Wolfgang Hofkirchner was invited to participate in a workshop at Duino Castle, Italy. The title of the workshop was “Information – Theory and Practice”. It was organised by physicists Hans Grassmann and Gerhard Luhn, and philosopher Klaus Kornwachs and sponsored by Isomorph srl and Qimonda. The three-day workshop held 19-21 October 2007 tried – as outlined in the programme – ‘to unify and compare all different approaches and mindsets in an interdisciplinary fashion, including some related topics like “activity”, “order” and “chaos”. We would also like to consider the impact of the topic “information” (which  seems to be still more a topic than a concept) on technical developments and also on society as a whole ­ and vice versa.’ Participants included, among others, Valentin Braitenberg, Gregory Chaitin, Koichiro Matsuno, Bernd-Olaf Küppers.

Wolfgang Hofkirchner gave a talk on the methodological framework of a research programme aimed at a Unified Theory of Information. He focused on the necessity to unify the different self-organisation approaches in the
light of a General System Theory in order to provide a sound basis for understanding information. Furthermore, he stressed the importance of a Unified Theory of Information for guiding the design of ICTs towards enhancing Collective Intelligence on a World Society level.