Winter workshop on complex systems: more than a decade of self-organised community building in complexity research

1 The establishment of a new initiative

The 2024 edition marked the 10th anniversary of the Winter Workshop on Complex Systems (WWCS), a significant milestone that invites reflection on its evolution and impact within the complexity science community (see Figure 1A). Over the past decade, the WWCS has grown from a small experimental meeting into an enduring, self-organised workshop that brings together early-career researchers from diverse backgrounds to collaborate on interdisciplinary projects in complexity science.

A strong research support network is essential for developing skills and advancing scientific careers, particularly for early-career researchers. Workshops play a crucial role in fostering networking opportunities and creating new relationships–both professional and personal–that are important for success in Academia. The WWCS has consistently emphasised this collaboration and interdisciplinarity, allowing participants to build connections that extend well beyond the event itself. It provides a platform not only to establish new collaborations, but also to encounter fresh perspectives and new research topics.

Building on this legacy of connection, we reached out to the people who make the workshop possible: its founders, organisers, and some participants themselves. Their testimonies and reflections provide useful qualitative insights to illustrate WWCS’s profound influence, proving that the relationships formed here serve as a vital cornerstone for success in the global research landscape.

As Luis A. Martínez–one of the founders of the workshop–recalls, the first edition in 2015 was “a small experiment” carried out in Europe after experiencing the 2014 edition of the Santa Fe Institute Summer School. It brought together twenty participants under improvised funding for a week focused primarily on collaborative project development. Talks and tutorials were important, but so too were the social activities and games, informal exchanges, and late-night discussions that encouraged researchers from different fields to connect. Since its inception, the WWCS has remained committed to accessibility and inclusion. Its low-cost, community-driven model ensures that participation is not limited by financial or institutional barriers, allowing researchers at early stages of their careers to engage fully in the experience.

To ensure the survival of the workshop over time, a distinctive dynamic was established: the organisers of each new edition would be part of the participants of the previous one. This self-organised model means that every edition is built from scratch: from finding the venue and securing sponsors, to contacting speakers and designing the programme. The WWCS exhibits the characteristics of a self-organising system, including distributed decision-making and the absence of a permanent central authority. While a Steering Committee provides continuity and oversight, the organisation of each edition is delegated to newly appointed Organising Committees composed primarily of former participants. This distributed governance structure allows the workshop to continuously renew itself while preserving its core identity.

For early-career researchers, this has provided not only valuable organisational experience but also a deeper perspective on academic events. By prioritising self-organisation, this approach ensures the WWCS remains both innovative and enduring.

This report reflects on the evolution of the Winter Workshop on Complex Systems (WWCS) as a community-driven initiative that has grown and adapted over more than a decade. We discuss the organisational principles, collaborative dynamics, and scientific outcomes that have contributed to its longevity and continued relevance and aim to share insights into the processes and practices that have supported the workshop’s sustained growth and ongoing evolution.

2 The architecture behind a sustainable self-managed scientific event

The WWCS follows a rigorous and collaborative weekly structure designed to maximize both focused research and informal networking. A typical day begins with a communal breakfast, followed by academic activities, including keynote presentations from invited speakers and specialised tutorials where participants share with each other methods and datasets. A defining feature of the workshop is the significant time dedicated to collaborative self-managed projects, which occupy the majority of the afternoons and allow participants to apply interdisciplinary methods in real-time. These intensive sessions are balanced by structured social activities—ranging from mid-morning and afternoon coffee breaks to communal lunches and dinners. Evenings are reserved for building community through social activities, such as quizzes, wine tastings, star-gazing, etc., ensuring that the intellectual exchange continues in a relaxed, personal setting. By the end of the week, the participants present their ideas, discussions, and conclusions in a public event. Ultimately, the WWCS works as a complex system itself: by fostering these non-linear interactions between diverse actors, it allows new scientific collaborations to emerge organically.

Crucially, the workshop is designed primarily to support early-career researchers. Its two central goals are to broaden and strengthen participants’ academic social networks and to stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration leading to new research projects. Central to this mission is the principle of inclusivity, ensuring that financial barriers do not hinder scientific exchange. As Luis A. Martínez emphasises, one of the core principles from the beginning was economic accessibility. “We wanted to ensure that financial constraints were never a barrier to participation. The fees were kept minimal because we secured funding to cover dinners and lodging. This spirit of accessibility must remain a transversal pillar (of the workshop).”

These objectives are safeguarded as the defining identity of the workshop. They guide both the organisational structure and the activities offered. To ensure its continuity, different committees work jointly.

• The Organising Committee (OC) is responsible for the practical execution of each edition. Tasks include advertising the call, selecting participants, securing venues and funding, coordinating online interaction, and reporting after the event. At least one OC member–ideally, all its members–must have previously attended the workshop to ensure continuity.
• The Steering Committee (SC) oversees the long-term coherence and sustainability of the WWCS. It selects the OC among the past edition’s organisers through a public call, ensures compliance with the statute, supports the OC through advice and fundraising, and manages communication channels. The SC also ensures fair participant selection and proper use of funds. Membership rotates, with a maximum term of three editions, and its members have the capacity to change the statutes unanimously.
• Past SC members act as an advisory body, available to provide expertise, connections, and additional support.

The organisation follows a clear annual rhythm that makes WWCS a sustainable project. As depicted in Figure 1B), the week-long workshop is held around the months of January and February, coinciding with the academic break in most European universities to increase participation.

During the workshop, the call for the next OC is announced, and the SC adjusts its membership. Within 1 month after the workshop, the newly appointed SC members begin their mandate and select the next OC. The selection process varies: in some years it involves evaluating the feasibility of a single proposal from prospective organisers, while in other years it requires choosing among multiple competing proposals.

During the spring and summer months, the newly appointed OC focuses on securing funds, confirming the venue, and inviting keynote speakers. These preparations must be completed by September, when the call for participants is launched. From September to December, the call remains open, participants are selected, and travel grant recipients are determined.

In more than 10 years of self-managed organisation, many lessons have been learned. The SC acts as a cross-edition transmission body for the new OCs. The main advice given by the SC to the new OCs can be summarised as follows.

• Constant communication between OC and SC, including shared digital channels, is crucial for coordination. This is a structural requirement to avoid misunderstandings and ensure that both committees stay aligned.
• During the workshop, speakers should be diverse, accessible, and actively engaged beyond their lectures. This ensures socialisation and smooth transmission of senior knowledge (both scientific and about academic structures) to junior attendees.
• Project-based activities must be prioritised, with schedules favouring collaboration time. The main aim of the workshop is to promote collaborative research and networking.
• Even if not the main activity, tutorials, panels, and discussions on career development and interdisciplinary practice enrich the programme and allow attendees to broaden their skills.
• Not all hours must be devoted to research, coding, and academic discussions. Coffee breaks and informal interactions are essential for creativity, and OCs are encouraged to responsibly allocate time for them.
• Social activities and well-planned accommodation logistics enhance the collective experience and help build long-lasting professional relationships.

All in all, committees are expected to uphold independence from private or public interests, ensuring decisions serve the workshop’s mission rather than external agendas. Both OC and SC must act transparently, inclusively, and collaboratively. The SC provides continuity and oversight, while the OC adapts and innovates within the framework of the statute. Past SC members provide historical memory and strategic support, ensuring that each edition benefits from accumulated experience.

This architecture serves as a proven model of sustainability with self-organisation, demonstrated by its success over eleven consecutive editions. Despite annual turnover in organisers, locations, participants, and scientific topics, the workshop has maintained its core objectives and organisational structure for more than a decade.

3 Building a community of researchers

“You never have time to sit and to properly talk with people (at big conferences) the smaller ones, between 20 and 50 people that’s the occasion where you can actually start working on a project with someone”, says Renaud Lambiotte, past invited speaker for the WWCS.

Since its inception, the WWCS has transitioned into an annual event hosted by rotating teams. Now in its 12th edition, the initiative has seen a consistent rise in attendance, as seen in Figure 1C,i). Following a brief decline during the COVID-19 pandemic, participation has stabilised at approximately 50 attendees—the target figure established by the current SC.

Designed to encourage deep collaboration, the workshop provides an intimate setting for researchers across a wide variety of disciplines. While predoctoral students form the core of the group, the event also integrates participants from both earlier and more advanced career stages. This professional landscape is reflected in the 2025 cohort—as illustrated in Figure 1C,ii,iii), the event attracts a wide range of academic stages and disciplines, creating a rich transdisciplinary dialogue.

For many participants, the horizontal nature of the workshop is its most empowering feature. ‘Being able to work with people at your own level is very much appreciated … without seniors in the middle and without authority, just shared interests,” as Emma Fraxanet, current member of the SC, remarks.

This peer-driven environment fosters a form of “professional normalisation” that is vital for mental health in academia. Emma also comments: “It is about seeing people in your same situation and realising you are not anything ‘weird’ or ‘extraordinary’—you’re just normal.”

The number of participants also facilitates engagement during lectures, encouraging active conversation between attendees and the speakers. As Simon DeDeo, speaker at the 2020 edition, remarked, “when you go beyond 40, you just have to lecture … and you can watch lectures on YouTube. If you have 40 students, you can actually have a conversation.”

The workshop also serves as a cornerstone for long-term career development, creating a unique cycle where participants eventually become the leaders of the community. An example of this “full-circle” trajectory is Alberto Antonioni who first attended as a participant, and later returned as an organiser for the Madrid edition, and then joined the Steering committee; he now frequently jokes that his ultimate goal is to complete the cycle by returning as an invited speaker.

To evaluate the consistency of the workshop’s multidisciplinary character, we analysed the self-declared academic backgrounds of participants, as in Figure 1C,iii), across several editions using word embeddings. Equivalent backgrounds were normalised, and by mapping participant backgrounds into a high-dimensional vector space, we calculated the average cosine distance between all disciplines for each year as a proxy for background diversity. We show the results in Figure 1C,iv). Even though we acknowledge the lack of comparable data from other workshops and the fact that the cosine distance is sensitive to the choice of the embedding model, the results demonstrate a stable trend over the past decade with diversity scores consistently hovering around 0.7, highlighting the workshop’s success in maintaining a stable multidisciplinary environment across different editions.

4 Networking

The WWCS has become a space where researchers can explore topics outside their primary areas of expertise, significantly strengthening their interdisciplinary communication and collaborative skills. It also offers an excellent opportunity to connect with researchers from different institutions from all around the world, as seen in Figure 1D), fostering professional relationships that can support future collaborations and career development. Miguel A. González, past member of the WWCS Steering Committee, recounts how connections initially formed at the WWCS later facilitated informal interactions at other scientific events, ultimately leading him to undertake a research stay abroad—an opportunity that he believes would not have arisen otherwise.

Furthermore, participants benefit from direct engagement with world-class experts across various disciplines. As an example, in the past 4 years workshop has hosted keynote talks from varied institutions like Stefan Thurner (CSH) and Alain Barrat (CNRS) in 2022, Fariba Karimi (CEU) and Karoline Wiesner (University of Potsdam) in 2023, Sofia Teixeira (University of Lisbon) in 2024, Leto Peel (Maastricht University) and Alessandro Galeazzi (University of Padova) in 2025 and Rafael Prieto-Curiel (CSH) and Carmen Cabrera (University of Liverpool) in 2026. These sessions have explored multifaceted topics including human mobility, crime, risk, echo chambers in social media, Bayesian inference, complex networks, social experimentation, and human behaviour, providing attendees with cutting-edge insights into both theoretical and applied complex systems science, while interacting in an informal environment.

Participants and organisers emphasise the strong sense of community that develops during the week, as well as the formation of lasting personal networks. “I don’t think you survive in academia if you are not in these networks … senior researchers are going to leave and we will be the ones left”, says Emma Fraxanet. Many participants became friends with people they met at the workshop, creating relationships that have since led to both scientific collaborations and enduring personal connections. “If I were locked here in my office, I’d be thinking: ‘I’ll finish my PhD and go to a company.’ But seeing this network gives me the desire to continue … I will not be alone competing against a bunch of people I don’t know, but working together with peers I admire and respect”.

5 Scientific outcome: projects and discussions

The legacy of these collaborations is tangible and defined by the diversity and originality of the research questions explored during the workshop. Participants often bring forward problems they are deeply curious about but which may not necessarily align with their primary research at their home institutions.

Projects covered a wide range of topics, from urban morphogenesis and music networks to the collective behaviour of ants and the application of network science to climate change.

A group of participants in the 2025 edition applied network modelling to study the resilience of the global food supply system. They performed a stress-test analysis of major crop types under different climate scenarios, accounting for variations in temperature and precipitation, and examined how yield reductions affect international trade patterns through a network-based shipping model.

During the same edition some other young researches participated in a project called “Altruism vs. Selfishness in a Collective Risk Game”. They explored the impact of altruism on decision-making in a public goods game, where individuals must balance self-interest with collective benefit. Their findings suggested that altruism significantly influences public decision-making, proving that more cooperative societies are more likely to achieve collective goals and attain higher overall satisfaction (Figure 2A).

Some other projects over the years have focused on urban systems, including the morphogenesis of cities through gamification and mapping approaches in the 2020 edition, and the study of historical and cultural dynamics in 2024, by modelling the city-size distribution of the Roman Empire using trade networks and resource distribution to reproduce urban growth patterns driven by trade routes and mining locations.

While the value of the WWCS lies partly on these projects and scientific discussions which may not constitute a published article, several research ideas initiated during the early editions of the workshop have evolved into full-scale studies, resulting in publications across a wide range of domains. Here, we cite some of them, as summarised in Table 1. These include social and behavioural dynamics, such as vulnerabilities in democratic electoral systems Raducha et al. (2025) or the cognitive transition between altruism and rationality Gallotti and Grujić (2019); ecological processes, such as parasite spreading in multiplex networks Stella et al. (2016), Stella et al. (2018); and theoretical contributions, including comprehensive reviews of signed networks Diaz-Diaz et al. (2025).

TABLE 1. Summary of a subset of the WWCS-derived research publications.

Another example is the study by Antonioni et al. (2019) which investigates the role of individual perception in game-theoretic models. In this work, the effects of individuals’ perceptions of payoffs in two-player games are analysed, considering settings in which prior experiences and outcomes shape their perceptions. The authors introduce an evolutionary game-theoretic framework in which agents may perceive the same interaction differently. Using alternative interpretations of a social interaction (e.g., Prisoner’s Dilemma versus Harmony Game) as an illustrative example, they demonstrate that the interplay between perception dynamics and payoff structure generates emergent non-linear phenomena absent in each game individually, including phase transitions, oscillatory behaviour, and polarisation. Combining analytical methods with multi-agent simulations, the study shows how microscopic heterogeneity in perceptions can give rise to complex macroscopic dynamics, providing new insights into the emergence of cooperation and its dependence on individual preferences.

Furthermore, in a very different domain, the work by Teixeira et al. (2021) addresses the challenge of characterising cognitive and emotional states in suicidal ideation by integrating cognitive network science, psycholinguistics, and semantic frame theory. By constructing network representations of suicide notes, the authors reveal structured relationships between semantic concepts and emotional states, uncovering a higher degree of structural balance than expected from null or baseline linguistic models (Figure 2B). Their results show pronounced affective compartmentalisation, with positive concepts forming cohesive clusters that dominate the global structure, while self-related perceptions remain associated with negative emotional content. These findings provide new insights into the organisation of meaning and emotion in extreme cognitive states, with potential implications for suicide prevention research.

Collectively, the aforementioned publications provide tangible proof of concept, demonstrating that the WWCS’s unique environment fosters the interdisciplinary skills and long-term collaborations necessary to address complex problems across disparate fields.

6 Future directions

Although the WWCS has welcomed participants from institutions around the world, its participant base remains predominantly European, as seen in Figure 1D. Increasing geographic diversity represents both a challenge and an opportunity for the coming years. To address this, the workshop actively strives to facilitate global attendance; depending on available funding each year, travel grants are offered specifically to enable participation from distant regions outside Europe or for researchers lacking institutional support. Through these bursaries, the WWCS has already succeeded in welcoming attendees primarily from South America and Asia, as well as from Europe and other continents.

Broadening participation from under-represented regions would enrich the interdisciplinary and intercultural exchange that lies at the heart of the workshop, while further advancing its commitment to accessibility and inclusion. Achieving this goal fully, however, will likely require new funding mechanisms, stronger international partnerships, and continued efforts to minimise financial barriers to participation. As the workshop is organised primarily by early-career researchers on a voluntary basis, sustained support from international institutions, scientific organisations, and funding agencies will be crucial. Such support would not only facilitate broader participation but also help preserve and strengthen an initiative that provides valuable opportunities for young researchers to build international networks, develop organisational and leadership skills, and engage with a diverse scientific community early in their careers.

By prioritising horizontal collaboration over traditional academic top-down structures, the Winter Workshop on Complex Systems has established a sustainable, self-organised model for training the next generation of complexity scientists. Over more than a decade, its success has demonstrated that a peer-driven, economically accessible environment is not only desired by early-career researchers but is also a powerful catalyst for enduring interdisciplinary collaborations. As we look toward the next decade, we invite the global community to engage with our mission, share new perspectives, and join us in fostering this resilient space for scientific discovery. We encourage readers to connect with us, explore our past projects, and participate in the continued evolution of this community-led initiative.

Author’s note

This work was conducted in the context of the Steering Committee of the Winter Workshop on Complex Systems.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Rosa Maria Benito, Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain

Reviewed by: Díaz-Téllez, Ángel Saúl, National Open and Distance University, Colombia

Fabian Zarta Rojas, Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios, Colombia