For those interested in the role of ICTs in development, please consider submitting a paper to the ICTD 2016 meeting. It will be held in Ann Arbor, Michigan from June 3-6. I’ve attended a couple of recent ICTD meetings and it is an excellent meeting, with opportunities to mix with academic researchers from many disciplines as well as representatives from development agencies and the private sector. I highly recommend it. The call for papers is pasted in below. Regards, Chip Steinfield Charles Steinfield Department of Media and Information Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48840 USA +1 517 482 8651 steinfie@msu.edu ----------------------------------------------- ICTD 2016 Ann Arbor, MI, USA | 3-6 June 2016 Call for Papers and Notes Deadline for Submission of Full paper: November 20 2015 The Eighth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2016), to be hosted at the University of Michigan from June 3-6, 2016, cordially invites you to submit Full Papers and Notes. Held in cooperation with ACM SIGCHI and ACM SIGCAS, ICTD2016 will provide an international forum for scholarly researchers to explore the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in social, political, and economic development. The ICTD conferences have been taking place approximately every 18 months since 2006; 2016 marks the first time that the conference will go to an annual cycle. Important dates · November 20, 2015: Deadline for submission of Full Papers · January 15, 2016: Notification of acceptances for Full Papers · January 29, 2016: Deadline for submission of Notes · February 26, 2016: Notification of acceptances for Notes · March 25, 2016: Camera-ready Full Papers and Notes due All submission are due 11:59 pm UTC. Over the past several decades, as radio and television have been joined by computers, the Internet, and mobile devices, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have become more pervasive, more accessible, and more relevant in the lives of people around the world. Virtually no sphere of human activity remains apart from ICTs, from markets to health care, education to governance, family life to artistic expression. Diverse groups across the world interact with, are affected by, and can shape the design of these technologies. The ICTD conference is a place to understand these interactions, and to examine, critique, and refine the persistent, pervasive hope that ICTs can be enlisted by individuals and communities in the service of human development. There are multidisciplinary challenges associated with the engineering, application and adoption of ICTs in developing regions and/or for development, with implications for design, policy, and practice. For the purposes of this conference, the term “ICT” comprises electronic technologies for information processing and communication, as well as systems, interventions, and platforms that are built on such technologies. “Development” includes, but is not restricted to, poverty alleviation, education, agriculture, healthcare, general communication, gender equality, governance, infrastructure, environment and sustainable livelihoods. The conference program will reflect the multidisciplinary nature of ICTD research, with anticipated contributions from fields including (but not limited to) anthropology, computer science, communication, design, economics, electrical engineering, geography, human-computer interaction, information science, information systems, political science, public health, and sociology. Full Papers An ICTD Full Paper, which is up to 10 pages in the ACM two-column format (including references, figures and tables), must make a new research contribution and provide complete and substantial support for its results and conclusions. Accepted papers typically represent a major advance for the field of ICTD. Full Papers will be evaluated via double-blind peer review by a multidisciplinary panel of at least three readers, one of whom will come from outside the paper’s disciplinary domain in order to ensure broad readability. Accepted Full Papers will be presented as oral presentations at the conference. Full Papers will be evaluated according to their novel research contribution, methodological soundness, theoretical framing and reference to related work, quality of analysis, and quality of writing and presentation. Manuscripts considering novel designs, new technologies, project assessments, policy analyses, impact studies, theoretical contributions, social issues around ICT and development, and so forth will be considered. Well-analyzed negative results from which generalizable conclusions can be drawn are also sought. Authors are encouraged (but not required) to address the diversity of approaches in ICTD research by providing context, implications, and actionable guidance to researchers and practitioners beyond the authors’ primary domains. Full Papers typically present mature work whereas Notes (see below) are used for presenting preliminary research that is still work-in-progress. All accepted Full Papers will be archived in the ACM Digital Library. A subset of the Full Papers will also appear in a special issue of the Information Technologies & International Development journal. See additional specifications under “All Submissions” below. Notes With a shorter 4-page limit, Notes are intended to introduce work-in-progress that may be published later in a journal, as well as to document shorter project write-ups. An ICTD Note is likely to have a more focused and succinct research contribution to the ICTD field than Full Papers. For example, Notes on novel ICTD systems may not cover the entire design of the system but may instead go into depth in specific areas (e.g., how the system was evaluated with real users or how the formative work to create the system was conducted). Notes are also not expected to include a discussion of related work that is as broad and complete as that of a submission to the Full Papers venue. Accepted Notes will be presented as poster presentations at the conference. Notes will be evaluated by at least two multidisciplinary reviewers in a double-blind fashion and will be assessed according to their research contribution, methodological soundness, quality of analysis, and quality of writing, and presentation. Manuscripts considering novel designs, new technologies, project assessments, policy analyses, impact studies, theoretical contributions, social issues around ICT and development, and so forth will be considered. However Notes need not necessarily be as comprehensive, novel, or generalizable as Full Papers. All accepted Notes will be made available in the ACM Digital Library. Notes authors will be invited to present a poster. See additional specifications under “All Submissions” below. All Submissions Only original, unpublished, research papers in English will be considered. Full Papers and Notes must use the ACM templates (LaTex and Word), and must be no longer than 10 pages and 4 pages respectively. (The main text, figures, tables, footnotes, references, etc. must fit within these page limits.) Additional material may be included in an Appendix, but the text within the page limits must read as a standalone work. Submissions longer than the page limits, not in the template format, not related to the conference themes, and/or not meeting a minimum bar of academic research writing will be rejected without full review. For each accepted Full Paper and Note, at least one of the authors will be required to register and present it at ICTD2016. If not, the submission will not be published in the final proceedings. For Full Papers, see the ACMs copyright policies and options. Copyright for Notes will be retained by the authors. Submitted Full Papers and Notes must not include names or other information that would identify the authors. Note that since the Full Paper and Notes submission review cycles will be sequential; it will be possible to revise, shorten, and resubmit elements of promising but non-selected Full Papers in time for reconsideration in the separate Notes review round. For more information, see http://ictd2016.info or email Susan Wyche at spwyche@msu.edu. General Conference Chair Kentaro Toyama, University of Michigan Program Committee Chairs Lakshmi Subramanian, New York University Susan Wyche, Michigan State University Notes Chairs Carleen Maitland, Pennsylvania State University Janaki Srinivasan, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore Senior Program Committee Richard Anderson, University of Washington Elizabeth Belding, U.C. Santa Barbara Michael Best, United Nations University / Georgia Institute of Technology Josh Blumenstock, University of Washington Marshini Chetty, University of Maryland Ed Cutrell, Microsoft Research India Rogerio de Paula, IBM Research Brazil Vanessa Frias-Martinez, University of Maryland Heather Horst, RMIT University Dorothea Kleine, Royal Holloway University of London Rich Ling, Nanyang Technical University Joyojeet Pal, University of Michigan Balaji Parthasarathy, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore Tapan Parikh, U.C. Berkeley Nimmi Rangaswamy, Xerox Research Center India Aaditeshwar Seth, IIT Delhi Araba Sey, University of Washington Charles Steinfield, Michigan State University Revi Sterling, NetHope Bill Thies, Microsoft Research India ICTD Steering Committee Francois Bar, University of Southern California Michael Best, United Nations University / Georgia Institute of Technology Ken Keniston, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Balaji Parthasarathy, International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore Krithi Ramamritham, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay AnnaLee Saxenian, University of California, Berkeley Kentaro Toyama, University of Michigan Ernest Wilson, University of Southern California