Data, Democracy and Digital Futures

Researchers from ORUA, the Public Policy Institute (PPI), the Centre of Methods and Policy Application in the Social Sciences (COMPASS) are working alongside researchers and policymakers from throughout New Zealand to provide advanced methods for improving policy planning.

Wicked problems faced by New Zealand society today include: how to reduce homelessness, improve equity, and provide housing for all New Zealanders. To tackle wicked problems, transdisciplinary approaches that provide evidence-based cross-sector policy are needed. Exploring data trajectories of citizens and residents, infrastructure and the environment and key turning points within those trajectories provides better understanding of cross-sector interactions, e.g., how providing housing will help reduce homelessness. These trajectories and turning points can be generalised into pathways and transitions so that the effect of potential policy combinations can be evaluated in a virtual New Zealand and provide better insights for policy planning.

NAOInstitute stands for the Natural, Artificial, and Organisation Intelligence Institute. These three facets represent the broad field of intelligence research, from biology and psychology, to sociology and business, to artificial intelligence and machine learning. NAOI covers anything and everything that can think, and we aim to understand all of it.We are a transdisciplinary research centre with affiliated members from a broad diversity of backgrounds, cultures, career stages, research interests, genders and ages; and we all seek to explore the same thing: how do individuals, organisations and machines think; why do they think; and by understanding this, how can we improve the world’s wellbeing?

The Social Futures Research Hub is an interdisciplinary network established in 2019 at the University of Auckland. It brings together scholars from various Faculties and disciplines with a shared interest in researching a diverse range of possible futures.