SYNENERGENE is a dialogue and agenda-setting project dealing with, promoting and enacting Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in synthetic biology. Funded by the EU, it encompasses more than 25 European and international partners. The project aims to involve citizens and a wide variety of stakeholders in the social shaping of the field, foster an open dialogue about potential benefits and risks, and explore what responsible governance of synthetic biology might entail. SYNENERGENE is designed to be a highly interactive project that is flexible enough to accommodate the dynamics of an emergent field, allow citizens to get in- volved and offer manifold opportunities for other initiatives and organisa- tions to cooperate with it. Amongst other things, the initiative will organise more than 100 events. In the talk, the approach of SYNENERGENE will be put forward for discussion and options for engagement in / cooperation with SYNENERGENE will be described in some detail.

Christopher COENEN
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology - ITAS, Germany
Christopher Coenen is a senior researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology’s Institute for Technology Assess- ment and Systems Analysis (KIT-ITAS). Before moving to Karlsruhe in 2009, Coenen was based in Berlin at the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Parliament (TAB), which is run by KIT-ITAS. He is in charge of the coordination of the EU-funded project “SYNENERGENE” on synthetic bi- ology (a large-scale stakeholder and public dialogue action plan with more than 20 partners from three continents) and is editor in chief of the journal NanoEthics, ‘KIT Expert’ for the topic ‘human enhancement’ and S.NET board member.