Social Network Effects Of The Transition Towards Sustainable Energy Production. A Proposal for a Data Mining Research Agenda
Abstract : The transition towards sustainable energy production is not only or even primarily a technological transition, but particularly also a social transition. Mutual dependencies will replace present one-sided dependencies, very much in analogy with the past and present communication revolution. The main difference between the two is that mutual dependencies are much more confined to local dependencies in the energy world than in the communication field. The transition will therefore have substantial positive effects on local social cohesion: in flexible local networks consumers of energy will be transformed into producers, jointly producing and distributing local sustainable energy through smart grids, enabling completely new applications of energy.
Modern possibilities of data mining enable registering this transformation, testing hypotheses on successes and failures in the transition and testing hypotheses on emerging social structures of different arrangements in different institutional settings.
Short Bio : Frans Stokman is Professor of the Methodology of Social Research at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) since 1977. His main present interests are: the analysis of informal social networks; the analysis of and strategic intervention in complex (political) decision making; social interventions to promote citizen participation in neighborhoods and other forms of joint production, like joint production of decentralized sustainable energy and heating by citizens and local plants of organizations. He received the Georg Simmel Award from the International Network of Social Network Analysis and was invited as keynote speaker at several international conferences.
For further information and publications see : www.stokman.org