The International Institute for Socio-Informatics takes pride in hosting the www-site of the conference series "International Conference on Communities & Technologies (C&T)" which is a biannual series of meetings started in Amsterdam 2003.
The C&T conference series is the leading international forum to discuss the relationship between communities and technology. C&T is committed to high scientific quality. The average acceptance rate of papers has been between 20 - 25 %.
Communities – both physical and virtual - are social entities whose actors share common needs, interests, or practices: they constitute the basic units of social experience. For a number of reasons, researchers are increasingly interested in communities. First, within a global knowledge-based society, communities play a pivotal role. Problems such as new forms of political participation and civic engagement, the maintenance of cultural identities, or the integration of minorities need to be tackled on the community level. Second, communities also re-shape the processes of learning and sharing knowledge in and among organizations. Communities are believed to be important social aggregates to create or share knowledge and expertise.
Third, inter-organizational cooperation is nowadays often realized in terms of B2B-marketplaces, supply chain management, virtual organizations, or strategic alliances. Many failed attempts to implement these approaches can be attributed to inadequate attention to community issues in the sense of the social embeddedness of collective action.
Finally, virtual communities have the potential to change the relationship between producers and consumers.
Information technologies may support or hinder these and other types of communities. New phenomena such as blocks, podcasting, social matchmaking, user generated content, cyber infrastructures for the sciences, neighbourhood networks, open source communities, and the popularity of concepts such as social capital or of social network software illustrate the diverse areas for research into the multifaceted interdependence between communities and innovative technologies. There are still considerable research challenges ahead of us.
