News Story

CIRN 2004: Sustainability and Community Technology

Mark Gaved, Thursday 14 October 2004 | Annotate

Mark Gaved, KMi PhD student, attended the Community Informatics Research Network conference, hosted in Monash University, Prato, Italy (Sept. 29 – Oct. 1). The theme of the conference was "sustainability" and 80 researchers discussed how this applied to the field of Community Informatics. 'Sustainability' has been identified as a key and controversial issue in community networking, and the purpose of the conference was to explore all its dimensions, resulting in a communique developed through plenary sessions, as well as further activities of the CIRN network. Mark presented a doctoral colloquium paper summarising his current work investigating 'grassroots initiated networked communities'. Key note speakers included Mike Gurstein, one of the key researchers in the field, Don Schauder, from Australia's VICNET, and Tony Salvador, from Intel's Exploratory Research group.