[Air-l] Call for Papers Digital Cities 3 Workshop

[Peter van den Besselaar]

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[Apologies if you receive this more than once]


CALL FOR PAPERS

DIGITAL CITIES III
local information and communication infrastructures:
experiences and challenges

A workshop organized within the context of the
Communities and Technologies Conference Amsterdam 19-21 September 2003

The relationship between technologies and communities is ambiguous.
On the one hand, changing technologies of communication and cooperation have
facilitated the changes in the way people relate to each other. Wellman
has introduced the concept of networked individualism for this (3), and
this points at the phenomenon that people often participate in a variety of
only partly overlapping and often non-local communities. On the other
hand, the role of place remains crucial important, as the local environment
remains an important place of organizing and coordinating social life.

Digital cities are developing on the intersection of these two phenomena:
network and place. Digital cities can be seen as an effort to develop and
use ICT-applications for the improvement of the local and urban
infrastructure for living, working, collaboration, and communication within
a networked society. Many experiments have taken place and are still taking
place all over the world (see 1, 2, 3 for overviews), showing a large
variation.

- Some are developing advanced cutting edge technologies, others use
established and well known technologies.
- Some are mainly technological projects that aim at demonstrating the
potential usefulness, while others are mainly social development projects,
using the technology as an instrument for supporting the development of
deprived groups, neighborhoods or regions.
- Some are very resourceful, whereas others are low budget initiatives.
- Finally, where some digital cities are merely (temporary) experiments,
others are meant as sustainable part of the local infrastructures.

The nature, functioning, use and sustainability of digital cities is highly
dependent on contextual factors such as the political and social context,
the actors involved with their different aims and resources, the
organizational forms, and choices for certain technical solutions.
Especially the arena of actors and organizations involved is a crucial
factor in the development of digital cities.

In the workshop we will discuss the state of the art in digital city
experimentation and research, and build upon the lessons of the earlier
workshops organized in Kyoto.

We invite papers on the following topics, but the list is not exclusive.
- Technologies for digital cities and community networks: development and
especially evaluation of infrastructures, systems, and tools. What is
'appropriate technology' in this field?
- Organizational forms of digital cities and community networks: the
question of ownership and resources of local information an communication
infrastructures.
- ICT and social change in urban environment on different levels: examples,
empirical studies, theoretical understanding.
- Real and virtual public domain: differences, analogies, implications.
- Interdisciplinary design approaches, methods and theories for community
systems.
- Digital cities / community networks and problems of privacy and identity.

The objective of the workshop is to evaluate the state of the art in the
field, and to formulate perspectives for research and for socio-technical
design.

REFERENCES:
(1) Toru Ishida, Communityware and social interaction. Lecture Notes in
Computer Science 1519 (1998).
(2) Toru Ishida & Karen Isbister, Digital Cities: experiences, trends,
perspectives. Lecture Notes in Computer Science  1765 (2000).
(3) Makoto Tanabe, Peter van den Besselaar & Toru Ishida, Digital Cities 2,
computational and sociological approaches. Lecture Notes in Computer Science
2362 (2002).


FORMAT OF THE WORKSHOP:
The workshop will last a whole day and will have 4 two-hours sessions, with
a maximum of 25 participants. We aim at a discussion between social
scientists, computer scientists, and practitioners with experience in
constructive, reflective, and empirical research in the field of digital
cities. To emphasize the cross-cultural dimensions of the research field, we
will have three invited speakers from Japan, the USA, and Europe.

Participants have a full paper by the end of August, to be distributed
(electronically) among participants in advance. The discussion in the
workshop will be organized around the main themes in the papers, as well as
the new ideas and results. We aim at publishing revised versions of the
workshop papers in a volume.

IMPORTANT DATES:
-       Extended abstract due June 7 (2500 words).
-       Author notification June 21
-       Full papers (10-15 pages) August 31
-       Revised (accepted) papers November 1


EXTENDED ABSTRACT:
The extended abstract should in 2500 words clearly summarize the work and
results that will be fully described in the paper:
- For social science papers: clearly describe in the abstract the research
questions, the data and methods used, an indication of the findings and of
the
relevance of the findings.
- For technology papers: clearly describe the abstract in the design
approach and motivation of decisions made, the resulting system, and
possibly an evaluation. (design theory, perspective, considerations,
description of system plus evaluation).

Please send your extended abstract to: submit at digitalcity.jst.go.jp

Format of the final version of the paper:
Please format the final version of your paper using the Lecture Notes in

Computer Science (Springer Verlag) formatting instructions for MsWord or
LaTeX:
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html#authors


CONTACT:
Workshop Website:	 Www.digitalcity.jst.go.jp/conferences/
For contacting us: workshop at digitalcity.jst.go.jp


ORGANIZERS:
Peter van den Besselaar	Social Sciences Department
				Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information
				Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences
Satoshi Koizumi		Digital City Research Center,
				Japan Science and Technology Corp.


PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Jun-ichi Akahani		NTT Communication Science Laboratory, Japan
Allesandro Aurigi		University of Newcastle, UK
Fiorella De Cindio	University of Milano, Italy
Noshir Contractor		University of Illinois, USA
Vanessa Evers		University of Amsterdam
Toru Ishida			Kyoto University, Japan
Satoshi Koizumi		Digital City Research Center, JST Corp, Japan.
Peter Mambrey		FIT Fraunhofer Gesellschaft & Duisburg University,
Germany
Carolien Metselaar	City of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Doug Schuler		Evergreen State College, USA
Sheng HuanYe		Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Peter van den Besselaar	NIWI-KNAW, Amsterdam, The Netherlands



SPONSORS:
NIWI-KNAW, Social Sciences Department, the Netherlands
Kyoto University, Japan
Japan Science and Technology Corp., Japan