This year we have 6 exciting workshops happening on Saturday, June 27 and Sunday, June 28. You can find more information about each workshop below or by visiting the workshop’s web site.
The venue for the workshops is the Engineering Research Building, University of Limerick.
June 27 2015 (Saturday):
- CulTech2015: Cultural Diversity and Technology Design
- Digital Cities 9
- Data, profiling and communities
June 28 2015 (Sunday):
- Cultural Heritage Communities: Technologies and Challenges
- Connected Sustainability: connecting sustainability-driven, grass-roots communities through technology
- Encouraging Collective Intelligence for the Common Good: How Do We Integrate the Disparate Pieces?
CulTech2015: Cultural Diversity and Technology Design
Workshop website: https://cultech2015.wordpress.com/
June 27, 2015 (Saturday)
About the workshop:
With globalization and technological advances, people are increasingly coming into contact with others from different cultural backgrounds, particularly in place-based and virtual communities. Yet, cultural diversity – the diversity of community members’ cultural backgrounds – offers both significant benefits and challenges in the design, usage and evaluation of technologies. In this one-day workshop, we explore the role of cultural diversity in potentially informing, supporting, challenging or impacting the design of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) within community contexts. To delve into this complex and multi-faceted space, we welcome workshop submissions that 1) engage broadly with the role of culture within technology design and usage for, with and by communities, as well as 2) proposals for approaches, tools, conceptual and methodological frameworks, case studies and best practices in community-based design that exploit cultural diversity as an asset and seek to encourage intercultural interactions. Our goal is to bring together academics and practitioners from different domains such as computer science, urban design, interactive art, anthropology and social sciences who share a common interest in exploring the design space of ICTs, culture and communities.
Workshop website: http://themobilecity.nl/dc9/
June 27, 2015 (Saturday)
About the workshop:
The DC9 workshop takes place on June 27, 2015 in Limerick, Ireland and is titled “Hackable Cities: From Subversive City Making to Systemic Change”. The notion of “hacking” originates from the world of media technologies but is increasingly often being used for creative ideals and practices of city making. “City hacking” evokes more participatory, inclusive, decentralized, playful and subversive alternatives to often top-down ICT implementations in smart city making. However, these discourses about “hacking the city” are used ambiguously and are loaded with various ideological presumptions, which makes the term also problematic. For some “urban hacking” is about empowering citizens to organize around communal issues and perform aesthetic urban interventions. For others it raises questions about governance: what kind of “city hacks” should be encouraged or not, and who decides? Can city hacking be curated? For yet others, trendy participatory buzzwords like these are masquerades for deeply libertarian neoliberal values. Furthermore, a question is how “city hacking” may mature from the tactical level of smart and often playful interventions to the strategic level of enduring impact. The Digital Cities 9 workshop welcomes papers that explore the idea of “hackable city making” in constructive and critical ways.
Data, profiling and communities – Invited workshop offered by the Tactical Technology Collective
June 27, 2015 (Saturday)
About the workshop:
For this workshop we will look at the impact of technologies on communities. Technologies harness a lot of potential for amplifying the work of communities, in both engagement, activism and organizing.
However, technologies have also brought about new challenges to different communities. In this workshop we will specifically want to explore what challenges surrounding data, profiling and communities. Here we want to focus on the abilities and limits of communities to control data that is collected, aggregated and used about them by companies and governments. In the workshop we will explore the digital traces of communities, the workings of the data industry and how this impacts communities. The workshop will be a collaborative and hands on space in which we practically come and understand issue around data and share knowledge and experiences. Prior to the workshop, we welcome submissions at tacticaltech@comtech.community. Please send us your name, background in working with communities and what you are specifically interested in to discuss.
Cultural Heritage Communities: Technologies and Challenges
Workshop website: https://culturalheritagecommunities.wordpress.com/
June 28, 2015 (Sunday)
About the workshop:
This workshop will explore the role of technology supporting and mediating cultural heritage practices for both professional communities (cultural heritage professionals, heritage institutions, etc.) and civic communities (citizen-led heritage initiatives, heritage volunteers, personal and community identified heritage, heritage crowdsourcing, etc.). The workshop – which aims to attract participants from heritage studies and practice, community engagement, digital humanities, design and human-centred computing – will discuss challenges and future opportunities for technology use and for design and participatory processes in the context of various heritage communities, and the role of different stakeholders in engaging with heritage in a technologically-mediated way.
Connected Sustainability: connecting sustainability-driven, grass-roots communities through technology
Workshop website: http://connectedsustainability.wordpress.com/
June 28, 2015 (Sunday)
About the workshop:
Recently, global economic turmoil has led to the rise of many grass-roots movements and communities that share a strong sustainability agenda and the desire for political, economic and societal change in the world. Digital technologies play a role in supporting these growing communities in achieving their goals, maintaining and extending their practices and connections. This marks a new area of research for HCI, that of Connected Sustainability. We propose the term Connected Sustainability to emphasise a focus that extends beyond the individual, towards communities, with shared commitments, interests and practices, that are considered within their social, political and infrastructural context. Furthermore, Connected Sustainability addresses the challenge of integrating digital technologies to connect communities and promote sustained positive change. In this workshop, we seek to understand the values and practices of such communities; the role of digital technologies in shaping and sustaining identity and community action; and existing challenges and opportunities.
Encouraging Collective Intelligence for the Common Good: How Do We Integrate the Disparate Pieces?
Workshop website: http://ci4cg.org/C&T2015Workshop/
June 28, 2015 (Sunday)
About the workshop:
Largely due to the Internet and the increase in digital network communications worldwide, researchers, community members, activists, and many others are exploring new ways of empowering citizens with systems that promote Collective Intelligence for the Common Good (CI4CG). We define CI4CG as a distinctive type of collective intelligence, which emerges in civic contexts; it is aimed at generating societal good; improving civic engagement; enabling democratic decision making and deliberation; and producing, collectively built and owned, transformative solutions to complex societal challenges.
In this workshop we will survey a variety of online tools and discuss what aspects of CI4CG they are intended to address and how they would be used by communities. We will consider how developers could collaborate in the future and what future work, including collaborating with people outside of academia, is needed. An important part of the work will be identifying approaches towards integrating the tools technologically and socially. We will try to identify frameworks and mechanisms that various systems could leverage. The main output of the workshop will be a short report that incorporates the general threads of the workshop. We also intend to discuss the possibility of a special issue or book based on the workshop.