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From: gaz <gary.marsden@gmail.com> Date: August 5, 2008 9:59:24 AM GMT+03:00 To: hci4d <hci4d@googlegroups.com> Subject: [hci4d] Call for Papers: Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Special Issue

Call for Papers: Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Special Issue:

Bridging the Digital Divide: Experiences and Perspectives

Editors

Lucia Terrenghi, Vodafone GROUP Services R&D, Germany

Gary Marsden, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Synopsis

For a portion of the global population, communication capabilities have reached the status of a commodity. Some of us can afford a complex portfolio of communication genres, such as voice over mobile networks, voice over IP, e-mails, sms, mms, instant messaging…The list is long and diverse, and we, as members of the industrialized society, have developed a vocabulary and a semantics of communication genres. These guides our use of one or another particular genre according to the context, to our recipient, to our personal lifestyles and objectives for self-expression and communication. One could actually say that we have developed a culture of communication around the media we can dispose of. Furthermore, our lives and economy in industrialized societies heavily rely on communication technologies (e.g., business, banking, health, public services, and security). We sometimes take for granted, though, that such communication capabilities are equally distributed globally. Similarly, we take for granted that our communication culture, heavily relying on digital media, can be understood and shared globally. Like water and food, one can rather think of communication capabilities as a resource (fulfilling a human need) we are globally sharing and responsible for: in these terms, we need to acknowledge that digital communication is a resource that at present is not equally and democratically distributed in the world. As such, work must be done to “give voice” to those portions of the population which are cut out from the global discourse, so as to preserve cultural diversity and contribute to filling the economical gap.

This special issue of the Personal and Ubiquitous Computing journal aims at collecting experiences and perspectives which address the bridging of the digital divide. With the term “digital divide”, we in fact address the communication divide, and the lack of digital communication capabilities in terms of access and generation of content.

Topics which are relevant for this issue include, although are not limited to:

- elicitation of requirements in unconnected communities (methodologies, results…)

- projects aiming at bridging the digital divide: successes, failures, lessons learned

- guidelines and/or manifestos for an HCI agenda in unconnected communities (e.g., rural areas, developing countries, elderly people, disabled people)

- examples of appropriation of a communication technology in a community previously unconnected

- examples/ideas about how to sensitize social responsibility in the networked society (e.g., recycling hardware, stimulating social networks…)

Submission details

Submissions should be between 3000 and 4000 words and authors are encouraged to use the Springer guidelines for authors, available at ftp://ftp.springer.de/pub/Word/journal

Submission in pdf electronic format should be emailed to bridgingdivide@vodafone.com

Important dates

15 September: deadline for abstract submission (300 words)

03 November: deadline for full paper submission

24 November: notification of acceptance and changes requests for camera ready version

08 December: camera ready version due

Reviewing Committee:

Abigail Sellen, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK

Andy Dearden, Sheffield Hallam University, UK

Ann Light, Sheffield Hallam University, UK

Anxo Cereijo-Roibas, Vodafone GROUP Services, UK

Derrick L. Cogburn, Syracuse University, USA

Edwin Blake, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Eli Blevis, University of Indiana, USA

Ingrid Mulder, Telematica Institute, The Netherlands

Keith Cheverst, Lancaster University, UK

Matt Jones, Swansea University, UK

Mike Best, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

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