Abstract: This chapter is concerned with how social order is established within collectives and the ethical problems that arise when we attempt to create and direct collectives towards particular ends. It draws on our work to establish governance principles for Smart Society—an EU project aiming to engineer Collective Adaptive Systems comprised of people and machines with diverse capabilities and goals that are able to tackle societal grand challenges. We examine how social values are implicated in and transformed by Collective Adaptive Systems, and suggest approaches to multilevel governance design that are responsive to emergent capabilities and sensitive to conflicting perspectives. Finally we illustrate our approach with a worked example of a sensor-based system in a care setting.

Citation: Hartswood, M., Grimpe, B., and Jirotka, M., “Towards the ethical governance of Smart Society”, In Miorandi, D., Maltese, V., Rovatsos, M., Nijholt., A. and Stewart, J. (eds) Social collective intelligence: Combining the powers of humans and machines Springer, 2014.

Download: http://bit.ly/2ijBXZZ

However, to reap these benefits, new thinking is required around the regulation and governance of smart online platforms to ensure balanced interests, and to promote fair and safe forms of participation, particularly relating to the role played by algorithms and data in driving economies of scale.

In order to address the issues this raises, we are organising a policy event on smart online platforms on the 5th of December 2016, at the Scotland Europa Conference Centre in Brussels.

Please visit our page on the event for further details and registration.

Abstract. We introduce the concept of Hybrid Diversity – Aware Collective Adaptive Systems (HDA-CAS) and their proposed role in addressing social problems associated with urban living, health, and financial markets. Our concern is for their responsible development and deployment, and to this end, we suggest perspectives on the governance of social machines and a framework from which to design governance regimes for HDACAS.

Keywords: governance, ethical governance, social machines, collective adaptive systems.

doi: http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/cgc/2013/5114/00/5114a426-abs.html

Citation: Hartswood, M., Grimpe, B., and Jirotka, M., “Towards Ethical Governance of Social Machines,” cgc, pp.426-427, 2013 International Conference on Cloud and Green Computing, 2013.

Download: http://bit.ly/1S3bbns

Social computing broadly refers to computing-supported approaches that facilitate interactions among people and organizations. Social computing has emerged as an exciting multidisciplinary area of research, driven by the wealth of easily available information and the success of online social networks and social media. Social computing applications are characterized by high interactivity among users, user-generated content, and in cases such as Wikipedia, more open governance structures. Much of the recent excitement in social computing is driven by data analytics and business models. What is still lacking, however, is a deeper conceptual understanding of social computing — e.g., relating to its conceptual bases, information and abstractions, design principles, and platforms. This event invites papers that take an explicitly multiagent perspective in addressing these gaps and do so in thought-provoking ways.

The First International Workshop on Multiagent Foundations of Social Computing is Co-located with AAMAS 2014

Important Dates

• Submission: January 22, 2014
• Notification: February 19, 2014
• Camera-ready due: March 5, 2014