Paper Number
ICIS2026-1563
Paper Type
Completed
Abstract
Digital public infrastructure (DPI) – public foundational and reusable digital systems for e.g. digital identity, payment, and data-exchange – has become a high-stakes concept in digital government and global development. Yet, it is underspecified: discourse bundles legal, normative, and functional meanings of ‘‘public‘‘ without analytically distinguishing them. We ask how dimensional publicness (DmP) theory can be adapted into an analytical framework for assessing the publicness of DPI. Employing a two-step knowledge synthesis – a concept-centered systematic review of publicness literature and a deductive grey-literature document analysis of 61 DPI sources – we identify twelve DPI-relevant publicness dimensions, specify units of analysis in infrastructural settings, and synthesize into three layers: structural, normative-relational, and experienced-realized publicness. Three propositions link the layers to the building, governing, and use of DPIs, and a contrasting illustration of India's Aadhaar / UPI and the European Digital Identity Wallet cases demonstrates the framework's discriminating power.
Recommended Citation
Bauer, Luca T.; Arpaci, Selin; Degen, Konrad; Köster, Sasha; and Niehaves, Björn, "Digital Public Infrastructure Through the Lens of Dimensional Publicness" (2026). ICIS 2026 Proceedings. 1.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2026/iot/iot/1
Digital Public Infrastructure Through the Lens of Dimensional Publicness
Digital public infrastructure (DPI) – public foundational and reusable digital systems for e.g. digital identity, payment, and data-exchange – has become a high-stakes concept in digital government and global development. Yet, it is underspecified: discourse bundles legal, normative, and functional meanings of ‘‘public‘‘ without analytically distinguishing them. We ask how dimensional publicness (DmP) theory can be adapted into an analytical framework for assessing the publicness of DPI. Employing a two-step knowledge synthesis – a concept-centered systematic review of publicness literature and a deductive grey-literature document analysis of 61 DPI sources – we identify twelve DPI-relevant publicness dimensions, specify units of analysis in infrastructural settings, and synthesize into three layers: structural, normative-relational, and experienced-realized publicness. Three propositions link the layers to the building, governing, and use of DPIs, and a contrasting illustration of India's Aadhaar / UPI and the European Digital Identity Wallet cases demonstrates the framework's discriminating power.
Comments
18_IoT_publicIS_infrastructures