Novel Practices of Biosecurity Governance (invite only)

The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) will hold a workshop in Cambridge, UK to discuss the development of a system for sharing and learning from the practice of biosecurity governance. Around 40 leading practitioners will gather to discuss the development of a system for sharing knowledge and learning from the practice of implementing biosecurity governance measures.

After the workshop, we will draft a high profile publication outlining the main findings and next steps to be taken. Participants will be invited to be co-authors.

An often overlooked area of biosecurity governance is the relationship between high-level strategy and on-the-ground implementation of that strategy within particular institutions, be they universities, government agencies, businesses, or community labs. Practitioners tasked with implementing biosecurity governance often find that a) they must interpret policy documents in light of their specific institutional configurations, which may not be the settings envisioned in the policies, and b) they encounter moments in the research process where they think there should be more or less attention to security than a policy might mandate.

Over the last decade, groups of practitioners have experimented with new ways of understanding when an area of biology should become subject to safety and security governance, and just what the governance should look like.

We currently lack a capacity to meaningfully share and learn from these experiments in identifying and governing novel safety and security concerns.

This workshop is a chance to debate and develop a structure for such a sharing and learning system for the practice of biosecurity governance.

Over the course of a day and a half, participants will gather at the University of Cambridge to

·      Identify desirable components for a global biosecurity governance-in-practice learning and sharing system

·      Test those components against lived examples by the participants

·      Outline a strategy for implementing such a system as the global level

This workshop is supported by the Hauser-Raspe Workshop Series at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.