Open Lab Athens

Open Lab Athens is a non-for-profit organisation; a design initiative of researchers and practitioners who engage in spaces of “social innovation”. Acknowledging the politics and values embedded in any system and infrastructure, we conceive social and technical systems that sustain and reproduce practices of solidarity, horizontality, and radical democratic participation. Our research contributes to Computing, Social Movements, Design and Digital Civics research. Our members come from diverse backgrounds (i.e. computing science and engineering, sociology and humanities), which in combination with our employed participatory methods give shape to an interdisciplinary approach to technology design. Open Lab Athens operates as a network of academics, practitioners and researchers interested to form and participate in a collective that gets involved with communities of social innovation and designs technology to support and extend these. We draw our resources from the network of collaborating institutions and research grants. We use such funding to employ people that subscribe to our values and vision on a project basis, with a goal to include them as full members in the organisation and running of the lab.