Workshop: Distributed Collective Practices

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

This is a twenty-four month standard award to support an extended, computer-mediated workshop on technical, cognitive, and social processes and infrastructures for distributed collective practices (DCP). DCP is conceptualized along the dimensions of social organization, cognitive processes, and technical infrastructures. A fourth crosscutting area of considerable emerging importance is the development of very large distributed, shareable information bases, community memory projects, and data warehouses, that create computer-mediated collective memory practices. This workshop brings together computer scientists, cognitive scientists, library and information scientists, artificial intelligence researchers, and social scientists, with the aim of strengthening and focusing the emergent multidisciplinary, international research community in this area. The workshop will be structured as a two-year web-based discussion, punctuated with two face-to-face meetings. The first year will establish a seed community, elaborate an international research program, and involve international scientific communities and the general public. The second year will assess progress, synthesize the results of discussions and joint work, develop and refocus the program's objectives, and produce documentation. This project involves four participating groups from France and the US, including the CNRS Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mecanique et les Sciences de l'Ingenieur (LIMSI); the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications (ENST); the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). Collaborative funding is being provided by the UNESCO Management Of Social Transformations Program and the Societe Francaise des Sciences de l'Information et de la Communication.