The e-Swabhimani Award process is being conducted along the lines of the World Summit which is the global follow-up initiative of the United Nations World Summit on Information Society and the e-Swabhimani award is a stepping stone to other regional and international awards. It is expected that national recognition would spur a greater interest in leveraging ICT for the social and economic development of the country. To achieve this national goal, the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka implements e-Swabhimani, the National Best e-Content Award with the aim of recognizing the creativity and skills of local digital content and application developers. Today, Sri Lanka is on a strategic path, aiming to become a digitally inclusive nation. Digital content also plays a vital role as ICT has become a part of life for all human beings throughout the world. ICT is used for achieving business goals as well as macro development goals owing to its transformative power. Information Communication Technology (ICT) has become an essential industry in today’s world, since it provides an overarching enabling platform for the human development process. It finishes with an empirical experiment to map the various ways in which Instagram data is made to count. The paper offers a conceptual perspective to interrogate what data counts by attending to questions of quantification, its entangle-ment with valuation and the various technologies and stakeholders involved. Platform data can participate in different valuation regimes at the same time – however, the paper concludes, not all actors can participate in all modes of valuation, as in the end, it is the platform that sets the conditions for participation. Platforms offer such grammars of action both to users and other stakeholders in front-and back-ends, inviting them to produce and engage with its data following heterogeneous orders of worth. Platform data, the paper suggests, is the outcome of capture systems which allow to collapse action and its capture into pre-structured data forms which remain open to divergent interpretations.

Drawing on both platform and valuation studies, it asks how the production, storing and circulation of data, its connection to user action and the various stakeholders of platforms contribute to its valuation. This paper explores the specific socio-technical conditions for valuating platform data and suggests that platforms set up their data to become multivalent, that is to be valuable alongside multiple, possibly conflicting value regimes. Social media platforms have been characterised by their programma-bility, affordances, constraints and stakeholders – the question of value and valuation of platforms, their data and features has, however, received less attention in platform studies.

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