Round tables- Technology & Community

Technion’s Center for Global Engineering hosted a social outreach workshop to promote synergy between the community’s needs and technology based projects. The main issues at the center of discussion were ways with which to meet the challenge of integrating both planning and engineering agendas into a community while bearing in mind the feedback provided by the community’s individuals. More specifically, understanding their needs with regards to sustainable issues in order to improve their quality of life.

The participants, both from the technological/engineering sector as well as on-the-field-agents, such as social workers centered their discussions on the following topics:

Methodology and actions within the planning and development of public areas
The challenge of integrating between community and technology
Academia: educating engineers to apply their skills for the benefit of the community

There is an existing gap between the people who work within the community and those that have the technological know-how. Choosing the right methodology will promote a mutual understanding of both these ‘languages” and serve to bridge this cognitive gap, benefitting both the individual and the community. To achieve this goal, it is detrimental that professional people who work within the community will become familiarized with basic concepts of development and planning, and that on their part, the engineers will be able to provide plausible solutions with regards to the community’s needs and difficulties which they encounter in their daily lives. The academia also plays a significant part in bridging this divide by providing students with the appropriate skill-set in both engineering as well as the humanities and social sciences.

The open-minded discussions led to a key conclusion: it is of utmost importance to continue the development of a comprehensive network which spans the wide range of community, academia, governmental institutes, NGOs and civil organizations, as well as relevant stakeholders who are responsible for community development.