ITAS-News

A project to monitor European technology assessment activities under the leadership of ITAS has recently been launched by the European Science and Technology Observatory (ESTO) network. The project is one of three to monitor EU countries' technology and future-oriented activities. The other two are on technology forecasting, being managed by the VDI Future Technologies division in Düsseldorf, and foresight, being managed by CEST (Centre for Exploitation of Science and Technology, London) and OST (Observatoire des Sciences et des Techniques, Paris).

The project on technology assessment involves a core group of eight institutions from seven countries and aims to track the activities of the most important institutions and programmes for technology assessment in Europe and elsewhere. Based on the results of this tracking activity, topics of special interest will be selected for in-depth analysis by experts. Such topics could be technologies of particular interest, societal issues involving the application of technology, or such aspects as ethics or public participation in decision-making on science and technology related matters. Among the goals of the project are:

• To identify common conclusions from this existing research and to identify areas of uncertainty or controversy regarding the conclusions of this work, in particular with respect to the European dimension of the issue in question. 
• To analyse possible reasons for difference in conclusions, e.g. the importance of cultural factors, variety of approaches and methods, country- specific focus on specific concerns. 
• While the project will not deal with purely theoretical issues, it will in some cases focus on methods and approaches to examine their suitability for achieving certain goals or in certain decision-making contexts, e.g. the participation of stakeholders and other important actors. 
• The work on these analyses may frequently generate ideas for additional research to close gaps in the knowledge, particularly but not exclusively on the European dimension. 
• The work on specific topics could lead eventually to the emergence of thematic networks working on the specific topic rather than technology assessment per se.

The results of work will be published on a web-site, which will probably also provide information on the other two monitoring activities. The coordinates of this web-site will be announced in a subsequent issue of "TA-Datenbank-Nachrichten".

The European Science and Technology Observatory
( http://esto.jrc.es/)
is a network of institutions with experience in the field of technological assessment at the national level and was formally constituted by the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies
(Sevilla, http://www.jrc.es/),
which belongs to the European Commission's Joint Research Centre.

Contact:

Ingrid von Berg, Dr. Michael Rader
Institut für Technikfolgenabschätzung und Systemanalyse (ITAS)
Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)
Postfach 3640, 76021 Karlsruhe