World Association of Young Scientists

The International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) will hold their 2010 Conference themed "Advancing Sustainability in a Time of Crisis" on August 22 - 25, 2010, in the twin cities of Oldenburg & Bremen in Northern Germany.

Amongst the proposed sessions is one tentatively entitled "ICT and sustainability", which not only fits my interests but also offers an unusually warm welcome to newcomers to the field: "You may never have considered attending an ecological economics conference. But now the time has come to try it."

The deadline for submissions being tomorrow, I just submitted the following abstract for a contribution to this session:

Scientific research as a whole is a large-scale collaborative effort to create, structure and maintain knowledge and to update it as new insights arise. However, the platforms on which the collaboration takes places - chiefly grant proposals, data records, conference contributions and printed publications - are often not publicly accessible (not even for other researchers) and generally neither updatable nor efficiently cross-linked, thus leading to a waste of natural and human resources. In this article, the potential to reduce this amount of waste will be explored by comparing central aspects of science with design features of existing wikis - i.e. online platforms designed to structure, maintain and update a set of interlinked knowledge elements - and by highlighting the sociocultural barriers preventing the wider adoption of such large-scale collaborative schemes that may well render scientific research more sustainable than it currently is. To emphasize the feasibility of the proposed approach, this conference contribution will itself be drafted in public, with all relevant information being made available via http://ways.org/topics/isee2010sustainablescience . All researchers with an interest in the topic are invited to join in.

Starting with this post, I will thus tag all posts related to this conference session with the tag "ISEE-2010-sustainable-science", such that they will be aggregated via the link provided in the abstract.