What can we hope to achieve? What do we wish to achieve?

In this two-day workshop we invite scholars to reflect on what is being valued in existing, emerging and envisioned life science knowledge infrastructures. We ask questions like: What visions, hopes and imaginaries guide the construction of such infrastructures? What becomes enacted as valuable through the practices of constructing them? How can questions like these contribute to well-constructed research infrastructures?

The workshop is hosted by the interdisciplinary project Crossover Research: Well-constructed Knowledge Commons, based in philosophy and systems biology. Crossover is engaged in GRECO, an international consortium dedicated to the construction of a digital knowledge infrastructure for the particular domain of gene regulation. This involves work of coordinating existing efforts to extract, structure and store biological information in a standardised digital format, thereby creating an open and interoperable knowledge commons comprehensible both to humans and computers. Such a gene regulation knowledge commons will in turn be part of and adjusted to other digital resources in the life sciences. Thus, the work of initiatives like GRECO taps into nothing less than a vision of a grand, unified life science knowledge commons encompassing all life science data, information and knowledge, supporting the envisioned life science of the future.

The event is Crossover Research’s midterm workshop with ample time for  discussions. We invite workshop participants to engage in discussions on visions and values – the ethos of life science knowledge commons – in the context of the GRECO initiative. Values, understood in a broad sense as denoting or producing the desirable, will be explored at various levels that range from practical considerations like code sharing and shifting of project goals to overarching visions of open science, systems biology and precision medicine. The workshop
is part of an ongoing experiment on ways of practicing Responsible Research and
Innovation (RRI) where we explore “ethos” as an RRI-concept.

Registration:
The workshop is free of charge, but registration is needed due to lunch orders.
Please register here before May 3rd in order to attend.
Contact info: ane.gabrielsen@ntnu.no.