On 12 May 2026, IEEE Europe organized a fireside chat titled “Building Resilience by Design: Digital Infrastructure, Recovery, and Human Values” at the European Resilience Summit 2026 in Vienna. The session was organized as part of the Horizon Europe-funded project “EUDHIT”, of which IEEE Europe is a consortium partner.
The session brought together two complementary perspectives on the implementation of Digital Humanism in practice: Jutta Meier, Founder and CEO of Identity Valley, a EUDHIT partner working on trust, responsibility and Digital Humanism indicators, and Fritz Fahringer, Founder and CEO of VALTYROL, who contributed to the regional data infrastructure initiative datahub.tirol. The session was moderated by Marianna Kramarikova, Standards Collaboration and Delivery Director at IEEE SA.
Together, they explored how digital infrastructure can be designed around human values, institutional trust and shared responsibility. Datahub.tirol was discussed as one concrete example of how Digital Humanism can be translated into practice through value-based engineering, based on the IEEE 7000 standard.
With a full room, the session attracted strong interest from participants from industry and sparked discussions on how Digital Humanism and values-based design can be translated into concrete organizational practices.
Key takeaways from the fireside chat included:
- Engaging stakeholders requires communication across different communities. Bringing together the tech sector, public institutions and civil society means making roles and responsibilities understandable to all stakeholders.
- Values cannot simply be retrofitted. If digital systems are to support trust and resilience, these considerations need to be addressed from the beginning of systems design.
- Standards such as IEEE 7000 help move from principles to practice. They provide consensus-based methods and commonly agreed-upon criteria to make values more actionable in the design of digital systems.
The session confirmed that Digital Humanism resonates most strongly when framed around concrete implementation questions, as illustrated by the audience discussion around datahub.tirol. Speakers and participants alike highlighted that making Digital Humanism actionable requires connecting value-based approaches to the practical realities of designing and governing resilient digital systems.