Subject: [NEXTEL-1] CFP: Digital Cities

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 12:17:34 -0400

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  ** Call for Papers ** 

Digital Cities 3:

     local information and communication infrastructures: 
          experiences and challenges

A workshop organized within the context of the 
Communities 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, other 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

The extended abstract (2500 words) should 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: [email-masked]

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: [email-masked]

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			Public Sphere Project (CPSR) & The 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

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