The biennial Communities and Technologies (C&T) conference (C&T 2023) took place last week in Lahti, Finland. This conference provides an unparalleled platform for interdisciplinary dialogue amongst researchers, practitioners, industry experts, and community advocates living in the intersection of communities and technology. The five-day event had a diverse program of research presentations, workshops, insightful panel discussions, and a showcase of emerging technologies giving the opportunity for participants to discuss the latest developments, innovations, and research results in the field.
The main conference chair (and amazing host(!)) was our very own Dr. Annika Wolf, a former member of KMi, who is currently an Assistant Professor in User-centred Software Engineering at LUT University.
Co-located with the conference, Prof. Anna De Liddo organised the workshop “Critical Deliberative Democracy Tech: Questions, Tensions, Norms and Directions for Working with Institutions, Communities and Technologies to Scale Up Democratic Innovations”. The workshop was a real success (!) attracted multiple experts in public deliberation and digital governance around the world and marked the first international event of the ORBIS project (a 3M, 3 yrs project just funded by the EU on the Democracy.01 call) You can find the full workshop programme here: https://events.kmi.open.ac.uk/ct-2023/ and read more about the ORBIS project at: https://orbis-project.eu/
The Workshop programme included a talk Could Generative AI Augment Reflection, Deliberation and Argumentation? by KMi alumnus, Professor Simon Buckingham Shum, who is now at the Connected Intelligence Centre, University of Technology Sydney.
Last but not least, one of our amazing PhD Students, Lucas Anastasiou, presented a paper titled “A Tale of Struggles: An Evaluation Framework for Transitioning from Individually Usable to Community-Useful Online Deliberation Tools”. This paper presented an evaluation framework for assessing the impact and efficacy of online deliberation tools while taking into account challenges to deploying those in real communities to make a real impact in achieving community needs. This presentation also signed a great milestone for Lucas who just submitted his thesis the day before C&T took place! A great week with many things to celebrate for the KMi lab!
You can find the conference’s full proceedings in ACM Digital Library here: https://dl-acm-org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3593743
