SEED Workshop at the 8th International Conference on Communities & Technologies

Organized by W. Lance Bennett and Alan Borning (University of Washington, Seattle USA) and Volker Wulf (University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany)

Quality of life for growing numbers of people on the planet is threatened by a set of integrated, systemic problems in the economy, environment and democracy. The goal of the SEED project is to form an international network of scholar/activists, advocates, and practitioners who seek to address these problems in a similarly integrated fashion. We are approaching this in two ways: first, by developing an online platform that connects our participants and facilitates sharing and assessing ideas and action experiments operating in local, national and international arenas; and second, by organizing a set of in-person workshops and other meetings of participants. This Communities & Technologies Workshop will be the first of these in-person workshops. Our goals for the workshop are three-fold: first, to help shape the plans for the SEED community; second, to present and discuss innovative proposals and work in this broad area; and third, for a key set of our participants from Europe, North America, and elsewhere to meet in person to help establish and further the connections among us.

The workshop will take place at the Université de Technologie de Troyes, France (map), 27 June 2017, from 9:30am-5:00pm, in conjunction with the Communities & Technologies Conference. If you are interested in attending, please send a short description of your interests and relevant background by email to seedproj@uw.edu by April 30. Optionally, you can also include a position paper with your application. We will then select a maximum of around 15 participants, with the goals of including both academics and practitioners, and a diverse range of disciplines and skills, in this broad area of seeking integrated solutions to problems of economy, environment, and democracy.

A central aspect of the SEED project is a resource center of position papers and other materials. We thus also invite attendees to add appropriate position papers or other materials to this resource center. To facilitate exchanges at the workshop, we will send out a list of these papers in advance. (Of course, participants can also provide papers later to add to the resource center, but these wouldn’t be available to the participants before the workshop.)

For Additional Information

Additional information on the workshop themes is provided in our workshop description, which was published in the Communities & Technologies Conference Proceedings.