DES

Socio-technical systems

We are interested in socio-technical systems and related emerging technologies (see also theme Responsible AI).

In particular, our previous research has focused on understanding the social, technical, economical, and political issues around scalability problems, and splits of public blockchains. As public blockchains are not maintained by a central authority, but a community of miners and developers, social and political issues unfold differently than other ecosystems.

We have explored different actors, their roles in the network, as well as their roles in shaping the future of the blockchain (Islam, Mäntymäki & Turunen 2019a; 2019b). Our findings contribute to the guideline development for the governance of public blockchains.

FEATURED PUBLICATIONS

Islam, N., Mäntymäki, M., & Turunen, M. (2019a, January). Understanding the role of actor heterogeneity in blockchain splits: An actor-network perspective of bitcoin forks. In Proceedings of the 52nd hawaii international conference on system sciences.

Islam, A. N., Mäntymäki, M., & Turunen, M. (2019b). Why do blockchains split? An actor-network perspective on Bitcoin splits. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 148, 119743.