The Independent Social Research Foundation is funding a project that is studying the theoretical, historical and practical aspects of digital democratic economic planning and its implications for future attempts. The interdisciplinary group of researchers that are involved in the project includes Eleni Papagiannaki, Vinit Ravishankar, Dominique Arsenault, Sascha Gander and James Macumber. One of the project’s major outputs will be a workshop on digital democratic economic planning that we will post about when further information becomes available.
A summary of the project can be found below:
This project investigates how empirical and historical planning experiments are shaped and constrained by the technologies available for economic calculation, coordination, and control. Rather than treating planning as a purely theoretical or institutional problem (Groos& Sorg Eds. 2025), the project examines planning as it was actually practised, mediated by concrete technologies such as early input–output (I-O) tables, statistical systems, cybernetic models, analogue and early digital computing, and logistics architectures developed in both civilian and crisis contexts.
You can find out more about the project here.