Models are increasingly being used to address problems over different scales, hierarchies, and policy domains to develop a so-called ‘global systems science’. Such models—whether heuristic, analytical, or computational—are approximations tailored to specific contexts and questions. To be useful they must be understood, particularly by decision-makers, but also by society at large and this typically only takes place through the lens of a narrative. Indeed decision-makers often require narratives of policy issues to be prepared for them within a short time-scale.

Model outputs can provide the backbone of a narrative for a particular scenario or policy option. This is then clothed in different forms of expression, argument and storytelling. There is currently insufficient understanding into how such narratives can be constructed in such a way as to also clearly communicate the limitations and assumptions built into that model. We need to explore how to couple models of globally connected systems with narratives in culturally appropriate forms in order to offer insight and options that are generated by the models themselves.

To achieve this coupling, we need a better understanding of the emergence of narratives through social interactions, particularly in the face of a changing media landscape, facilitated by new and ubiquitous digital communication. This is because, as well as being formed directly from a scientific model, narratives can emerge through social interaction. The scientific backbone of a narrative can often be entirely overwhelmed or suppressed by narratives based on social and cultural identity. How can stories, games and art, perhaps embedded in digital communication, be used to bridge the gap between scientific models, policy-makers and citizens? Detecting socially emerging narratives from social media data may lead to the prediction of social trends and enable decision-makers to gauge responses to different policy options on short time-scales.

This workshop will consider how narratives fit into the developing research agenda focused on the use of ICT and models for global policy decisions, with the aim being to identify the crucial research questions for narratives in global systems science from the perspective of both global policy challenges and also ICT.

Workshop format

The first session will begin with an introduction to the workshop. This introduction will comprise of some framing talks by Steven Bishop, Julian Hunt (via video recording) and Ilan Chabay. During these introductory comments, a series of questions (see below) will be introduced, which aim to address the research area to be discussed during the workshop at a relatively high conceptual level. These will be circulated among participants beforehand. The workshop participants will be invited to respond to these questions.

The workshop will firstly discuss whether these questions are appropriate or whether they need to be re-framed. It will be considered whether or not these questions are sufficient, necessary, and specific for the research topic in the context of a science of global systems.

The workshops will then proceed with an open discussion to be chaired by Ilan and Steven, during which each question will be addressed in turn, and specific research challenges that fall under each of the questions will be determined. A list of these research challenges will be recorded during the discussions and displayed on the projector. These will form the basis of the subsequent scientific report.

A provisional agenda is shown below:

Thursday 8^th November 17.00 – 19.00

17.00 Introductory talks and questions (Steven Bishop, Julian Hunt, Ilan Chabay)

17.30 Response by participants

18.00 Discussion on suitability of proposed questions

18.50 Agreement on questions

Friday 9^th November 14.30 – 16.30

Discussion of each question in turn, specifying specific research challenges.

Proposed Research Questions

The questions we initially pose are outlined below:

What are the links between models and scenarios of Global Systems Science and the narratives derived from them, as expressed in different forms, cultures and communities? How can ICT help express such narratives?

How might a useful public understanding, including by policy-makers and corporate leaders, of Global Systems Science, via associated narratives, be developed to more effectively support decision-making?

How can ICT be used to assess the impact of a narrative on attitudes and collective behaviour change in diverse communities and across spatial and temporal scales?

How might digital methods (models, ICT) and their users and analogue methods (performance, non-digital 2 and 3 dimensional art) and their users interact and collaborate in creating narratives in order to initiate positive social change?

1st Open GSS Conference

City Systems Workshops

November 8, 2012 open-gss 3 Comments

Chair: Sander van der Leeuw, Arizona State University

Session 1: Thursday 8^th November 15.15 – 16.45:

General: this set of three sessions is intended to generate questions and new ideas for future research. I therefore suggest that after a very quick round of introductions and two very brief introductory statements for each session(that I will invite personally), we devote all our time to discussion.

In order to facilitate that, I would like to receive from anyone who is so inclined, tentative answers to the ‘What’ and ‘How’ questions formulated for each session. That will greatly help me steer the sessions to a productive result.

Main questions

What drives the seemingly inexorable growth of urban systems?
What might level off this growth?
What would a generalizable theory of urban systems look like?

How would we collect, and deal with, the data?
How could we model it?
How could we derive scenarios from the models?
How might such a model serve to improve decision-making?

Contributors / participants:

Luis Bettencourt. Ricardo Herranz, Denise Pumain, Jose Javier Ramasco, Moritz Remig, Wanglin Yan, Maxi San Miguel, Alan Wilson, Michel Morvan, David Lane

Session 2: Friday, 9^th November 2012, 14.30 – 16.30:

Main questions:

What would a sustainable city look like?
What would make urban systems more sustainable?
What are the trade-offs that would need to be dealt with?
What kinds of institutional change would this require?
What kinds of policies would need to be put in place?

How could we mobilize society to that effect?
How could ICT play a role in this process?
How could ICT create a synthesis between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’?

Contributors / participants:

Vittorio Loretto, David Lane, Michel Morvan, Denise Pumain, Maxi San Miguel, Alan Wilson, Luis Bettencourt. Ricardo Herranz, Jose Javier Ramasco, Moritz Remig, Wanglin Yan

Session 3: Saturday November 10th, 9.30 – 10.30

Chairs: Carlo Jaeger and Sander van der Leeuw

This workshop will be oriented to identify and discuss common questions between the different workshops following the insights gained from the previous discussions. So the topics will be adapted to the results of the prior days.

Contributors/participants:

Anyone of the above (and the Global Systems Science sessions) that is still present and interested

1st Open GSS Conference

Climate Resilience Workshops

November 8, 2012 open-gss 1 Comment

Two Workshops on Global Systems Science and Sustainability Challenges

Chair: Diana Mangalagiu

The understanding and governance of global systems – social, economic and ecological (socio-eco-eco) – raises questions about systemic risks and multi-scalar resilience. This requires new systemic perspectives in science and policy and the development of models and analyses that span the whole range of scales and domains. Global Systems Science (GSS) should find novel responses to the unsustainable trends of global socio-eco-eco systems by developing a new set of approaches to system modeling and governance. GSS should explore the role of ICT in linking various global systems, in fostering global learning communities and awareness, and developing new methodologies and decision support systems for global governance. The role of ICT here is twofold: bring the necessary knowledge (data on the state of the world, models, and data on societal and individual behaviors) and provide a means for new forms of societal organization to better cope and anticipate (systemic and emergent) risks.

In this workshop, we look into the global sustainability challenges through two different perspectives: 1/ from the challenge of extreme events and 2/ through the link between global climate policy and the financial crisis and global markets.

1/ Global sustainability and the challenge of extreme events

Traditionally, the main sources of risks – hazard, exposure and vulnerability to extreme events – tend to be dealt with separately. We will inquire how to better integrate risk management and governance and build pathways towards more resilient global interconnected societies.

Questions we would like to address include (but are not limited to):

What is unique of global systems risks and the resilience of global systems (functioning)?
What the challenges of extreme events mean for the reconceptualization of risk and resilience of global systems?
How can our current knowledge support change processes? What is needed in order to reduce risks and better manage disasters?
How to deal with the multi-scalar sources of instability in global systems?
How to tackle the multi-dimensional aspects of disasters (natural disaster, pandemic etc.)?
How to combine adaptability with transformability of systems? How to implement ‘extreme adaptation policies’? How to harness transformability?
How can resilience to disasters be increased in a time of global economic crises, decreasing resource availability at local, national and international levels? How can more be achieved with less?
What is the role of data (e.g. data through sensors, in a smart city context)?
How to deal with the cognitive and empowerment issues at the core of global challenges? What is the role of social media in this process?
- E.g., the global environmental change and sustainability issues have been framed as a collective problem rather than an individual one. Is there a need to bring it back to the individual level and if yes, how?
- E.g., Individual and collective risk perceptions influence the allocation of resources and investment decisions. How models can better take such aspects into account?

What role can ICT play in?
- Preventing disasters: E.g. Early warning systems; learning from previous disasters; disaster-related citizen participation; use of social media in mobilizing and activating information thus empowering citizens and help build resilient communities;
- Response times to disasters: E.g. Search and rescue technology and expertise; improvement of disaster investigation systems using smart phones, GPS, sensors, social media for gathering valuable information in real-time (providing situational updates, geo-location information, situation awareness etc.);
- Disaster recovery: E.g. Coordination of National Disaster Management Systems; public health and telemedicine during disaster recovery.

2/ The link between global climate policy and the financial crisis and global markets perspective

Today there is compelling evidence that at the heart of the global financial crisis there is a capital crisis from the energy flows imbalance (two third of global imbalances are due to energy). This raises the questions of the sustainability of a globalized open financial system dependent on fossil fuel and of its consequences in terms of systemic issues. A possible response is to tackle jointly the governance of energy systems – in which the climate can be thought an unwanted negative effect of its malfunctioning – with the governance of information systems, in which the financial systems are also part. Thus reforming climate and financial issues could be thought as two key pillars in the move toward an integrated strategy for a green transformation. A green transformation strategy could offer the opportunity to address the current financial and economic crisis by turning sufficient amounts of financial capital into entrepreneurial investment. Transforming the cities, businesses, energy systems and homes jointly with making the best use of information systems, including ICT and knowledge about transparency and governance of monetary flows so as to increase welfare while reducing damages to the environment is great opportunity and a tremendous challenge at the same time. Moreover, given the scale of the finance required, combined with tightening fiscal constraints in most industrialized countries, the challenge to leverage significant investment is.

Questions we would like to address include (but are not limited to):

What type of science for what type of world? That is, it does not make sense to answer what type of science we want if we don’t know or make explicitly what type of world we want.
Do we want a GSS to do the same as today? Or do we want a GSS for a different type of society(ies)? Is GSS as we can conceive of it today possible without the ICT tools at our disposal?
How can GSS help addressing systemic risk, finance and the sustainability challenges together?
How to bring into focus the long-term nature of both sustainability issues and long term-finance needed?
How to tackle the issue of risk transfer from private to public sector (there are similarities in this respect between the financial crisis issues and the sustainability issues)? How can data and models of risk help in better regulation?
How the broadening scope of information available for decision-making changes our conception of money and its role in how society functions? How changing the nature of information can change the nature of decision-making? Money is information but we know the system is fundamentally flawed and our balance sheet is broken – blind to a wide range of issues that matter greatly in terms of risk matrix that went global and multi-scalar with long supply chains and shadow (i.e., invisible) dependencies.
What role ICT plays in a differentiated globalization? As ICT allows the emergence of different forms of local economies, it may push us in the direction of a new type of globalization with a re-evaluation of the nature, risks and opportunities in managing supply chains. Can ICT help us to rebalance supply chains based on their length, risks and social payoffs they bring by making visible and bringing into the decision making new dimensions reflecting forms of social capital invisible otherwise?
How to use ICT to provide opportunities for public engagement, political participation, more sustainable consumption and altogether societal change?

1st Open GSS Conference, Global Systems Science

Workshops on Global Markets

November 7, 2012 Antoine Mandel 6 Comments

Two small workshops on global markets and sustainability

Objects of governance have turned into parts of a globally interconnected system whose sustainability is at risk. This calls for a « global systems science», which could on the one hand support governance and, on the other hand, explicit how power and influence are transmitted in these interconnected systems. The aim of this workshop is to investigate how those two issues materialize in the economic realm: new questions and challenges economic policy addresses to science and new questions and challenges science faces when investigating economic policy and decision making in a globalized market environment.

Middle-term issues, whose time-span approximately coincides with the average five years electoral mandate, might possibly be dealt with by neo-classical social science: policy-makers maximize their probability of being reelected by putting in place policies whose efficiency (number of jobs created or quantity of pollution avoided) can be assessed “all other things being equal” using computable general equilibrium models. Questions about sustainability are of a different kind, they are not asked “ceteris paribus” as they rely on endogenous dynamics and challenge the very existence of the system under investigation.

Sustainability mainly refers to the long-term balance between economic development and environmental conservation but also materializes as problems with very short time-horizons such as the 2011 earthquake in Japan, the failure of Lehman brothers, or the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone. Both for short and long-term issues, decision-makers turn to science with very specific as well with very general questions, with micro and macro problems. As far as environmental change is concerned, questions range from “How to reproduce locally an industrial symbiosis like this of Kalundborg ?” to “How to move to a competitive low carbon economy in 2050 ?” Turning to the financial realm, one might wonder whether (or until when) the global financial system was sustainable or if it can today provide the 30 billions euros Greece needs by 2020 to upgrade its energy system[1] ?

It is doubtful that a single model might address those issues. Even if one embeds all existing heterodoxies, very few of the policy-relevant questions of the time can be answered. Among the challenges to be faced in order to overcome this failure are the disaggregation and the extension to non-equilibrium phenomena of economic models and the exploitation of the wealth of data at hands thanks to the IT revolution.

The burgeoning mind of economists has managed to develop a wide taxonomy of models (e.g general equilibrium, CAPM, Bertrand or Cournot competition, principal-agent) under the, most often ad-hoc, constraint of only considering equilibrium situations. There is little doubt that this taxonomy can be extended if the economist toolbox is enriched by non-equilibrium models inspired by harder sciences. How to foster this process ? For example how can econophysics and agent-based models become mainstream within the economic profession ? Which standards can be established to better communicate about models that aren’t always analytically tractable ?

New classes of models and new tools are also required to exploit the wealth of data at hands thanks to the IT revolution. Statistical institutes produce a limited and rather immutable class of indicators with a certain lag. Now, most if not all the data collected by statistical institutes during census operations are in fact readily available in some electronic form and circulating at extremely high speed on the internet. What are ethical and methodological issues posed by “big data” ? Are current models up to the challenge of parsing if not explaining the material ?

Finally, as a counterpart to the questions posed by policy, shouldn’t global systems science come with series of interrogations about power and governance in the globalized economy ? With markets’ liberalization and globalization, nation states seem to have lost part of the influence and the power they had on the economy. Where has this power gone ? Can citizens be offered better maps of the corporate governance network, the financial system or the international trade network ? Aren’t such maps necessary to embed in the democratic process the redrawing of boundaries between the public and the private spheres, the public and the private sectors, communities and cities, membership and governance ?

Two series of questions

Global Markets I : Thursday, 8th November 2012, 15.15 -16.45

– What is unique about our system of globally interconnected markets that materializes itself in this massive flow of data ? i.e “Big data” is the symptom of what ?

– How can this data be used to better understand the system which generates it?

– How can models parse and/or explain this “big data” ?

– What is specific to models of the global economic system ?

– For example, does increasing connectivity lead to increasing fragility, what transpires in models as volatile or even chaotic behavior ?

Global Markets II: Friday, 9th November 2012, 10.30 -12.30:

–How can models using « big data » be more useful than existing ones for policy purposes ?

– What kind of models can be used for « emergency » economic and financial management ? By who and how ?

-What kind of models can be used for long-term issues such as strategic planning or scenario generation ? By who and how ?

– What kind of models do we need to better manage the transition to a green economy ?

-How can models improve public understanding of the dynamics of global systems ?

What would be the impact of on governance ?

[1] see http://www.investingreece.gov.gr/default.asp?pid=36&sectorID=38&la=1

1st Open GSS Conference, General

‘Global Systems Science’ Conference (Ralph Dum)

November 7, 2012 Ralph Dum Leave a comment

The conference will help ‘Global Systems Science’ to develop an agenda of action both in research (in ICT and beyond) and in policy (as a coordinating concept). GSS has as ambition to unite different strands of research and policies trying to cope with global challenges. The attached document is an attempt to do so, based on preceding consultations. The conference will ideally help to evolve and expand this preliminary document. (Ralph Dum)

Towards a ‘Global Systems Science’ : how this conference should contribute