e-Governement and e-Knowledge – wider societal use of knowledge maps. A report from the Sevilla workshop

This is an excerpt from the report on the workshop  e-Governement and e-Knowledge – wider societal use of knowledge maps held in Sevilla, Spain, on 16-18 September, 2014.

The Workshop on  eGovernement and eKnowledge – wider societal use of knowledge maps held in Sevilla, Spain on Sept. 16-18, 2014 was fortunately concomitant to a DYSES 2014 conference on “Methodological Advances in Social Sciences: Better comprehension, better decision-making”. The gathering took place at the Facultad de Turismo y Finanzas,  Universidad de Sevilla. The workshop was  a joint venture of  WG 1, 2, 3, and 4   of KnoweScape (TD1210) in order to outline new topics of interest to the community, as in promising  “New trends”.

The topics of the workshop was further defined to include tourism, religion, sport, legal  and financial matters;  the discussed topics were relevant to the analysis of complex social issues and explored possible ways of seeing the issue at hands, sometimes before pursuing work on definite research problems, but based on well acquired big data.  This workshop  provided a platform for cross fertilization of ideas from across various sciences to researchers in social sciences, economy, finance, sport, religion, history, tourism, with bases in standard disciplines, plus with an interest in contributing to public policy.

The  original expectation was to gather  10 or so active participants, but in a networking spirit, the seminar room was opened to anyone interested. At some time, the audience was as large as 30. Most of the attendants were from Europe and in particular the TD1210 Action, but two invited speakers were one from Argentina and one from Japan. Alas, three intended participants had to withdraw due to complicated commitments  appearing within the time of scheduling and getting the  financial approval from the COST office.

Note that there was  an overlap with DYSES through two invited speakers. Serge Galam (Paris Sorbonne) and Noemi Olivera (U. La Plata).  The first was introduced by M. Ausloos (TD1210 MC). S. Galam talked about the effect of stubbornness as an  instrumental key for winning a controversial public debate, when there are two groups having different opinions.  N. Olivera discussed  ways for modeling legal complexity. No need to say that the latter  topics demand further considerations.

In the introduction by  the organizers of the  specific workshop, the  key   themes to be explored were mentioned: 1. understanding and managing research and innovation policy in unusual domains; 2. managing  big data and scalability issues for policy modeling;  3. examining mechanisms and components between complexity science and  the socio-economic  domains; 4. inducing a better comprehension of social features in order to reach a better decision-making process.

We thank M. Squillante (U. Sannio, Benevento, IT), Maria Rosario Gonzalez Rodriguez (U. Seville, Seville, Spain) as local organizer and and the young staff for making our stay enjoyable and fruitful.

Giulia Rotundo (Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, IT)
Dr. Marcel Ausloos (e-Humanities, KNAW, Amsterdam, and GRAPES, Liege, Belgium)

[excerpt made by Andrea Scharnhorst]

The full report can be found in the member section, or be requested from Giulia or Marcel.