[URBANTH-L][african-voices] Call for papers - Makerere University, Uganda

[Gianluca Miscione]

Please distribute widely

In order to facilitate accessibility to our text in all conditions, I've
attached the call in MSWord format, as HTML, and pasted it below, also.
It's online here:

http://docs.google.com/View?id=ajfr5cm33w54_496grn847cp
<http://docs.google.com/View?id=ajfr5cm33w54_496grn847cp> 

 

 

 

 

Call for Participation


ICT and Development


Research Voices from Africa


 

International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP)

Technical Commission 9 - Computing and Society

 

Workshop

At Makerere University, Uganda

22-23 March 2010

 

 

 

"ICT for development" has attracted wide attention for several years
now. Often we hear about ICT in Africa, much more rarely about ICT from
African voices. Why did our knowledge about the correlations between ICT
and the economy and society fail to develop ICT to support development?
Is the mainstream model of conceptualising and implementing ICT4D
applicable in the African context? What are the alternatives to dominant
approaches?

 

This workshop is intended to provide a forum for discussion of ICT
research approaches and findings that emerged from and relevant to the
African contexts. We are particularly interested in receiving written
submissions from African researchers in ICT for development, and from
African intellectuals outside the mainstream ICT-based approach to
economic growth and social improvements. 

 

We welcome explanatory papers, aiming at analysis and understanding of
ICT in actual African contexts. More precisely, the workshop invites
short papers in the following focal areas:

*   discontinuities between the African context and dominant ICT
paradigm

*   role of information, and ICT, within Africa and between Africa and
the rest of the world 

*   barriers against Africa's adoption, appropriation and autonomous use
of ICT 

*   cultural issues that may shape ICT adoption in unexpected ways

*   alternative strategies of ICT implementation and sustainability in
Africa

*   uncertainty, unpredictability, risk and serendipity related to ICT
initiatives

*   role of ICT in empowerment, illiteracy, poverty eradication, and
human development in Africa.

 

 

The workshop is intended to be informal and inclusive in order to
provide a "bigger picture" of ICT in Africa. We welcome participants
from academic institutions engaged in similar research, governmental and
non-governmental organizations, public and private sector
representatives, entrepreneurs and grass-root movements, civil society
and ICT practitioners.

 

 

Submissions

We call for submission of short papers, in the form of long abstracts,
up to 2000 words. Please send them as email attachments to this address:

african-voices at googlegroups.com

 

The selection process will eschew traditional peer review processes as a
means of improving inclusivity. However, the workshop organizers will
select papers to balance the range of relevant topics and to keep the
quantity of papers to manageable levels consistent with the objectives
of the workshop. The programme committee will examine the potential of
developing some of these short papers into full papers for publication
in a special issue of an IS journal and will invite their authors to
extend their papers as required by the journal. In addition, all papers
will be published online in workshop proceedings in a format yet to be
determined, so that participants can make references to their
contributions.

 

 

Workshop Chair

Jude Lubega, Faculty of Computing and IT, Makerere University, Uganda

jlubega at cit.mak.ac.ug

 

Programme Co-chairs

Walter Brown, School of Information Technology, Monash South Africa 

walbrown at mail.ngo.za <mailto:walbrown at mail.ngo.za> 

 

Walter De Vries, devries at itc.nl and Gianluca Miscione, miscione at itc.nl
<mailto:miscione at itc.nl> 

Department of Urban and Regional Planning and Geo-Information
Management, International Institute for Geo-Information Science and
Earth Observation, The Netherlands

 

 

Deadlines:

Submissions of short papers: 30 November 2009

Acceptance: 15 December

 

 

Organisers

*   International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP),
Technical Commission 9

*   Faculty of Computing and IT, Makerere University

 

 



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