Prato 2009: Call for Papers: Community Informatics Practice

Apologize for cross-posting:


CALL FOR PAPERS: CIRN 2009: Empowering communities: learning from community
informatics practice.

4-6 November 2009 Monash University Prato Centre, Italy. For more
information,
or to submit an abstract for a referred or non-refereed paper, the PhD
colloquium, a workshop or a poster session, please go to www.ccnr.prato2009/

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT & CALL FOR PAPERS

We are seeking abstracts and proposals from academics, practitioners and PhD
students for this exciting conference and workshop event at the Monash
University Centre, Prato Italy (near Florence).

The Centre for Community Networking Research, Monash (www.ccnr.net), in
conjunction with the Community Informatics Research Network
(www.ciresearch.net), and sponsors has held highly successful annual events
since 2003, as well as associated workshops over the years, in the UK,
France, and Portugal.

The conference has an increasing representation of delegates from
Francophone and Spanish-speaking countries, and we welcome your attendance.
While the official conference language is English, if there are sufficient
papers for either language, language-specific sessions will be arranged.

This conference is also being run in conjunction with the IDIA2009
Conference

28-30 October 2009 Kruger National Park, South Africa, Digitally Empowering
Communities: Learning from Development Informatics Practice,

KEY DATES

* 1 April 2009: abstracts due for consideration - the earlier the better.
* 1 May 2009 : acceptance/rejection of abstracts. Refereed papers are blind
peer reviewed.
* 1 July 2009 : papers due
* 1 September 2009: final version of papers after blind peer review (for
academic papers) for publication in the official conference proceedings.

MAIN THEME

The idea of 'empowerment' has a number of special connotations in the
Community Informatics space. Community Informatics is an approach to
empowering communities with information and communication technologies.
There is a widespread expectation that Community Informatics will enhance
democracy, develop social capital, build communities, develop economies and
empower individuals and groups, and result in many different forms of social
change.

Community Informatics, in bringing together communities and technologies,
works across at least three dimensions, though there may be others which are
relevant.

* The Context and Values held by different stakeholders in Community
Informatics
* The Processes and Methodologies which are brought to bear in Community
Informatics
* The Systems (both technical and human) which are brought to bear in
Community Informatics

We use cases or examples of projects and programs to consider the
intersection between these three dimensions. The different interpretations
that can be given to the concept of 'empowerment' gives rise to a number key
questions about the relationships between the different dimensions of
community informatics and how we describe and analyze the communities and
cases we work with.

Keynotes will be delivered by Aldo de Moor (Community Sense, Netherlands)
and Leopoldina Fortunati (Univ. of Udine, Italy).

COST: Registration will be approximately 310eu, with substantial reductions
for PhD students and delegates from developing countries. Costs include
first class Italian catering.


SPONSORS:Monash University; CIS University of Washington; Turabo University;
SLIS, University of Illinois-Champaign; SLIS, Marseilles.

Other inquiries-- prato2009 AT fastmail.fm