Designing Peace Technology for Fun and Profit, by Pr. Nelson- Stanford University

Description

***AGENDA*** Talk 1: Designing Peace Technology for Fun and Profit 14:00--15:10 Presentation 15:10--15:40 Q&A Overview: Recent advances make it possible to build technologies that consistently elicit positive social behaviors between people. We can now target this technology to any specific prosocial behavior, between any two individuals, groups, or even species. Moreover, we can now very rapidly design, validate, fail-test, deploy, optimize, and scale these technologies, in a systematic, research-based manner somewhat analogous to how the International Civil Aviation Organization has consistently improved aviation performance and safety. What is of particular interest is that these technologies inherently generate and distribute new value and new wealth. There are companies already generating millions of euros of annual new revenues for the cities they serve, while creating new jobs and shareholder wealth, and generating nice profits in the process. In this talk we will first examine the implicit and traditional "Actor" theory of conflict, where the focus on defending "us" from "them" has led to our current suite of destructive defense technologies, and contrast it with an alternative "Action" theory of conflict that leads to entirely new kinds of defense technologies, whose focus is to defend all of us, from violence itself. We will then take a quick tour of the Peace Technology design framework, the methods, and the process, as well as the both the positive potentials and dangers of these technologies. We will conclude with some actual examples "from the wild" of companies, NGOs, and movements deploying these technologies, and the impact they are having. Break: 15:40--16:00 Talk 2: UNamur / Stanford Peace Innovation collaboration possibilities 16:00--17:15 presentation 17:15--18:00 Q&A Overview: Stanford Peace Innovation Lab is scaling its work and impact by creating duplicate (actually improved--we want to learn from our partners!) Peace Innovation Labs with partner universities in partner cities around the world. We are doing this to create a unique network of innovation research facilities working with identical protocols on identical challenges with identical approaches. The objective is to create a large N systematic study of the innovation process itself, that is global and ongoing, with the initial innovation subject of study being the creation of a new defense industry (against violent conflict itself). To this end, our City Partner Labs accomplish five functions: They teach our specific method of open, collaborative innovation driven by community co-design. They incubate new peace ventures every quarter, that deliver peace as a service industry, for profit, to the community, while creating local economic development and employment, and positive social impact. They accelerate these outcomes and ventures by quickly identifying in a systematic way what doesn't work, across the whole network, and focusing on testing many variations of what does work as quickly as possible. They function as a design observatory, researching the innovation process itself, using a systematic participatory action research framework. They also quickly validate any initial results by running randomized controlled field trials of any promising interventions across the entire partner lab network. They provide a new kind of rapid, agile, lean funding, for both innovation research, and sustainable startup funding for new local enterprises, job creation, and economic development. We would be very interested in collaborating with UNamur in this regard, so in this talk we will explore an overview of the labs, the lab network, and the process of starting up a partner lab. We will conclude with a discussion of next steps we can take and move on to Q&A.

Period	28 Mar 2014
Event type	Scientific committee
Location	Namur, BelgiumShow on map