CFP: Social Innovation and Social Media (SISoM) @ ICWSM 2011

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SISoM 2011: CALL FOR PAPERS

First international workshop on *Social Innovation and Social Media*

www.sites.google.com/site/sisom2011

July 21, 2011, Barcelona, Spain

in conjunction with the 5th International Conference on Weblogs and
Social Media (ICWSM-11)

Submission deadline: March 22, 2011
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*OBJECTIVES*

The workshop seeks to integrate views at the intersection of several
fields: computer and computational social science, policy design, social
innovation, and technology development. The formal objective of the
workshop is the collaborative drafting of a Manifesto on Social Media
for Social Innovation, summarizing the challenges and proposals
discussed at the workshop.

The workshop will explore two dimensions along which research might help
social innovation to take place at a larger scale:

   * The conceptual and computational development of new frameworks for
public policy modeling and implementation to help public authorities to
harness the full potential of Social Media and social innovation;
   * The design of new Social Media tools offering better support to
social innovators and policy designers.


*OVERVIEW*

Social innovation refers to new strategies, concepts, ideas and
organizations that meet social needs of all kinds - from working
conditions and education to community development and health - and that
extend and strengthen civil society. [Wikipedia]

There is an obvious interest in using Social Media to achieve greater
proximity between administrations and citizens. Social innovations,
encompassing new forms of private-public partnership, are increasingly
seen as necessary to better address a number of pressing social
problems. The idea behind it is that new forms of engagement of citizens
and private organizations can bring about substantial improvements of
productivity in the “social sector” (public services plus charity).

Empirical research has allowed to identify some basic design principles
and rules behind successful and sustained bottom-up collaborative
arrangements, of which communication is one key ingredient. Therefore,
it could be expected that properly applying existing and new Social
Media tools to those communication procedures will be a means of
achieving the improvements on speed and scale required to extend the
reach of social innovation. At the same time, research in the design and
modeling of policies taking full account of this potential will also be
required.


*RESEARCH TOPICS*

Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to the following:

   * Design of innovative tools for social participation and collaboration;
   * Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of social participation;
   * Challenges and opportunities regarding the use of Social Media to
address public policy problems;
   * Case studies of successful applications of Social Media to achieve
social innovation (in particular,  combined with large-scale Social
Media data analysis);
   * Policy areas best suited to apply Social Media as an instrument for
social innovation (e.g. for inclusive audience: older people or
developing countries).


*IMPORTANT DATES*

March 22, 2011: Paper Submission

April 8, 2011: Acceptance Notification

July 21, 2011: Workshop


*SUBMISSION*

We invite original anonymized position papers up to 4 pages long. Papers
should focus more on highlighting agenda issues than on research results.

Submissions must be in English, must be formatted according to the AAAI
template:
http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php;

and must be made in PDF through EasyChair:
www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sisom2011.

Received on Friday, 11 March 2011 13:30:13 UTC