Workshop on "Complexity in real world practices: reshaping the relationships" @ ECCS 2014

A Workshop we are Co-organising:

Complexity in real world practices: reshaping the relationships

ECCS 2014, 22-26 September, Lucca, Italy. Satellite Meeting to the main Conference.

Since the ECCS foundation in 2004, a number of meetings have been organized at the ECCS conferences dealing with how Complexity Science might inform about and provide leverage within socioeconomic contexts and policy oriented practices. This meeting is meant to keep alive that discussion and help bring together an inter-disciplinary community who, since the first event, has progressively attracted people from different domains. Thus this workshop provides a direct “interface” to the policy world for the more academic research elsewhere at ECCS, facilitating a dialogue between the policy world and the ECCS community.
In addition, over the last few years several initiatives in universities and EU projects have explored these issues with the spread of the complexity oriented literature into many disciplinary fields.
While the merits of complexity studies are praised on a methodological grounds, their impact on real-world organizations is still limited. The reasons are manifold and may be attributed to the difficulties that private and public organizations have in understanding the impact of this paradigm which, besides dismantling the old one, encroaches on the possibility created by the dramatic progress in ICT and in computational power.
The questions raised in today’s application of complexity approaches tend to polarize around two main themes:

1. A conceptual one: designing lines of enquire to address substantial issues for the future of organizations, such as those concerning goals definition, cooperative behaviour and agents engagement on a collective basis (e.g. learning to learn in order to cooperate and build more resilient organizations);
2. An operational one: developing new techniques for data gathering, information processing and visualization, to manage the increasingly large data source made available by ICT devices.

These questions are also crucial to those involved in policy activities, as they underpin the emerging requirements for open government. However, the opportunity to better articulate the relationships between the above themes is however crucial and the meeting will provide ground for their discussion.
The webpage for this workshop will be linked to: http://www.eccs14.eu/