For decades, technology has been hailed as a pivotal solution for sustainability problems. Polluted skies, oil dependence, wasteful consumption - technology will solve it. Indeed, technology brings with it important new ways of producing, organising and consuming. But while technological advances help us become more efficient, we also see troubling new concentrations of power, that trigger some important questions for the future.
How can we radically trigger the involvement of citizens in the energy transition? How do we keep the race for sustainability from becoming a race for the ownership of intellectual property? Will we be able to harness the powers of the free Internet - the world wide web as it was intended - to share and democratize knowledge? How do we (re)design digital platforms to work for the many, instead of working to the advantage of the few?
The movement of Digital Social Innovation is exploring opportunities for fairer technological innovation, developing open and bottom-up solutions for pressing social and environmental challenges. This series of events helps us to zoom in on some specific interests and developments that are trending in the community. Open source, blockchain and data commons will be discussed in relationship to the big sustainability challenges we have today.
To showcase the different aspects of Digital Social Innovation, Waag will organize three DSI talks:
- DSI talks: if you can't open it, you don't own it (6 September 2018 - sold out)
- DSI talks: blockchain for transparency and ethics (18 October 2018)
- DSI talks: data from the people, for the people (8 November 2018)
DSI4EU, formally known as DSISCALE, is supported by the European Union and funded under the Horizon 2020 Programme, grant agreement no. 780473.
