Communities and technologies (C&T 2003)

Citation

(2003), "Communities and technologies (C&T 2003)", Kybernetes, Vol. 32 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2003.06732dab.001

Communities and technologies (C&T 2003)

Conferences

Communities and technologies (C&T 2003)

International Conference, Amsterdam, The Netherlands19-21 September 2003

More and more relationship between communities and technology is a topic of major research interest. “C&T” Conference serves as a forum for stimulating and disseminating research into all facets of communities and information technology.

The nature of the field requires multidisciplinary research efforts involving researchers from different fields of applied computer science (Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Information Retrieval, Human Computer Interaction, Information Systems) and social sciences (Economics, Management Science, Psychology, Political Science, Sociology, Ethnography, Discourse Analysis).

Communities are social entities whose actors share common needs, interests, or practices: they constitute the basic units of social experience. For a number of reasons, researchers are increasingly interested in the topic of communities. First, within a global knowledge-based society, communities play a pivotal role. Problems such as new forms of political participation and civic engagement, the maintenance of cultural identities, or the integration of minorities need to be tackled on the community level. Second, communities also re-shape the processes of learning and sharing knowledge in and among organizations. While earlier approaches focused on storing and retrieving explicit knowledge represented in documents, communities are believed to be important structures to share implicit situated knowledge, as well. Given a new dimension by the use of electronic networks, inter-organizational cooperation is nowadays often discussed in terms of B2B-Marketplaces, Supply Chain Management, Virtual Organizations, or Strategic Alliances. Many failed attempts to implement these approaches can be attributed to inadequate attention to the issues of communities. Finally, new types of communities, e.g. on-line communities, might change the relationships between producer and consumer.

Information technologies may support or hinder these and other types of communities by enabling communication among (virtual) community members. Research issues include trust-building, maintaining (awareness of) social relations, increase or decrease of social capital, visualization of social relationships, matching (unknown) actors, bridging between physical and electronically-mediated interaction, etc.

The conference will focus on presentation and discussion of empirical and conceptual research. Topics covered by the conference include, but are not restricted to the following subjects:

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  (virtual) community formation and development;

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  communities of practice, knowledge sharing and organizational learning;

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  appropriation of communityware;

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  communities and innovation;

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  communities of interest versus communities of practice;

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  virtual communities versus location based communities;

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  regional networks and B2B E-commerce;

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  digital cities;

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  communities in developmental organizations;

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  return on investment in communities;

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  communities and business models;

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  consumer communities and electronic commerce;

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  ethnographical studies of virtual communities;

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  case studies of community building and development;

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  social capital and communities;

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  communityware: support or hindrance;

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  design methods for communityware;

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  innovative applications in the field of communityware;

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  architectures for communityware;

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  interoperability among community systems;

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  innovative user interfaces for communityware;

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  privacy and security issues for communityware.

A programme committee has been appointed which consists of 45 international members with important interests in this area of endeavour.

The conference chairs are:

Marleen Huysman, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands Etienne Wenger, Cp Square, San Jose, USAVolker Wulf, University of Siegen and Fraunhofer FIT, Germany

Details of the conference and the Web site to be accessed for more information are given in the Special Announcements Section of this journal Issue.