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/journals
Submission in pdf electronic format should be emailed to
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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, Indiana University, USA
Ingrid Mulder, Telematica Institute, The Netherlands
Keith Cheverst, Lancaster University, UK
Matt Jones, Swansea University, UK
Mike Best, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Nic Bidwell, James Cook University, Australia
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