UCD Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation

Co-organised by the IIEA and Donncha Kavanagh (College of Business), Tadhg O’Mahony (School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy) and Demort O’Doherty. We’re now running a series of events on Finland’s Futures Ecosystem in conjunction with the IIEA and with the support of Finland’s Embassy in Ireland and Ireland’s Embassy in Finland.

A joint initiative involving Prof. Dermot O’Doherty, Prof. Donncha Kavanagh, and Tadhg O’Mahony, Assistant Professor in Environmental Policy in UCD and Adjunct Professor in transformative sustainable futures at the Finland Futures Research Centre at Turku School of Economics. An address and discussion: Joakim Strand Minister for European Affairs and Ownership Steering of Finland. Wednesday, 17 September 2025 at 9.30a.m.

Finland’s Futures Ecosystem in a European Context

To register to attend this event in person only, please follow this Eventbrite link and enter your details: https://joakim-strand.eventbrite.ie To register to attend this event online only, please follow this Zoom link and enter your details: https://iiea.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Y9gIIzJkRVOafhbNUdiLoQ   In his address to the IIEA on Finland's Futures Ecosystem in a European Context, Minister Joakim Strand will draw on tools of strategic foresight to elicit Finland's vision for future-proofing Europe and increasing its presence in the EU Institutions. He will highlight Finland’s EU strategic policy objectives of strengthening Europe's democracy; boosting its resilience to malign foreign influence by strengthening media literacy; and improving comprehensive security.  Minister for European Affairs and Ownership Steering of Finland Joakim Strand is responsible for matters related to the European Union within the Prime Minister's Office that are not covered by the Prime Minister, including representing Finland in the EU General Affairs Council. He is also responsible for state ownership steering policy. Minister Strand is serving his third term as a Member of Parliament from the Vaasa constituency, where he was first elected in 2015. He has served as the Chair of the Committee for the Future and the Intelligence Oversight Committee, and as a member of the Commerce Committee and the Defence Committee, among others. Minister Strand has also worked as the Chair of the City Council of his hometown, Vaasa, the Chair of the Regional Assembly of Ostrobothnia, the Chair of the Kvarken Council, and the Chair of the Board of two energy companies. He holds a Master of Laws and a Master of Science in Economics and Business Administration. This event will be followed by a series of two webinars later this autumn, co-organised with UCD’s Centre for Innovation, Technology and Organisation and with the support of the Embassy of Finland and the Department of Foreign Affairs. The webinars will take a closer look at Finland’s Futures ecosystems and methodologies, and potential lessons for Ireland. Further details to follow.

A Seminar by Quinn DuPont titled “Making New Money: How autonomous communities produce and govern cryptocurrencies.”

Location: Quinn-2-Q233 Quinn Building (1) [Zoom Rooms Device]
Recorded on 03/10/2025 - 4pm IST (Irish Standard Time) UTC/GMT +1 hour.
Hosted by: Donncha Kavanagh and Paul Dylan-Ennis

A Seminar by Quinn DuPont titled “Making New Money: How autonomous communities produce and govern cryptocurrencies.”

Decentralized cryptocurrencies are upending the foundations of economic power, challenging centuries of state and bank control over money. This research critically examines the rise of digital wildcat banking and its profound implications for economic sovereignty. Leveraging digital forensics, data science, and OSINT, this work reveals who actually produces and governs cryptocurrencies—and how their collective labor reshapes value and risk. It explores the forces behind decentralized money, the vulnerabilities these systems introduce, and the future role of state-issued currencies in an era of rapid monetary transformation.

Reflecting on the project Quinn notes:
"I've been working on this for well over a year now, and while it is still in development, the basic outline is complete. I make some pretty provocative claims, like arguing that global forces first emerging in the 1970s lead us inexorably to this point where the labour required to produce and govern new money has become involuted.  It is a unique project that reveals how new money is made and details the implications for banks, nation states, and society. I also have some fun stories to share, like my effort to vampire attack Trump's WLFI token or my reverse engineering of the FBI's Operation Token Mirrors."

This seminar will be held in-person and via video link. The session will be recorded for future release on the CITO podcast. We hope you will join us for this timely and important discussion.

n.b. 1 Involution; the theory from Clifford Geertz where, in the original context, rice production becomes internally competitive and the processes require more labour without an increase in output - analogous to this story of technological development and precarious technological labour. I argue that the operational infrastructure of crypto expands to require more labour, despite no correlated increase in output. Thus, crypto overtakes national currencies not by meeting a market demand, but by accommodating excess labour supply.

Gaming the System: the enabling aspects of regulation and competition as drivers of business opportunity for the games sector.

Panel 2 – Gaming the System: the enabling aspects of regulation and competition as drivers of business opportunity for the games sector.

Chair: Conn Holohan, Director Centre for Creative Technologies, University of Galway

·       Ambre Nicolle: Platform competition and strategic trade-offs for complementors: Heterogeneous reactions to the entry of a new platform

·       Alexey Rusakov: First-party complements and value in platform markets

·       Maria O’Brien: Ireland’s new Digital Games Tax Credit: the role of the state in supporting the games industry

Notes, extra questions, and further reading:

With thanks to the College of Business, Public Policy & Law for the funds to support this event. The event is also part-funded by the College of Business, Public Policy & Law research fund.

Supported by:

·       The University of Galway College (link)

·       College of Business Public Policy and Law (link), 

·       WRAP - developing a sustainable Film, Television Drama, Animation, & Games sector in the West of Ireland (link)

·       NEXUS Games Conference - by GamerFest (link)

·       IMIRT - The Irish Game Makers organization representing game developers in the Republic of Ireland (link)

·       ARDÁN - talent development in Film, TV, Games and Amination.

Thanks to all our presenters, participants, attendees and to the staff in the University of Galway for support including Mary O’Malley, Louise Monahan and Sergei Medvedev. Particular thanks to Professor Geraint Howells, Professor Martin Hogg and Professor Alma McCarthy for trusting this event to us and for all the support.

Saving the Game: philosophical, existential and technical issues, shaping the intersection of games and la

Panel 3 – Saving the Game: philosophical, existential and technical issues, shaping the intersection of games and law

Chair: Maria O’Brien

•       Kieran Nolan: Material and Cultural Preservation of Legacy Video Game Platforms

•       Abby Rekas & Matt Voigts: Saving the Game

Notes, extra questions, and further reading:

With thanks to the College of Business, Public Policy & Law for the funds to support this event. The event is also part-funded by the College of Business, Public Policy & Law research fund.

Supported by:

·       The University of Galway College (link)

·       College of Business Public Policy and Law (link), 

·       WRAP - developing a sustainable Film, Television Drama, Animation, & Games sector in the West of Ireland (link)

·       NEXUS Games Conference - by GamerFest (link)

·       IMIRT - The Irish Game Makers organization representing game developers in the Republic of Ireland (link)

·       ARDÁN - talent development in Film, TV, Games and Amination.

Thanks to all our presenters, participants, attendees and to the staff in the University of Galway for support including Mary O’Malley, Louise Monahan and Sergei Medvedev. Particular thanks to Professor Geraint Howells, Professor Martin Hogg and Professor Alma McCarthy for trusting this event to us and for all the support.

The following is the second recording from the Music and Virtual Worlds Workshop held on the 20th of June, 2024

The following is the second part of the Music and Virtual Worlds Workshop held on the 20th of June, 2024 – where invited guest, Emeritus Professor Karamjit Gill, co-founder and editor of the journal AI & Society reflected on his personal academic habitus; How he felt called to take action and respond to the question: How do you bring people together to help others, to make change and create social value through technology, without money, without power, without fame, and when the human-technological-systems to do this are yet to be invented?

This episode’s cover art includes a photo of Liam Bannon, Satinder Gill, and Karamjit Gill taken at UHL. The lower picture is a snapshot from the panel discussion in the Irish Chamber Orchestra Building, University of Limerick. From left to right:Gerry Keenan, Simon Thompson, Andrew Kaung, Martin Cunneen, Karamjit Gill, Cathriona Murphy, Amanda Clifford and Satinder Gill.  Credit: Allen Higgins, 20th June 2024.

The following is a recording from the Music and Virtual Worlds Workshop held on the 20th of June, 2024 - a working event of the XTREME project, a research projected funded by the European Union.

The workshop was a preliminary activity of the XTREME project; which stands for “’miXed Reality Environment for IMmersive Experience’ of Art and Culture”.

The goal of the project being to research new applications at the intersection between augmention technology and human kinaesthetic being. For example, by experimenting with embodied musical-artistic performance uniting AR/VR and AI, for therapeutic and other forms of human involvement.

The panel included:

• Martin Cunneen, from the Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick and local PI for XTREME.
• Amanda Clifford, Physiotherapist, from the School of Allied Health, University of Limerick
• Satinder Gill, from the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Music and Science
• Emeritus Professor Karamjit Gill from University of Brighton and Editor of the journal AI & Society
• Cathriona Murphy,
• Gerry Keenan, 
• And Simon Thompson from the Irish Chamber Orchestra and the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance.
• And Andrew Kaung a researcher on the XTREME project.

The goal for the workshop was to explain the scope of XTREME and its inspiration in ideas surrounding the blend of music, dance, physical and virtual embodiment. The local partners gathered to meet and introduce themselves, their motivations and research interests. 

Professors Karamjit Gill and Liam Bannon had planned to prompt a dialogue centred on the role of technology shaping human society and implications for computer mediated immersive experiences. Unfortunately, due to illness Liam was unable to attend on the day and so Karamjit offered a personal reflection on his own academic habilitation and storied career, which we present in the second episode/recording of this event.

STS Community Making with Cassidy R. Sugimoto and Rob Kitchin

This episode is a recording of the keynote at the STS Ireland unconference of 25 June 2024.

Welcome by Kalpana Shankar. Talks by Cassidy R. Sugimoto and Rob Kitchin

The unconference was held at the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI), St Stephen’s Green South, Dublin.

Professor Cassidy R. Sugimoto, chair of the School of Public Policy at Georgia Institute of Technology and Professor Rob Kitchin from the Social Sciences Institute at Maynooth University.

Why an unconference? An unconference is an event where the attendees help set the agenda and content. Rather than papers and panels, we want to use this opportunity to foster networking and discussion.

The goal of this inaugural event was to acknowledge the specificities but also international connections/reach of STS (and the general implications of scientific research and policy here in Ireland) and bring researchers together for networking from different institutional and disciplinary homes. The unconference format included panel talks and small-group discussions to explore various facets of the socio-cultural study of technology, science, and medicine.

Seminar: Policy and European Economic Convergence: the cases of Ireland and Poland

UCD Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation (CITO), UCD College of Business, and the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Ireland invite you to a seminar on 8th April. 

Please register here or email cob-mktcomms@ucd.ie 

This seminar will compare and contrast innovation and transformation in industrial and economic policy in Ireland and Poland. Panelists are Professor Frank Barry and Professor Marcin Piątkowski and the event will be moderated by Associate Professor Dorota Piaskowska.

Professor Barry will draw, in particular, on his recent book, 'Industry and Policy in Independent Ireland 1922-1972', published by Oxford University Press. 

Similarly, Professor Piątkowski will draw on his book, 'Europe's Growth Champion: Insights from the Economic Rise of Poland', also published by Oxford University Press.

The seminar is being organised by the UCD Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation, UCD College of Business, and the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Ireland. 

All are most welcome to attend on
Monday 8th April, 2024
4.00-5.30pm
(followed by a reception in the Laurence Crowley Boardroom)

Location - Lecture Theatre N204
UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School
Carysfort Avenue, Blackrock, County Dublin

Transformative change: unlocking institutional imagination

Moran-Introna Keynote Lecture 2008

The following episode is a bonus cross-pod publication (pollination?) between “Design Talk” and “CITO Conversations” a research community pod hosted by University College Dublin’s Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation.

This ‘from the archives’ recording is the first part of the keynote from “ Triangular Conference 2008”.

We were delighted to have Dermot Moran and Lucas Introna to talk about the value of conducting research in the phenomenological tradition and considerations when carrying out research into organisations, information systems and modern technology.

Part 1

In part one Dermot introduces Phenomenology and argues for its continuing relevance to Philosophy and Science.

The talk was recorded in-person with a live audience on Thursday June the 5^th 2008 in the UCD Lochlann Quinn Undergraduate School of Business, Belfield, Dublin, Ireland.

The conference was supported by the UCD School of Business Doctoral Studies Programme and hosted by the UCD Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation (CITO).

Moran-Introna Keynote Lecture 2008

The following episode is a bonus cross-pod publication (pollination?) between “Design Talk” and “CITO Conversations” a research community pod hosted by University College Dublin’s Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation.

This ‘from the archives’ recording is the first part of the keynote from “ Triangular Conference 2008”.

We were delighted to have Dermot Moran and Lucas Introna to talk about the value of conducting research in the phenomenological tradition and considerations when carrying out research into organisations, information systems and modern technology.

Part 2

In part two Lucas argues that Phenomenology offers deep insights into fundamental aspects of the human experience of technology and information systems, with implications for the sociology of Management and Organisation.

The talk was recorded in-person with a live audience on Thursday June the 5^th 2008 in the UCD Lochlann Quinn Undergraduate School of Business, Belfield, Dublin, Ireland.

The conference was supported by the UCD School of Business Doctoral Studies Programme and hosted by the UCD Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation (CITO).

CITO seminar: Investigate the frontline

This seminar is titled "Investigate the frontline: performing an affective ethnography in a theatre workshop" by Laura Lucia Parolin, University of Southern Denmark & Carmen Pellegrinelli, University of Lapland.

Laura is an ethnographer who uses the Latourian ANT approach, familiar with SCOT and HCI, Carmen is a theatre director, producer, and playwright. Their research is in the areas of materiality, affectivity and embodiment examining diverse empirical settings. They will present work-in-progress that on an affective ethnography of a theatrical laboratory organised for/by the hospital staff in Bergamo as a form of collective therapy. If you remember the hospitals in Bergamo were acutely affected during the Covid pandemic.

Organised by the UCD Centre for Innovation Technology and Organisation (CITO) - The seminar took place in-person on Tuesday, February 21st, 16.00-17.00 - in the Q026 Angela Moore Boardroom, Quinn School, University College Dublin. Introduction by Donncha Kavanagh, Professor of Information & Organisation, UCD College of Business.

Abstract

In March 2020, Bergamo was hit by the first wave of the pandemic. More than 6.000 people have died in the area, where the emergency facilities lived in a stressful situation for months. In January 2022, a group of ER doctors and nurses from the main hospital in Bergamo - the frontline in the crisis - wanted to reflect collectively on their experience with the pandemic. The group set up a one-year-long theatre workshop involving around thirty colleagues from the ER. The workshop also aimed to prepare a theatre show, "Giorni muti, notti bianche" (Silent days, sleepless nights), presented in Bergamo's main theatre. By participating in the theatre workshop, we conducted a collaborative affective ethnography to investigate the dimension of affect in ER professionals' work practices during the first wave of the pandemic. This contribution focuses on affective ethnography discussing the characteristics and potentials of this (post)qualitative research method for organisational scholars.

Laura Lucia Parolin (parolin@sdu.dk) is Associate Professor of Organizational Communication at the University of Southern Denmark. She is interested in the relationship between knowledge, body, sensitivity, affect, care, materiality, and innovation in work practices. She is currently visiting UCD, having been awarded a Carlsberg foundation grant. 

Carmen Pellegrinelli (cpellegr@ulapland.fi) is finishing her PhD at Lapland University in the Faculty of Social Sciences. Her research interests are focused on creative practices, theatre and post-human philosophy. She is a professional playwright and director of theatre.

CITO Seminar: Towards a Firm for Our Time

Friday March 5th, 2021 at 14:00 GMT

JC Spender

Prof. JC Spender, Research Professor, Kozminski University, Warsaw; Visiting Scholar, Rutgers University, NJ and Visiting Scholar, Fordham University, NY

Abstract

The widely accepted understanding of the firm is deeply flawed and is a serious impediment to policy-making. Indeed there seems to have been little advance in theory since 1937, when the youthful Ronald Coase tweaked economists, charging they could not explain why firms existed, let alone how they worked. Notions of managers making decisions 'scientifically' is not only narrow, it ends up erasing their practice's essential nature and socioeconomic significance. Spender revisits the nature of the firm and argues that managing might be more helpfully understood as entrepreneurship, a value-creating activity often supported by science's facts and reasoning but never 'dominated' by them. The human condition is one of uncertainty, of not-knowing and therefore questing for knowledge; Homo Inquirentes rather than Homo Sapiens. Taking this as the starting point, Spender goes on to explore the implications for the private sector firm and for managing.

Bio

JC Spender is Research Professor at Kozminski University, Warsaw and Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University, New Jersey and Fordham University, New York. He served in RN submarines and worked with Rolls-Royce on nuclear propulsion, IBM on financial computing, and as an investment banker before earning a PhD at the Manchester Business School (UK). Retired in 2003 as Dean of the School of Business & Technology at FIT/SUNY (New York).
He has published 8 books, and over100 journal articles and book chapters. His most recent book is titled Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise (Oxford UP 2014) and is about managing a business's creative responses to uncertainty (‘business model innovation’). He also writes about the theory and ethics of the firm, business strategy, and the history of management education. He is Commissioning Editor for the Cambridge University Press Elements in Business Strategy. In 2014 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in economics by the Lund University School of Economics & Management. https://jcspender.com

CITO seminar: Meaningful Work and Hermeneutics

Wednesday December 9th, 2020 at 16.30 GMT

Todd Mei

Todd Mei is founder of the public philosophy and consultation organization Philosophy2u. He calls himself a `public philosopher’. It involves adapting abstract concepts and ideas from philosophy and employing them to frame new ways of understanding work as meaningful and virtuous beyond obligatory, functional or mere utilitarian views.

Abstract

Meaningful work is the idea that work holds an important role in the flourishing of societies and individuals. While there are many debates about what meaningful work is and whether we should take it seriously, this talk will focus on what I call the work-flourishing gap (WFG). Because work is a physical activity, there tends to be controversy as to how it can participate in those kinds of intellectual and imaginative activities we tend to associate with self-actualisation and flourishing. I will discuss how Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory of action (based on speech acts) can help dissolve the WFG by demonstrating how the activity of work bears features of linguistic meaning. This linguistic claim enables us to see work as more than just a bare physical phenomenon; it is communicative in the broad sense of being assertoric (locutionary), conventional (illocutionary), and transformative (perlocutionary). I will conclude with a reflection on some practical examples.

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies

Uncommon Economies: Successes, failures, and the circulation of values

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies 15

Diane-Laure Arjalies (Ivey Business School, Western University)

"Cryptocurrencies, Accounting and The Real Economy: The Case of Impak Coin"

What if no money could be produced—hence debt allowed—if transactions in the real economy did not match the overall financial evaluation of the latter? What if the primary role of accounting was to allow a transaction to happen, instead of recording it? Would we see a new form of capitalism arise in which the land of our desires would match the land of our lives? What would be the conditions for such change to happen? This project is a first step towards such an understanding. By analyzing the cryptocurrency impak Coin whose explicit goal is to align the production of value in the real “impact” economy, it aims to uncover the mechanisms through which such a form of valuation and production could be obtained.

For more information, please contact Quinn DuPont (quinn.dupont@ucd.ie)

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies 14

Primavera De Filippi (CNRS & Berkman Klein Center)

"Build your own economy: the tokenization of everything"

Blockchain tokens can be used for a variety of functions: from the funding of new initiatives via Initial Coin Offerings, to the selling scarce digital artworks through NFTs. These new value systems are not based on debt (as most fiat currencies are) but rather on value: new tokens are minted when new products or services are created, whose market value will depend on the perceived value that these products or services hold in the eyes of consumers. However, the tokenization of everything also brings the risk of promoting a process of hyper-financialisation of many facets of society that had until recently been protected from speculative dynamics.

For more information, please contact Quinn DuPont (quinn.dupont@ucd.ie)

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies 13

Antonia Hernandez (Concordia University)

"On-Demand Intimacy: The Cost and Value of Intimate Exchanges on Chaturbate and OnlyFans"

This lecture examines money and intimacy on two of the leading on-demand intimacy platforms: Chaturbate.com and OnlyFans.com, a webcam sex platform and a platform that provides sexual content by subscription, respectively. While the two platforms share several characteristics, they diverge in their treatment of money and intimate content. While these two platforms have important differences regarding the use of money, they rely on a common infrastructure that includes app marketplaces and payment providers.

For more information, please contact Quinn DuPont (quinn.dupont@ucd.ie)

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies 12

Nicholas Bernards (University of Warwick)

"Kenya’s digital financial boom and the colonial histories of financial infrastructures"

Kenya’s digital finance boom is a paradigmatic case of the role of financial technologies (fintech) in development and poverty reduction, both for advocates and critics of fintech. Recent discussions, however, have tended not to closely examine the fundamental unevenness of this boom, in two senses. Drawing on engagements with Marxian conceptions of uneven development and recent debates on financial infrastructures, I link both of these patterns to the durable legacies of the distinctive political economy of colonialism in Kenya. Given the growing importance of Kenya’s digital finance boom in broader policy and academic debates about fintech, this case suggests a need for greater attention to the uneven nature of fintech applications.

For more information, please contact Quinn DuPont (quinn.dupont@ucd.ie)

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies 11

Lana Swartz (University of Virginia)

"Scam: Shadowing the Digital Economy"

According to various reports in the popular media, the years 2016, 2018, 2019 were all “year of the scam.” Beyond the headlines and the podcasts, scams are particularly important to understand because the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate capitalism seem to be in flux. I argue that in order to understand this contestation, we have to understand the role of the Internet in the production of an economy both legitimate and scammy. Social media has proven to be fertile ground for both the cultivation of a world in which scams make sense and the diffusion of scams themselves. Like all forms of economic activity, scams map to communication channels. Why are fictional and documentary content about scams so popular? How does the category of “scams” and the work of “fraud prevention” authorize surveillance and other forms of infrastructural power?

For more information, please contact Quinn DuPont (quinn.dupont@ucd.ie)

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies 10

Quinn DuPont (UCD)

"Responsibly Governing Consensus: How security technology makes space and place"

Current governance approaches are poorly suited to the remote, distributed, and highly dynamic environments many organizations operate in today. New, sophisticated governance technologies, led by blockchains, are thought to address governance challenges as part of the rising corporate responsibility movement. The key to these security technologies is an ability to create space and place, which can be governed very precisely. To explain how security technologies create and govern space and place, blockchain governance is presented as a case study.

For more information, please contact Quinn DuPont (quinn.dupont@ucd.ie)

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies 09

Alana Cattapan (Waterloo)

“Surrogacy and the Sharing Economy”

Harnessing the notion of `imagination' we identify a particular solutionist vision materialising across public documents from financial regulators, industry organisations, as well as RegTech and consulting firms. We draw out two failures of the RegTech imagination. First is a failure of dynamism in the way RegTech materialises visions of regulation. Second is a systems failure which focuses on narrower, individual problems in finance. We conclude that RegTech reflects continuities rather than the profound changes its advocates and observers exclaim.

For more information, please contact Quinn DuPont (quinn.dupont@ucd.ie)

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies 08

Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn and Marc Lenglet

"`#Imagination Fail': RegTech in Finance"

Harnessing the notion of `imagination' we identify a particular solutionist vision materialising across public documents from financial regulators, industry organisations, as well as RegTech and consulting firms. We draw out two failures of the RegTech imagination. First is a failure of dynamism in the way RegTech materialises visions of regulation. Second is a systems failure which focuses on narrower, individual problems in finance. We conclude that RegTech reflects continuities rather than the profound changes its advocates and observers exclaim.

For more information, please contact Quinn DuPont (quinn.dupont@ucd.ie)

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies 07

Kalpana Shankar (UCD)

“Research funding, responsible evaluation, and missing data”

Although research funders wield enormous power over knowledge production and science policy, their decision-making processes are opaque. The inner workings of funding agencies involve numerous stakeholders, processes, and data; like other complex institutions they rely on an evidence base that supports and reflects individual and collective decision-making and personal judgement, but little of this data is available for scrutiny and what is available internationally is uneven. Building on some of the work my research team and I have been doing over the last two and a half years, I want to use this opportunity to think through how this gap in transparency and accountability of public sector funding bodies is intertwined with funding allocation and responsible evaluation - and why that matters for how and what research is valued.

For more information, please contact Quinn DuPont (quinn.dupont@ucd.ie)

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies 06

Koray Caliskan (New School)

“The Rise and Fall of Electra: An Ethnography of a Cryptocurrency Project”

Electra was developed in 2017 by a young man who use the pseudonym Electra01. Following its emergence in cryptocurrency markets in 2018, it’s market capitalization briefly reached 180 million USD as a result of its original supply mechanism. The coin was designed to lose value, yet to still retain enough to build a community of its own. In 2019, the coin and its community have been regarded as among the most successful projects, winning a prestigious vote organized by Binance, whose research department published a report about its community and technology. The project’s community had written its white paper, and released two new versions, updated its blockchain, developed and maintained a platform that has 40.000 members in a variety of channels, instituted a foundation in the Netherlands, introduced a payment system, and has become the only cryptocurrency project to be accepted to ETA (Electronic Transactions Association). However, following a controversy between its community leaders and its founder, the Electra collapsed as its founder Electra01 decided to dump his own Electras in November 2020, bringing the market capitalization down to less than a million dollars, effectively killing the project. This paper presents a discussion of the rise and fall of a cryptocurrency project drawing on two years of fieldwork among its community and interviews with its anonymous founder who accepted to meet me in person. It describes how actors see their engagement in a data money community, how they build and maintain a digital platform, innovate tools of new economization in crypto contexts and finally lose the very platform they stood. The paper ends with a discussion of the future of Electra community whose leading community members are now building a new platform.

For more information, please contact Quinn DuPont (quinn.dupont@ucd.ie)

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies 05

Vicki Lemieux (UBC)

“Multidisciplinary Blockchain Research and Design: A Case Study in Moving from Theory to Pedagogy to Practice”

The application of multidisciplinary theoretical models in an emerging field of study like blockchain can improve both collaborative learning and solution design, especially by creating a valuable shared language for colleagues from different disciplinary areas. This presentation traces a journey from theory to practice by outlining the origin and development of the theoretical ‘three layer trust model’ for blockchain technologies, discussing the pedagogical utility of this model within a virtual education setting, and describing a student’s application of the learned model in a technical blockchain product design setting. By providing a thorough grounding in the complex multidisciplinary balance involved in designing blockchain systems (and adding the reflections of participants in this multi-setting focal design application) the presentation outlines the potential value of such theoretical models to establish shared language for complex concepts across disciplinary divides.

For more information, please contact Quinn DuPont (quinn.dupont@ucd.ie)

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies 04

Wessel Reijers (EUI)

“Social Credit: The Circulation of Reputational Value”

Since 2014, China has been implementing a comprehensive programme to introduce a Social Credit System. The programme has a sweeping ambition, though it is to date only partly implemented, and aims to subject virtually all societal interaction to an assessment of trustworthiness. China’s initiative goes well beyond Western practices of credit scoring precisely because it stretches the notion of trustworthiness from the purely financial realm to the realm of reputation and morality. And yet, we see a similar shift in Western countries, considering the rise of reputation mechanisms on Internet platforms, in the crypto sphere, but also on the local level. On a speculative note, we might be witnessing a re-emergence of an ethics of reciprocity (think of the Thomist idea of a “just price”) in the political economy. In this talk, I will do three things. First, I will give a high-level overview of China’s Social Credit System. Second, I will situate this within a broader context of emerging reputational mechanisms. Third, I will raise some critical questions concerning the new trend: 1) what it means for the relation between the public and private sphere, 2) what it means for the distinction between law and morality, and 3) how it affects our understanding of civic virtue.

For more information, please contact Quinn DuPont (quinn.dupont@ucd.ie)

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies 03

John McCallig (UCD)

“Reporting on Receivables: Designing Trust into Accounting Systems”

Investors and other external users of financial statements need to be able to trust that the financial statements reflect the economic reality of the firm’s business. The research objective of this paper is to design a system that allows external users to trust that an entity’s individual receivables balances are accepted as obligations by these counterparties and are aggregated properly, without disclosing the individual balances that make up the total for receivables. The paper uses a design science research approach, to design and build an artefact that achieves its research objectives, by using Shamir [1979] secret sharing to provide privacy, and a blockchain and smart contracts to provide public access to total receivables.

For more information, please contact Quinn DuPont (quinn.dupont@ucd.ie)

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies 02

Ryan Deschamps (Waterloo)

“Schrödinger's Threats: Uncertainty and Risk in the case of Quantum and Side-channel Cybersecurity”

Since 2011, countries across the United Nations have been developing plans to increase their resilience against disastrous global cyberattacks to critical infrastructure with potential cost of life. While existing prevention efforts can help manage traditional cyberattacks, they are useless against the small but growing risk of cyberattacks via quantum 'supreme' computers and so-called 'side channel' attacks. While the technical solutions for many quantum and side-channel attacks are already underway, it is an open question about how little or much attention our social institutions should spend to address such low probability but high-risk concerns. This presentation provides a lay explanation of quantum and back-channel cybersecurity challenges, arguing that a policy design approach can offer a robust response to these and other problems where scientific solutions outmode the social and economic will to apply them.

For more information, please contact Quinn DuPont (quinn.dupont@ucd.ie)

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies 01

Paul Cuffe (UCD)

“The Electricity Industry: It's boringly reliable and we mostly trust the incumbents. So, is there a role for blockchain at all?”

For more information, please contact Quinn DuPont (quinn.dupont@ucd.ie)