Might be of Interest to some of us. -- Best Regards, *Ephraim Percy Kenyanito* *Twitter:* https://twitter.com/ekenyanito ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: ICTD 2015 Secretariat <secretariat@ictd2015.org> Date: 17 April 2014 09:49 Subject: ICTD 2015: Call for Papers and Notes To: Cc: program@ictd2015.org, notes@ictd2015.org The Seventh International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2015), to be hosted at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore from May 15-18, 2015, cordially invites you to submit Full Papers and Notes. Held in cooperation with ACM SIGCHI and ACM SIGCAS, ICTD2015 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. General Topics 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 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. This paper provides further suggestions on what makes good ICTD research. Full Papers typically present mature work whereas Notes (see below) are used for presenting preliminary research that is still work-in-progress. Plans are being made to have all accepted Full Papers appear in the electronic conference proceedings and 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. New in 2015, authors of each accepted Full Paper will be invited to submit a one-page policy brief, which aims to make their research accessible and relevant to practitioners in a succinct form. We expect to have authors receive feedback from experienced ICTD practitioners for improving their briefs, and to include their briefs in a separate proceedings. 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, but not 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. Plans are being made to have all accepted Notes be made available in the ACM Digital Library. Important dates Aug 1, 2014: Submission site open for Full Papers and Notes Oct 13, 2014: Deadline for submission of Full Papers Dec 7, 2014: Notification of acceptances for Full Papers Dec 21, 2014: Deadline for submission of Notes Jan 31, 2015: Notification of acceptances for Notes Mar 2, 2015: Camera-ready Full Papers and Notes due All submission are due 11:59 pm UTC. Submission guidelines 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. A website will be made available on August 1, 2014 for authors to submit their Full Papers and Notes by the respective deadlines. For each accepted Full Paper and Note, at least one of the authors will be required to register and present it at ICTD2015. If not, the submission will not be published in the final proceedings. For Full Papers, see the ACMs copyright policies and options http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/ copyright_policy/. 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 ictd2015.org, and for queries, contact secretariat@ictd2015.org General Conference Chair Arul Chib, Nanyang Technological University Program Committee Chairs Matthew Kam, American Institutes for Research Jenna Burrell, University of California, Berkeley Notes Chairs Sirajul Islam, Örebro University, Sweden Mahfuz Ashraf, University of Dhaka