TELEMATICS AND INFORMATICS: An Interdisciplinary Journal on the Social Impacts of New Technologies, by ELSEVIER Call for Papers Special Issue on Digital Cities Aims and Scope During the last years, extensive broadband network infrastructures are being constructed in more and more cities worldwide, offering high-speed connectivity to public organizations, businesses and citizens, that allow the deployment of highly useful applications and electronic services. These e-services aim at both economic objectives (such as enhanced competitiveness and growth) and social objectives (such as higher quality of life, better services to various groups, social networking and inclusion, environmental protection). It is important to analyze systematically these Odigital cities¹ projects (usually including both network infrastructures and applications/e-services). Gaining knowledge from them is going to be useful for improving both design and implementation of future attempts, and also public policy making in this area. In particular, it is important to gain a deeper understanding of the main motivation and objectives of these projects, the main difficulties and challenges they faced, the business models they adopted and the role of both public organizations and private companies, and assess their social, economic and other city/municipality-related impact and value. This Special Issue of the OTelematics and Informatics¹ solicits original high-quality papers investigating the above issues of digital cities, with main emphasis on the following topics: - Motivation and objectives for developing broadband infrastructures and applications/e-services on them - Detailed analysis of such broadband infrastructures or electronic service development projects in municipal contexts - Adoption of applications / e-services by the public and factors affecting it - Main challenges and difficulties faced during digital cities projects - Reports on achievements, current situation analysis of digital cities projects - Mobile applications and field force automation in government based on broadband infrastructures - Assessment of social, economic and other city-related impacts of such projects - Decision-making tools and models for assisting elected representatives and city officials in Odigital planning and management¹ - Approaches for managing digital transformation and policy support for municipalities - Business models, role of public companies and private organizations (such as municipalities and government) - Projects and initiatives specifically targeting e-Inclusion or minimization of Digital Divides, at municipal level - Specific applications and lessons learnt in developing countries or regions - Future, forward looking approaches and initiatives for digital cities Submissions Authors are invited to prepare original manuscripts of 5000 to 6000 words (excluding references), adopting the guidelines defined in the website of OTelematics and Informatics¹ (www.elsevier.com/wps/product/cws_home/703). Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. All submitted papers will be refereed through a peer review process. All papers should be submitted via the Journal's online submission and peer-review systems (http://www.ees.elsevier.com/tele). Please follow the instructions given on this site. Schedule * Submission deadline: March 31, 2009 * Completion of first review: May 31, 2009 * Revisions deadline: June 30, 2009 * Final decisions notification: July 15, 2009 * Final manuscripts deadline: July 30, 2009 Guest Editors Assistant Prof.. Euripidis Loukis University of the Aegean, Greece Email: eloukis@aegean.gr Dr Yannis Charalabidis National Technical University of Athens, Greece Email: yannisx@epu.ntua.gr Associate Prof. H. Jochen Scholl University of Washington, Information School, USA Email: jscholl@u.washington.edu