Client and addressees
The client and first addressee of our work is the German Bundestag.
Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment
The Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment (ABFTA) is responsible for political steering (§56a of the Procedural Rules of the German Bundestag). In each legislative period, this committee forms a permanent TA rapporteur group with one member of each parliamentary party in the Bundestag, which prepares all decisions of the committee, e.g. on the work programme, and the acceptance of work results, in regular exchange with TAB. The Committee's secretariat supports communication between TAB and the bodies and members of the German Bundestag.
Specialised Committees, plenary of the Parliament and the general public
Important for the parliamentary involvement of our work are the specialised committees of the Bundestag. They introduce subject-specific topics of investigation for TAB, discuss the submitted reports in their meetings, and the representatives of the parliamentary groups debate them in the plenary sessions.
All TAB work results are published in a freely accessible form - in the form of a Bundestag printed paper and/or as a TAB publication.
Particularly with our reader-friendly abstracts (especially our policy brief in Englisch TAB-Fokus), we would like to contribute to the social dialogue on scientific and technological innovations- in public authorities and companies, at universities and other research and educational institutions, at the breakfast table and in social networks.
»I expect a qualified contribution from parliamentary technology assessment to a sober as well as future-oriented processing and evaluation of all implications of artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous systems, big data, blockchain etc. The boundless hype surrounding these new technological possibilities must be transformed into a factual debate, also through the scientific methodology of TA.«
E. D. Rossmann, TAB-Brief Nr. 49 (2018): Erwartungen an die TA im 19. Deutschen Bundestag, S. 5