C&T 2017 – Communities & Technology Workshop

Digital participation is emerging as a key issue for researchers, designers, educators, industry and others as government policy increasingly seeks to include people in decision-making about all aspects of their lives. Yet, that tends to focus predominantly on mainstream communities of highly urbanised settlements, often neglecting segments of society lacking access to resources, digital technology or telecommunications infrastructure. Likewise, people from diverse and marginalised backgrounds, or who are socially excluded, such as people living with disability, the elderly, disadvantaged youth and women, people identifying as LGBTQIA, refugees and migrants, Indigenous people and others, are particularly vulnerable to digital under-participation, thereby compounding disadvantage.  

This C&T 2017 workshop proposes to identify practical, innovative, and sensitive design solutions to support digital participation and foster digital skills for disadvantaged communities; investigate the role of proxies in digital inclusion; and discuss design strategies for sustaining digital inclusion in the long term.
 
The workshop extends the themes discussed on a related workshop, at OzCHI 2016, Launceston, Australia. This iteration seeks to further the investigation into strategies for designing participation for the digital fringe in urban and regional environments, as well as within and across a diverse range of communities.

We invite the submission of 1-page abstracts (using the ACM recommended templates) that describe experiences of:

  • Fostering digital skills within or across communities.
  • Designing, developing, adapting and utilising technology for digital inclusion in regional or urban environments.
  • The role of proxies and champions for supporting digital inclusion and participation.
  • Researcher strategies for recognising and responding to sensitivities during the research process.
  • Sustaining digital inclusion beyond the life of the research project.

Abstracts should also clearly outline:

a.        what the addressed communities are;
b.       what characterizes their digital exclusion;
c.        the reasons behind it (e.g. affordability; social exclusion; cultural factors; etc.), and
d.       how the presented research contributes to enhancement, better understanding and advancement of design participation for the digital fringe.

Submissions should be sent in .pdf format to Hilary Davis at hdavis at swin.edu.au and Luke Hespanhol atluke.hespanhol t sydney.edu.au

Abstracts will be reviewed by a committee of experts and selected on the basis of relevance to the workshop, quality of presentation, and potential to stimulate discussion. At least one author of each accepted submission must register for the workshop.

The workshop will run for a full day, with the main objective of critiquing and debating submissions by participants, leading to a collaborative understanding of the field that can be captured as a special edition of a high-quality peer reviewed journal.

Important Dates:

  • Deadline for submission: 16 May 2017
  • Notification of acceptance: 26 May 2017
  • Workshop day: 27 June 2017