SaSSO: Sustainable and Scalable Self-Organisation


@ACSOS'2023

This workshop connects with several ACSOS main track themes, but also offers a distinctive and complementary forum for research on sustainability, scalability and self-organisation, particularly in relation to the operationalisation of Socio-Technical Systems and issues of public interest, polycentricity, collective action and societal impact. These contrasting themes of inter-related research are as follows:

  • Sustainability of Self-Organisation & Self-Organisation for Sustainability: A drift from decentralised to centralised governance has often been observed in socio-technical systems to address the problem of sustainability. Given the myriad of known and unknown parameters and the spectrum of complexity and dynamics, we see that both centralised and decentralised governance has its advantages and disadvantages, but it is possible, with some introspection and (restricted) freedom for self-modification, to drift or shift between the two. The critical requirements are the ability to shift along the spectrum between the two as circumstances require, the ability to shift back and not get stuck in either of the two extreme attractors, and the ability to make, recognise, and correct mistakes. Trial and error in self-adaptive cybernetic systems is the essence of certain sustainability problems when there is no expertise to solve the problem, so a community must learn to self-organise on the fly. Unfortunately, with one-shot wicked problems such as sustainability, the consequences of error are potentially catastrophic.

  • Scalability of Self-Organisation & Self-Organisation for Scalability: As the size and longevity of an organisation increases or decreases, absolute centralisation brings certain disadvantages: for example it can undermine principles of self-determination, rights to self-organise, and willingness to take responsibility of initiative. This removes ‘edge’ benefits such as localisation, rapid and appropriate response to local environmental conditions, and the diversity that promotes resilience. Certain processes that might have been effective at small scale (like word-of-mouth, and monitoring (compliance checking)) are no longer effective at larger scales. On the other hand, from a complex systems perspective, decentralisation may make it more difficult, or more lengthy, to coordinate in order to achieve macro-level outcomes, i.e. the coordination of micro-level behaviour through meso-level mechanisms which result in the creation of global structures or achievement of high-level goals by intention or design.

Programme

TBD

Invited Speaker

Heather Love (University of Waterloo, Canada)

Paper Submission

Authors are invited to submit full workshop papers up to 6 pages as well as extended abstracts up to 2 pages (containing, new and wacky ideas, work in progress, or work published elsewhere) in the ACSOS paper formatting guidelines. Submissions to the workshop are free of change and they are required to be formatted according to the standard IEEE Computer Society Press proceedings style guide. Papers are submitted electronically in PDF format through the SASSO 2023 conference management system via EasyChair following this link.
For more details about ACSOS, see here.

Venue

Venue: Second Student Centre, York University
Mode: In person
For more details about the venue, see here.

Important Dates

  • June 23rd: deadline for paper submission
  • July 15th: acceptance/rejection
  • August 5th: final copy (as per ACSOS main track)

Programme Committee



Organisers

Ada Diaconescu

Departement Informatique & Reseaux
Telecom Paris, LTCI, IP Paris
ada.diaconescu@telecom-paris.fr

Peter Lewis

Business and Information Technology
Ontario Tech University
peter.lewis@ontariotechu.ca

Jeremy Pitt

Dept. of Electrical & Electronic Engineering
Imperial College London
j.pitt@imperial.ac.uk



Workshop Delivery and Management

Asimina Mertzani

Dept. of Electrical & Electronic Engineering
Imperial College London
asimina.mertzani20@imperial.ac.uk

Aishwaryaprajna

Business and Information Technology
Ontario Tech University
aishwaryaprajna@ontariotechu.ca