Stakeholder Consultation 2025 for the International Digital Dialogues

Organised by GIZ, which on behalf of BMDV supports the International Digital Dialogues with a secretariat, the meeting brought together around 80 representatives from the business community, academia and civil society attending both on site at BMDV or participating online. The meeting provided an opportunity for German stakeholders to share their views, practical experience, interests and challenges in order to help deliver higher quality and targeted policy and cooperation initiatives under the umbrella of the Digital Dialogues.

Setting the scene

Dr Marc Lendermann, Head of Division Bilateral Digital Policy; Digital Dialogues of BMDV, welcomed all participants and stressed the strong value of bilateral cooperation formats, such as the Digital Dialogues, in times of increased scepticism towards multilateralism.

To dive deeper into possible topics for discussion, Torge Wolters, Head of GIZ’s support team to the International Digital Dialogues, presented the results of a recent online survey which provided new insights into current issues of interest within the International Digital Dialogues network. The online survey was conducted to learn about priorities and challenges of the digital communities in all Digital Dialogues partner countries. It showed that cybersecurity, data protection and privacy as well as digital business models and innovation were regarded as the most relevant topics. The ubiquitous matter of Artificial Intelligence (AI) did resonate in the responses to the survey as well, being considered the most relevant technology. At the same time, respondents stressed the need for ethical guidelines and robust regulatory frameworks for a responsible use of AI for societal benefit.  

Interactions throughout the day (Copyright: Sebastian Woithe)

Spotlight on stakeholders

Short “spotlight” presentations by five stakeholders from various sectors gave insights into current hot topics in the digital sphere.

Dr Simon Rinas from Siemens AG addressed the necessary conditions that should be created for digital industrial solutions to be developed, especially with regard to AI systems for industrial sectors (“Industrial AI”). Dr Jin Woo Ro from the German Aerospace Center’s (DLR) Institute for AI Safety & Security presented the institute's BaseX project that is implemented in cooperation with South Korea. The aim is to link several data spaces which will form the basis for AI developments. Karl-Heinz Land from neuland.ai AG discussed how individual AI technologies could be linked together in AI platforms to make them more usable for companies. Alan Ang and Friederike von Franqué from Wikimedia advocated digital public goods as possible solutions to global challenges and highlighted the work of Wikidata, a public search engine and Wikimedia project. Finally, Gudrun Schwarz from the Federal Ministry for Housing, Urban Development and Building (BMWSB) presented Germany´s approach to developing Smart Cities at the national level and spoke about scaling, data sharing / urban data spaces, and development of urban digital twins as current trends and topics of interest for international exchange.

Region-focused consultations

Following the plenary part, break-out sessions provided the opportunity for interactive discussions. The sessions were structured according to regions and focused on the Digital Dialogues’ partner countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa. After brief inputs on the status of the Digital Dialogue as well as current digital policy developments in the respective countries by the GIZ teams, each regional meeting gave room to an open discussion, with a wide variety of stakeholders actively exchanging about priority topics and cooperation activities.