Science in a Digital Society
The latter versions of the documents are uploaded.
Please note that we will bring the final programme with us – i.e. you do not need to print it.
Squared table 11 is cancelled.
See you tomorrow at 8.30 AM! 
sci-ict Team
The programme is now online, as well as the abstracts of the keynote speeches and “squared tables” descriptions and teaser questions.
If you want to register you can download the registration form (Links menu on the right side) and send it to sci-ict@jrc.ec.europa.eu.
16th May @ 7pm is the last day for registration!
Thanks!
“The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.” – William Gibson
The workshop “Science in a Digital Society” is framed on ideas of anticipation and visions of the future. It focuses on the scientific endeavour, but Lisboa has also been transforming itself, adapting to new times while also reconciling many pasts. As part of the workshop, we’ll conduct a tour of transitions in Lisboa, in which YOU are asked to find its futures.
Finding Futures invites you to join us in collective inquiry. What happens when you look at the city as a composite of images? How can we make the city and its contents, patterns and possibilities legible? What memories and imaginations are summoned?
We’ll do this through shared, attentive touring of the futures of Lisbon. We invite you to wander around, to notice differently. Trade your data collection instincts for a more naïve scavenger-hunt playfulness. As part of this we will:
WALK Alcântara to Belém, along the river Tejo: Explore the remnants of Lisboa’s industrial past and envisage what these pasts might become – what would you like to see in these spaces in 2050? Take photos and describe your vision in the photo captions.
SPOT signs of the times: Identify and photograph street signs, advertisements, shop fronts, flyers, and road signs – for instance – that capture the spirit of the now. Note the reasons for your selection.
IDENTIFY the future: As you wander, where do you see the future breaking through? What are the places that point to precursors of dramatic change? Select three futures and describe their directionalities.
How to Play
Walk the route with us at 5.30 pm on Wednesday 18th May (the first day of the conference) armed with your digital camera or smart phone and capture images and interpret what you see in the picture titles and captions. (You can also walk the route at your leisure.) Photos and captions should be uploaded onto our designated Flickr group (details and directions will be provided at the start of the conference). Contributors’ discoveries and editorial comments will be analysed, mashed and rendered, and on the 20th May at 5.30 pm we will host a gallery installation that will reveal your findings to the group.
What you need
You’ll need a digital camera or a smart phone that can take pictures. If you are using a digital camera, use the cable to connect to a computer and upload your creations. Directions and support will be available for uploading, tagging, and organizing your photos on site.
You’ll need comfortable shoes to walk around for two hours, a hat and sun protection.
We will start our tour on Wednesday at 5.30 PM. But if you are in Lisboa before Wednesday, feel free to take to the streets and shoot pictures with Finding Futures in mind.
Thank you!
Cynthia Selin. Gretchen Gano. Sarah Davies. Ângela Guimarães Pereira
Organized by the European Commission – Joint Research Centre
Lisbon, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 18‐20 May 2011.
The new technologies of digital communication have been changing all areas of social activity; first entertainment and business, and now politics. What will happen to science?
In those other areas the trend has been for things to become more fluid, participatory and, to some extent, unstable. Will those trends also affect the conduct of scientific research? Old practices and institutions suddenly face unknown challenges to traditional research methods, hierarchical arrangements, funding lines, peer review processes and reputation management. Quality is redefined.
The identification of “grand challenges” (or questions) can now follow different paths and the imbedding of research in society can take many diverse forms. Interactions of science with society are becoming multiform. Hitherto well codified practices could suddenly become obsolete as previously closed communities of practice are opening up. These trends are for most part technologically driven but they are now stimulated by seemingly irrepressible new social dynamics. How will the conduct of research be affected in the future? How will research results be affected and, overall, is there a risk that those multiform approaches may negatively affect the generation of knowledge?
Science is also changing very rapidly in its practice and self-awareness. While there are still some prestigious and vital ‘free’ sectors of science, the institution as a whole is now firmly ‘industrialised’, both in the scale of operation and in the tightness of its relations with commerce and the State. But whereas ‘big science’ once aimed at controlling of matter and energy, science in the digital age is largely defined by the emerging technologies of information. A deeper imbedding of science in the society is no longer a utopian dream and is, today, naturally unfolding through new forms of learning, sharing, debating, contestation and even healthy exposure enabled by emerging digital technologies.
These will create new relations of power, exploitation, consciousness and protest as they affect science.
This workshop will bring together scholars and practitioners who have, through their work and ideas, stimulated reflection and action in realising the new, positive conceptions of science appropriate to its new social and technological conditions. In this conference we will share our new understandings and experiences.
THEMES
The themes of the workshop will be along the following lines, serving as invitations rather than constraints.
• Computer Models – ever easier to use and to misuse.
• The ‘participatory turn’ in science policy, as decision-makers start to share power with citizens.
• ICT as the technology of post-normal science – the new open media of interaction, and how they foster critical and creative thinking and action.
• Citizen science –as participants in projects, as innovators, and as critics, how ‘amateurs scientists’ are becoming recognized in their own right via contributions to policy and scientific research questions, again made directly possible by ICT technologies
• Science and other areas of knowledge – how the old divisions are melting, as people realise that science cannot maintain claims to objectivity remote from human nature and societal context
