Martin O'CONNOR

Martin O’Connor is a co-founder of L'Association ePLANETe Blue and currently its Programme Manager. 

Born in 1958 in New Zealand, with university academic qualifications in Physics, Sociology, Development Studies and Economics (PhD, Time and Environment, University of Auckland, 1991), he specialises in inter-disciplinary research on the interfaces between society and environment, business and public policy, research and action.  After 15 years of university research, teaching and applied social science research in New Zealand, he moved permanently to France in 1995, where he took up a post of Professor of Economics at the University of Versailles St-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ, now a component of the vast conglomerate University Paris-Saclay).

With the KerBabel™ team and European colleagues, he has been a pioneer since 1998 in the conception and prototyping of interactive Internet-based tools for collaborative learning, multi-criteria evaluation and indicator-based deliberation support.  These include the KerBabel Deliberation Matrix, for multi-criteria multi-stakeholder evaluation, now integrated in the on-line collaborative learning platform ePLANETe.  Current research activity centres on the collision between two distinct motifs of transition — (1) the normatively impelled “ecological transition”, and (2) the technologically and financially impelled “digital transition” — and the deep indeterminate processes of societal transformation fuelled by this collision.