ABOUT US
Founded in Berlin in 2025, the Global Digital Futures Architects is an expert community, research hub, advisory and accelerator. It brings together innovators, businesses, investors, policy makers, researchers and civil society to co-design and scale ideas and projects that shape sustainable, human-centric and inclusive digital futures. The Global Digital Futures Architects enables cross-regional public-interest technology use cases, builds their business cases and creates investment opportunities. The Architects also enable training modules for public and private sector professionals as well as investors and young tech talent to integrate business value and societal good. To incubate and test ideas and raise public awareness, it convenes the multi-stakeholder community through conferences, consultations, and speaker series.
Our Story
At the Summit of the Future in New York in September 2024, UN Member States adopted the Global Digital Compact, the world’s first global framework for an open, free, safe, and secure digital future for all. This was the latest milestone moving towards a global framework, after regional AI governance initiatives and regulatory frameworks had dominated the previous years, like the OECD AI Principles, the G7 Hiroshima Process. the EU AI Act and the Council of Europe Convention on AI and Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law. Just recently, the AI Action Summit in Paris highlighted the need for re-directing global AI development, policy and investments towards the public interest.
Engagement and conversations across stakeholder-groups at the Summit of the Future in New York, the Human Rights Council in Geneva and exploratory trips to France, the US and Singapore brought about one key challenge:
How do we create a market and innovation ecosystem for and around public-interest technology and digital spaces at scale?
The Global Digital Futures Architects focus on diagnosing high-impact societal challenges across regions and sectors, and co-designing scalable use cases. Most and foremost, we are dedicated to creating and designing entirely new innovation ecosystems and markets for public-interest AI at scale. As such, we look at various dimensions, from crafting business cases and implementation frameworks for companies and investment strategies for institutional and private investors, over building governance strategies to incentivize public-interest technology, to raising public awareness and demand and enabling training and learning to develop public-interest technology competency.
We are firmly anchored in an understanding of public-interest technology and digital spaces to be mission-driven in its outcome, that is tailored towards helping to solve major societal and planetary challenges. In its process-design, we aim for public-interest technology to be trustworthy, transparent, safe, secure and human-rights based.
Join us in this journey to integrate social impact and human rights-based technology with business, market and investment goals to change the DNA of future technology and paint a vibrant digital future in support of human and planetary flourishing.
UN Summit Actions Days Side Event for Digital Public Goods co-hosted with the Governments of Germany, Mexico and Poland, the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Global Network of Internet and Society Research Centers (NoC).
Exploratory workshop in Singapore on AI use cases in GovTech in both Singapore
and Germany.
58th Human Rights Council Side Event co-hosted by LMU, Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence, and Globethics.
About Me
I founded the Global Digital Futures Architects to combine a social impact with a business mindset to design and enable technologies and digital spaces and bring together diverse stakeholders that I too often see work in different "bubbles".
My background integrates expertise on the governance of digital technologies like AI with hands-on insights into practical implementation and long-standing trajectory in designing policy campaigns and convening stakeholders across political and sectoral aisles.
In my current role with the German Federal Foreign Office, I drive diplomatic efforts for Global AI Governance and Digital Cooperation in the Coordination Unit for AI in Foreign Policy. Before, I served as Team Lead for global partnerships and programs in FFO’s crisis early warning unit PREVIEW. Apart from my official function, I am a Fellow of Practice with the TUM Think Tank at the Technical University of Munich and the Global Solutions Initiative (GSI), Co-Chair of the Freedom Online Coalition Task Force on AI and Human Rights (TFAIR), and have recently joined the UNESCO’s expert group Women4Ethical AI as a contributing member.
During my time at FFO, I launched and led various global digital transformation campaigns with the UN, such as the now 30+ Mio. UN Complex Risk Analytics Fund CRAF’d enabling high quality, open-source data and analytics for targeted crisis prevention. I also enabled political agenda setting with the Ministerial Conference “Sustaining Peace Amidst the Climate Crisis: The Role of Data, Science, and Technology”, and advance efforts for a global GovTech ecosystem in Berlin.
Before joining the German Federal Foreign Office in 2020, I worked in various functions in diplomacy, security policy and sustainable development with the US State Department at the US Consulate General in Munich and the Munich Security Conference, as well as with the German Agency for Development Cooperation. I also conducted research on law and politics at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Göttingen in Germany. Trained in International Relations and Law, my regional experience spans across North America, Europe, Africa and Asia.
Nicole Manger
Founding Director, Global Digital Futures Architects
Learning Partners
