Emerging Logics of Algorithmic News Personalization in European Quality News Media. Digital Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2019.1624185 Bodó, B., & Giannopoulou, A. (2019). The logics of technology decentralization: the case of Distributed Ledger Technologies. In M. Ragnedda, & G. Destefanis (Eds.), Blockchain and Web 3.0: Social, Economic, and Technological Challenges Routledge. Bodó, B., & van de Velde, R. N. (2019). Big Data & Data Science in information law and policy research. In H. Van den Bulck, M. Puppis, K. Donders, & L. Van Audenhove (Eds.), Palgrave Handbook of Methods for Media Policy Research (pp. 347-366). Palgrave Macmillan