The TechCo online conference has indeed lived up to our expectations. We were pleased to see how, during the five days of the conference, participants and senior presenters alike maintained a high level of engagement and spurred exciting discussions on topics like trust, solidarity, co-operative knowledge creation and technological developments, privacy issues concerning contact tracing, the societal perspective on digitalisation, among many others. We also believe that the continuous reference to the different frameworks and locales of Japan and Germany and more in General between the situation in Asia and Europe set the base for the cultural-sensitive and transnational discourse on the role of digital technologies in crises that we were aiming to when planning the conference.
Therefore, it is fair to say that we are content with the conference, and we would like to thank all the young scholars who proposed fascinating projects and actively contributed to its success, as well as Prof. Satoshi Kodama, Prof. Robert Ranisch, Dr. Susanne Brucksch, and Prof. Ann-Katrin Voit, whose contributions and lectures were inspirational.
There is, however, one final stage to the TechCo project, one to which we look forward to and about which we are very proud. The Institute for Medical Ethics and History of Medicine of the Ruhr-University of Bochum recently agreed with the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) to publish a selection of the papers proposed by the conference participants and senior researchers in a Themed Issue entitled “The Present and Future of Pandemic Technologies”.
We are excited to work with such an influential and well-established journal as JMIR, and we are also proud to be able to support young scholars in sharing their results with the rest of the academic community.