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Conference: Making the Invisible Visible

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Community of Practice in Indicators of Sustainability and Values
16 - 18 December 2010 at the University of Brighton

The Making the Invisible Visible International Conference provided a unique 3-day arena for discussing unmet needs of a wide range of organizations - including businesses, civil society organizations (CSOs), social enterprises and funders - to measure aspects of their work at the project level, and especially those which are based on human values.

A major driver for the initiation of this conference was the ESDinds EU research project, which had exciting results to report on the development of values-based indicators, trialed in the field with CSOs and businesses, and remotely by a further 50 organisations, some of whom reported at the conference. It was during this project that the need for such a conference to bring together workers in the different but overlapping fields of Indicators, Sustainability and Values became apparent. Benefits of such interdisciplinary approaches emerged; several groups wished to report on them and learn from each other.

Key themes
Values - The relevance of values to the success of businesses, CSOs and other organizations, even when they are not themselves values-based, is becoming increasingly recognized, and a theme of the conference will be the usefulness of values-based indicators in that context.

Useful indicators for CSO projects - The development of useful indicators for any type for civil Society (CSO) projects have always been problematic. At this conference speakers from CSOs, funders and researchers will give updates on challenges and emerging ideas.

Co-design and partnership in research - The importance of co-design and the involvement of Communities of Interest for the success and appropriateness of a research project will be explored.

Ethics and Sustainable Development - Major advances have been made in developing indicators, but challenges still exist at the project (or local) level, and in linking to ethical values.