The 4th Industrial Revolution, 21st Century Engagement: What's it Mean? and How to Engage?

Community well-being and health are directly linked to how we address our changing environment, socioeconomic conditions, and the automating workforce. Societal challenges are demanding new partnerships to develop new community engagement tactics that strengthen these connections between our natural environment, our educational institutions, and the economy. Themes are emerging around sustainability and resilience, but in order find effective solutions in these areas we must acquire the knowledge, skills, and a mindset that brings forth a 21st century engagement program that keeps our practitioners and educators (P&Es) relevant to their communities’ needs. My intention is to provide background and resources for engagement in a technology-driven, digitizing world that is on the onset of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Our society is at a unique convergence of social, digital, and biological systems that are rewriting the narrative of how we want to live. How P&Es design their engagement programs will be critical, and defining humans’ intentions of today as a precursor will influence new program design. Effective engagement requires the inclusion of relevant partnerships, but also facilitating higher expectations than to simply work to be less bad, less repetitious, less unsafe, less just, because today societal challenges are demanding a more aggressive and absolute standard of a diverse, safe, healthy, and just world with clean air, clean water, clean soil, and clean energy. Community engagement must happen at all levels of society, from the individual, the personal, the institutional, and the global to adapt to today's societal challenges, but also adapt to technological challenges that are redefining what it means to be human, what it means to work, and to be embedded in a community. More than 30 percent of the world uses social media platforms to connect, learn, and share information. This can provide opportunities for cross-cultural understanding and cohesion, but it can also create propaganda and unrealistic expectations as to what constitutes successes, as well as offers opportunities for extreme ideologies to spread. P&Es will have to weigh technology's by-path of greater inequality and disruption to the workforce or a net increase to a safer rewarding workforce and higher quality of life. The reality is probably a blending scenario. New technologies make assets more durable and resilient, while data and analytics are transforming how they are maintained and applied. Humans have always used tools, but now our tools are becoming exponentially advanced and augmenting themselves in all sorts of new ways that is requiring new education, new workforce training, and new engagement systems.Technology can be a tool to continuously innovate, learn, and apply a growth mindset to everything people do, especially around engagement and P&Es must not let technology diminish compassion and communal cooperation.AUTHOR AFFILIATION: Meghan Thoreau, OSU Extension educator, community development/STEM, thoreau.1@osu.edu (Corresponding Author).Community well-being and health are directly linked to how we address our changing environment, the socioeconomic conditions, and the automating workforce. Societal challenges are demanding new partnerships to develop new community engagement tactics that strengthen these connections between our natural environment, our educational institutions, and the economy. Themes are emerging around sustainability and resilience; but to find effective solutions in these areas, we must acquire the knowledge, skills, and a mindset that brings forth a 21st century engagement program that keeps our practitioners and educators relevant to their communities’ needs. My intention is to provide background and resources for engagement in a technology-driven, digitizing world that is on the onset of the 4th Industrial Revolution