Sustainability and Scalability of Self-Organisation
(SaSSO)

Monday the 7th September, Cesena, Italy

In conjunction with ACSOS 2026
Important Dates
  • Submission deadline: June 15th
  • Notification to authors: July 7th
  • Camera-ready deadline: July 20th
  • Workshop: September 7th

All times in Anywhere on Earth (AoE) timezone.

Call For Papers
The fourth SaSSO workshop explores inter-organizational self-organization to address sustainability and scalability challenges. Domains like healthcare, transportation, and food systems are all examples of complex, interdependent systems requiring multi-stakeholder coordination. This highlights a pressing need to re-consider, integrate and re-vitalise concepts of self-organisation, self-governance, sustainability, and multi-scale systems thinking in order to meet the challenges involved in shaping real-world complex systems.

The goal of this inter-disciplinary workshop is to address two contrasting pairs of inter-related research questions:

  1. The sustainability of self-organisation, given the features of path dependency (where prior decisions significantly constrain present choices); the iron law of oligarchy which identifies the tendency of self-organisation to slide into oligarchy; and the avoidance of tyranny at the core of Ober’s Basic Democracy; and conversely, self-organisation for sustainability, building on the pioneering work of Ostrom’s self-governing institutions for common-pool resource management, but also considering self-sustainability, e.g. in the form of cooperative survival dilemmas.

  2. The scalability of self-organisation, for example as the number of components in a system changes over time, how are structures and processes for decision-making, dispute resolution and monitoring affected by such changes, even with new ‘generations; and conversely, self-organisation for scalability, both for pro-active management of anticipated growth or contraction, but also how the values or incentives implied by self-organised rules change over time (the rule-based equivalent of concept drift).

SaSSO welcomes both applied and theoretical contributions addressing these challenges.

Information for Authors

Authors are invited to submit full workshop papers up to 6 pages of original work, as well as extended abstracts up to 2 pages (exploring work in progress, explaining relevant work published elsewhere, or just weird, wonderful or quarter-baked ideas) according the ACSOS paper formatting guidelines. Submissions to the workshop are free of change and are required to be formatted according to the standard IEEE Computer Society Press proceedings style guide. Papers should be submitted electronically in PDF format.
Please submit through EasyChair
Evangelos Pournaras Democratic Innovations in the Era of AI: Reimagining Fair Decisions

Evangelos Pournaras
Democratic Innovations in the Era of AI: Reimagining Fair Decisions

Democracy has never been so vulnerable before. Longstanding challenges with poor participation and representation of citizens often result in illegitimate decision outcomes. The advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI) comes with remarkable opportunities to scale up democratic innovations, but not without unprecedented risks for the integrity of democratic processes. This talk will shed light on these opportunities and risks by providing hands-on experience from recent democratic innovations in real-world. I will show the transformative impact of adopting fairer voting methods in a participatory budgeting process the city of Aarau in Switzerland and follow up evidence of this across the world. I will also discuss what it means in the era of generative AI this profound shift of moving from majoritarian methods to collective decision making that promotes a more proportional representation of citizens. Can fairer voting methods play the role of a safeguard against biases and inconsistencies when engaging large language models in deliberation and decision making processes? Facing such tough and inevitable questions is necessary if we are to reinvent a more resilient democracy in the era of AI.

Program Information

Accepted Papers

  1. Sofia Baxter, Huma Samin and Aishwaryaprajna. Theory of Mind-inspired Reflective AI for Sustainable Small Language Model Orchestration
  2. Nathan Lloyd and Peter Lewis. Self-Fulfilling Expectations: Evolutionary Game Theory with Endogenous Social Fields
  3. Savannah Dysard, Samrat Singh, Lesley Drake, Matthew Scott, Ella Bettison and Jeremy Pitt. School-Meal Menu Planning: A Self-Organised, Sustainable and Scalable Approach
  4. Roberto Casadei, Paolo Baldini and Niccolò Castronuovo. Macro-to-micro behavioral mappings in distributed systems: a characterization on event structures
  5. Zahra Atf and Peter Lewis. Rule-Based Self-Governance for Green-Claim Control in AI Retail Recommendations

Schedule

StartEndEvent
9:00am9:20amRegistration & Welcome Coffee
9:20am9:30amOpening Remarks & Workshop Introduction
9:30am10:30amKeynote: TBD
10:30am11:00amTheory of Mind-inspired Reflective AI for Sustainable Small Language Model Orchestration
11:00am11:30amCoffee Break
11:30am12:00pmSelf-Fulfilling Expectations: Evolutionary Game Theory with Endogenous Social Fields
12:00pm12:30amSchool-Meal Menu Planning: A Self-Organised, Sustainable and Scalable Approach
12:30pm13:00pmRule-Based Self-Governance for Green-Claim Control in AI Retail Recommendations
13:00pm14:00pmLunch Break
14:00pm14:30pmMacro-to-micro behavioral mappings in distributed systems: a characterization on event structures
14:30pm15:30pmDiscussion Panel (All Speakers)
15:30pm16:00pmCoffee Break
16:00pm16:45pmBreakout Groups: Future research Directions & Collaboration Opportunities
16:45pm17:15pmPlenary Report from Breakout Groups & Discussion
17:15pm17:30pmClosing Remarks
Organizing Team
Simon

Simon T. Powers

University of Stirling

Stefan

Stefan Sarkadi

University of Lincoln

Tobias

Tobias Buhl

Universität Würzburg

Programme Committee
  • Chloe Barnes, Aston University, UK
  • Andrei-Bogdan Balcau, King’s College London, UK
  • Ane Kristine Espeset, University of Oslo, Norway
  • James Borg, Aston University, UK
  • Matthew Scott, Imperial College London, UK