Digital Cities 3: local information and communication infrastructures: experiences and challenges

Please note:

Submission of a paper for a workshop is directly to the workshop organizers. When accepted for a workshop, registration to the conference and the workshop is through the conference website only.

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)

The extended abstract 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: submit@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

Sponsors

NIWI-KNAW, Social Sciences Department, the Netherlands

Kyoto University, Japan

Japan Science and Technology Corp., Japan