Digital services can be more sustainable by consuming less energy and moving near to their consumers and providers.
An innovative idea to achieve this dual goal, is the notion of sustainable digital micro-communities, i.e., bring digitalization near the people/organization like we did for energy prosumption (think of solar energy produce on our roofs and electricity shared with our electric car).
To develop the notion of sustainable digital micro-communities further, we need to address various inter-disciplinary questions, which are at least technical in nature (how to do it, for which digital services), business-related (what novel business models can attract interest from individuals and organizations) and legal (how we can fairly share such prosumed digital solutions).
In the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area there is a lot of knowledge and interest to explore ideas as small pilots. We want to engage various stakeholders and start developing initial results by creating the SCA-Lab under the umbrella of the VU Digital Sustainability Center (DiSC). We then want to use such preliminary results to develop a research project proposal for funding as the next step.
The first step in this direction is to gather all stakeholders in at least three categories active in various disciplines in the broad spectrum of the intersection and complementarity of sustainability and digitalization: researchers contributing novel results and ideas, students contributing new competencies and skills, and practitioners bringing their experience and the needs for innovation.
In this project, an initiative from the ASI Research Innovation Programme, we organize two meetup events where the above stakeholders start the conversation. On top of that, we monitor the experience in organizing such events and will produce a handbook that will help the organization of such types of events for anybody in the Amsterdam Sustainability Institute (ASI) and DiSC, and beyond.
Furthermore, the SCA-Lab is one pilot for the DiSC “talent hubs” that link our talents (students and researchers) with practitioners. If successful, we hope to continue the initiative and open new hubs in the future.
Click here to view the project poster (presented at the ASI Innovation Meetup)