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ECCS'10 Satellite Meeting "Policy making in complex adaptive systems"

ECCS'10 Satellite Meeting

Policy making in complex adaptive systems

Lisbon, September 16, 2010

Organisers: Sylvie Occelli, Yasmin Merali, Ferdinando Semboloni, Jeff Johnson and Jorge Louçã

Description

The rapid evolution and expansion of ICT capabilities, capacity and pervasiveness gives rise to opportunities and challenges for the sustainability and transformation of society and economy. For policy makers, the increased complexity of the networked world demands a re-evaluation of the role, task and impact of policy making.

Advances in ICT and computational approaches afford novel ways of policy design, which in turn require new forms of institutional organisation and management. Whereas policy-making could be loosely understood as an activity favouring the alignment between the internal and external complexity of socio-economic systems, adaptation and innovation in policy making are pre-requisites for the viability of these systems in dynamic contexts.

The purpose of this meeting is to begin an articulation and investigation of the issues that need to be addressed by both the complex systems scientific community and the governmental agencies involved in this domain, and to set the agenda for research activities to be actively pursued .

The meeting will be organized around the following four themes:

  1. Framing methodological aspects: can we identify and map a set of meta categories of relevant problems and the requisite modelling strategies and ICT tools for dealing with them?
  2. Framing the contents of policy making: given the increasingly ICT-based nature of the policy making context and which entities (processes) should be targeted (and managed) by policy making? How can we link short-term policy actions with long term/higher level strategic ones? How would this linking affect current forms of organization and collaboration? Additional issues dealing with the innovation of policy making contents concern:
    • the role of civil society and NGOs- is there a way of exploiting ICTs to engage civil society in the definition, development and delivery of policy outcomes?;
    • the co-evolution of local and global level policy targets and outcomes. Is there a smarter way of combining global and local resources selectively to deliver better outcomes, possibly more efficiently? Is distributed management and a degree of local autonomy a way to go? If so, how do we design policy processes? -Can we learn from ICT design principles and the distributed mechanisms in biological systems?
  3. From policy making to policy agency: We suggest a view that a policy be considered as an agent. This has a lot of consequences in terms of accounting of the policy actions and evaluation of their impacts. Which currently used approaches should be best exploited? Or which novel computing tools are likely to be required?
  4. Policy learning/education: How can we exploit the introduction of new ICT application to leverage improved (innovative) ways of coordination within and between governmental departments or among governmental departments and research centres?

Important dates

20/05/10: Deadline for submissions

07/06/10: Notification of acceptance
16/09/10: Satellite Meeting

Paper Submission

Papers should have no more than 12 pages, and must be submitted in Word form. ECCS'10 accepts the document format templates proposed by Springer-Verlag for the "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" series. Please use the following template when preparing your paper: Template for Office 2007 Word.

Submissions should be sent by email to Sylvie Occelli or Yasmin Merali.