SoCS: Energy Sustainability and Smart Grids: Fostering and Supporting Cultures of Participation in the Energy Landscape of the Future

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The vision for the Smart Grid is to support new ways of producing, transmitting, distributing, and consuming energy to change and improve the sustainability of future energy environments. This represents a unique opportunity for synergy between research in social-computational systems and the Smart Grid application domain. This project will demonstrate that on the one hand, for the Smart Grid effort to live up to its vision and expectations, technological developments are necessary but not sufficient: fostering and supporting changes in human behavior are equally important. On the other hand, social-computational systems face interesting, specific, and unique research questions to cope with the challenges associated with Smart Grids.The project will design and develop: (a) components of an initial theoretical framework for social-computational systems based on cultures of participation and (b) initial architecture and interaction mechanisms for HYDRA, an open, collaborative, living knowledge environment to foster and support ecologies of different levels of participation. Evaluation in naturalistic settings will provide requirements and guidelines for future developments as a major outcome.The project will transcend existing technological research by creating prototypes of new socio-technical systems to empower human beings and provide opportunities, incentives, and rewards for changing their behaviors. Collaborations with local technology companies, local governments, and international researchers will ensure the broad impact of our research. Beyond the lessons learned from our specific developments, the theoretical grounding of our research will make our methodologies, components, architectures, requirements, and guidelines applicable to a large number of social-computational systems.