Date: 15 – 16 November 2018
Place: Berlin, Germany
Description
Our first workshop gathered a group of people, engaged with current and/or past SwafS projects as well as those with specific knowledge about one or more than one of the RRI key dimensions public engagement, science education, gender, ethics, open access/ open science and governance.
They were complemented by people looking at SwafS from a more holistic point of view such as National Contact points, evaluators or representatives of civil society. Many of the participants represented more than one of these viewpoints. Some participants have had a long-standing experience with science-society relations in the European framework programmes, others were newcomers and just recently engaged with SwafS and RRI in more general and thus had a fresh view on the issue.
The views on RRI exchanged in an opening “positioning” exercise reflected the width and depth of the concept. The basic understanding that RRI is about connecting science and society was shared as well as areas of focus of the participants, which are Diversity, Research Integrity, Science Education, Co-Creation as well as Institutional Change, Relevance and Impact Reflection.
Our Vision of RRI …. Clusters which emerged at the first social lab workshop
When the participants introduced themselves, it became quite clear that many of them have more than one focal area in the field of RRI. Through their work and the different roles many of the participants have in their professional environment, they connect different “spheres” of RRI, which resulted in a quite open and integrating debate on RRI in the workshop.
It became also very clear that SwafS today is much more than a couple of dedicated research (and innovation) activities, as its profile encompasses also a growing number of education activities, education research as well as many applied education projects. These different backgrounds taken together produced a quite novel view on RRI, SwafS and their relevance for the future and have lead to five ambitious pilot actions of the social lab. SwafS-type acitivities at the interface of society and science were regarded by the social lab workshop participants as central for the future.
The view widely shared among participants was that SwafS activities will need to focus even more than today on the transversality, which means that they should build further on engaging with societal partners and involve them in different roles. The case for transversality was also made with respect to better bridging the RRI knowledge base represented by SwafS researchers with other academic fields (the other programmes of H2020 respectively).
Participants:
- Rosa Arias: Fundación Ibercivis, Spain.
- Luisa Fernanda Barbosa Gomez: Studies Centre on Science, Communication and Society – University Pompeu Fabra, Spain.
- Fabio Feudo: Knowledge & Innovation, Italy.
- Michail Giannakos: Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway.
- Agata Gozdzik: Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland; involved in the project Edu-Arctic (H2020 project GA. 710240).
- Maria Hagardt: Vetenskap & Allmänhet, VA, (Public & Science), Sweden.
- Julia Hahn: Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute for Technology Assessment (based in Berlin), Germany.
- Marianne Kinnula: Associate Professor, INTERACT Research Unit, Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Oulu, Finland; involved in the project COMnPLAY SCIENCE
- Alenka Komljanc: Trnovo Kindergarten, Slovenia.
- Natalja Komljanc: National Educational Institute, Slovenia.
- Leane Regan: Hochschule Rhein-Waal, Germany.
- Dorte Riemenschneider: European citizen science association, Museum für Naturkunde – Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Berlin, Germany.
- Stefan Reichmann: Open and Reproducible Research Group, Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science, TU Graz, Austria; involved in the project ON-MERRIT-Observing and Negating Matthew Effects in Responsible Research and Innovation Transition
- Simone Rüfenacht: European citizen science association, Museum für Naturkunde – Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Berlin, Germany.
- Michalis Tzatzanis: National Contact Point SWAFS, Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), Vienna, Austria.
- Meie van Laar: NEMO Science Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
- Magdalena Wailzer: Lab for open innovation in science, Ludwig-Boltzmann-Gesellschaft, Austria.
Participating members of the social lab team: Susanne Buehrer, Stephanie Daimer and Philine Warnke, all Fraunhofer ISI, Karlsruhe, Germany.
