Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society

The Weizenbaum Institute investigates the current changes in all aspects of society occurring in response to digitalisation. Our goals are to develop a comprehensive understanding of these changes based on rigorous academic analysis and to offer informed strategies to address them at a political and economic level.

The Weizenbaum Institute is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research with € 50 million over 5 years. The consortium is coordinated by the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and includes the four Berlin universities – Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, Universität der Künste Berlin – as well as the Universität Potsdam and the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS).

The Berlin-Brandenburg Consortium focuses on the interaction of the social sciences, economics and law with design research and computer science. Interdisciplinary basic research and the exploration of concrete solutions in practice-based labs are combined with knowledge transfer into politics, business, and society. The conceptual design of the Institute aims to achieve scientific excellence with a nationwide and international impact, as well as networking with cooperation partners from civil society, business, politics, and the media.

The institute is named after the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, who was born in Berlin in 1923 and passed away in 2008. His entire life’s work was concerned with the socio-critical dialogue between man and machine.