A journey around Sustainable ICT

SICT2020 aims to bridge the gap between research in ICT and the overarching and inter-related social, environmental and economic questions of our time. Intended for researchers in ICT-related fields, the first edition of this doctoral summer school will critically look at the current state of ICT, challenge its mainstream research agenda and its underlying assumptions, and discuss the role(s) ICT researchers can play to build a sustainable and desirable future in a limited world.

The program of the doctoral summer school has been built to offer a multi-disciplinary, holistic and system-view approach to sustainable ICT. From the geophysics and geopolitics of ICT raw materials extraction to sustainable and social applications of ICT in developing regions, from the economics of ICT to the energy consumption of internet data traffic, SICT2020 hopes to  provide attendees with a broad yet coherent view of the current ICT ecosystem throughtalks, workshops, collective reflections sessions, hands-on sessions, expert panels and more!

This project does not aim at introducing specific and highly technical content. Instead, SICT2020 wants participants to take a step back from narrow and very specific system in order to zoom-out over the entire ICT life-cycle. While enabling tremendous possibilities, ICT comes together with a burden that has to be quantified, discussed and questioned. Universities exist for the long term : they have a critical role to play on long-term thinking and are responsible for growing the seeds of tomorrow. It is of decisive importance that values governing Universities differ from those dominating the for-profit world.

This is in this context that SICT2020 has been created. Some researchers and professors from the UCLouvain/ICTEAM (Science & Technology) were concerned about the socioenvironmental impacts of technology as much as global trend pushing towards more performances
at the expense of weakened resilience. By wondering how people with different backgrounds could be gathered to question ICT impacts from several perspectives, they came up with the SICT2020 project. Indeed, UCLouvain as many other Universities bring many research fields together in one place. Improving interactions between these different fields seemed an interesting way to stimulate research on technology for needs and not for desires allowing also to better sort between what we could do and what we want to do. In order to encourage people with different skills to share with each others, interactive social workshops ans collective intelligence modules are in place with ICT as common theme.