Call for Papers COMMUNITIES & TECHNOLOGIES (C&T 2003): An International Conference IMPORTANT DATES: March 14, 2003: Submission deadline for papers April 22, 2003: Notification of acceptance May 21, 2003: Submission of camera-ready copies September 19 to 21, 2003: Conference held in Amsterdam (or Bonn) CONFERENCE CHAIRS: Marleen Huysman, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands Etienne Wenger, Cp Square, San Jose, USA Volker Wulf, University of Siegen and Fraunhofer FIT, Germany THEME More and more, the relationship between communities and technology is a topic of major research interest. ‘C&T’ conference serve as a forum for stimulating and disseminating research into all facets of communities supported by 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: - (virtual) community formation and development - communities of practice, knowledge sharing and organizational learning - appropriation of communityware - communities and innovation - communities of interest versus communities of practice - virtual communities versus location based communities - regional networks and B2B E-commerce - digital cities - communities in developmental organizations - return on investment in communities - communities and business models - consumer communities and electronic commerce - ethnographical studies of virtual communities - case studies of community building and development - social capital and communities - communityware: support or hindrance - design methods for communityware - innovative applications in the field of communityware - architectures for communityware - interoperability among community systems - innovative user interfaces for communityware - privacy and security issues for communityware WORKSHOPS Workshops will take place on 19 September 2003. Workshop proposals should be submitted to the workshop chair: Erik Andriessen, TU Delft, The Netherlands: [log in to unmask] PROCEEDINGS The proceedings will be published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. PROGRAMME COMMITTEE Mark Ackerman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA Erik Andriessen, TU Delft, The Netherlands Peter van Baalen, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, The Netherlands Andreas Becks, Fraunhofer FIT, Aachen, Germany Peter van den Besselaar, NIWI, The Netherlands John Seely Brown, Palo Alto, USA Amy Bruckman, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA John Carroll, Virginia Tech, USA Elisabeth Davenport, Napier University, Edinburgh, UK Bente Elkjaer, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Giorgio de Michelis, University of Milano Bicocca, Milano, Italy Gerhard Fischer, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA Thomas Herrmann, University of Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany Bart van den Hooff, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Yasmin Kafai, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Wendy Kellogg, IBM Research, USA Paul Keursten, University of Twente, ‘Kessels and Smit’, The Netherlands Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen, Germany Timothy Koschman, Southern Illinois University, Chicago, USA Kari Kuutti, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Helmut Krmar, Technical University of Munich, Germany Ulrike Lechner, University of Bremen, Germany Dorothy Leonard, Harvard University, USA Henry Lieberman, MIT MediaLab, Cambridge, USA Peter Mambrey, Fraunhofer-FIT, Germany Mark Maybury, MITRE, USA Anders Morch, University of Oslo, Norway Keiichi Nakata, University of Tokio, Tokio, Japan Bernhard Nett, University of Freiburg and Fraunhofer-FIT, Germany Wolfgang Prinz, Fraunhofer-FIT, Sankt Augustin, Germany Larry Prusak, IBM, Cambridge, USA Volkmar Pipek, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany Markus Rohde, International Institute for Socio-Informatics, Bonn, Germany Harry Scarbrough, Warwick Business School, UK Johann Schlichter, TU Munich, Munich, Germany Kjeld Schmidt, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark Doug Schuler, Evergreen State College, Seattle, USA Ulrike Schultze, Cox Business School, USA Gerhard Schwabe, University of Zurich, Switzerland Carla Simone, University of Milano Bicocca, Italy Gerry Stahl, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA Charles Steinfield, Michigan State University, USA Yao Hua Tan, Vrije University Amsterdam, The Netherlands Suzanne Weisband, University of Arizona, USA Barry Wellman, University of Toronto, Canada