Note: Due to industrial action by the UCU, a new date will be found for this webinar.
Research seminar:
Self-organising community energy systems and democracy-by-design
In this talk, we will apply the idea of value-sensitive design of socio-technical systems to the operationalisation of community energy systems conceived as a problem of common-pool resource management. As such, we use the ideas of Nobel Prize Winner Elinor Ostrom to specify a self-governing institution for the members of the community to self-organise their own affairs, with respect to their values of sustainability, fairness, and legitimacy. Legitimate self-governance is, we will argue, rooted in civic dignity and meaningful consent, and based on simulation experiments using Ober’s theory of basic democracy, we discuss how this qualitative value can be realised as a “supra functional” requirement through the principles of Democracy-by-Design.
Biography:
Jeremy Pitt is Professor of Intelligent and Self-Organising Systems in the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. His research interests focus on developing formal models of social processes using computational logic, and their application in self-organising multi-agent systems (as published by World Scientific, 2021). This work won two Best Paper awards from the IEEE Conference on Self-Adapting and Self-Organising Systems. He has been an investigator on more than 30 national and European research projects, including the EPSRC Grand Challenge “The Autonomic Grid”. He has a strong interest in the social impact of technology, and since 2018 he has been Editor in Chief of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.
About Energy Futures Lab
Energy Futures Lab is one of seven Global Institutes at Imperial College London. The institute was established to address global energy challenges by identifying and leading new opportunities to serve industry, government and society at large through high quality research, evidence and advocacy for positive change. The institute aims to promote energy innovation and advance systemic solutions for a sustainable energy future by bringing together the science, engineering and policy expertise at Imperial and fostering collaboration with a wide variety of external partners.