Far Wise in Knowledge Management

Encyclopedia for virtual communities and technologies (Call for Short Papers)

Erik van Bekkum (Efios) announces a Call for Short Papers for the Encyclopedia for Virtual Communities and Technologies. Submission deadline is November 15th; papers have a max of 1000 words.

Conference: ICT, the Knowledge Society and Changes in Work

A message from Eric Andriessen, Technical University of Delft, with the announcement of a new conference:

ICT, the Knowledge Society and Changes in Work
1st Bi-annual European Conference

The Netherlands, 9 & 10 June 2005
Social and Cultural Planning Office, The Hague

Changes in ICT and work offer the framework for the conference. First and foremost among those changes is the emergence of the information society, in which production and employment are increasingly geared to the development of information and the creation of knowledge. Secondly, there is the growing importance of ICT-tools at the workplace. As a consequence, the work process and the organization of work are also undergoing major changes. Of course, not only does ICT have an impact on work, but also the other way around: social forces (the social dialogue, institutional shaping, transitional labour markets) influence technological developments. The relationship between ICT and work is reciprocal.

The focus of the conference is on the impact of ICT and the knowledge society on work, the quality of work and new forms of work organization (networks, virtual teams). Special attention will be paid to the development of skill and competencies, the role of institutions, social actors and regulation and on new groups at risk (see also the preliminary programme and the subthemes).

The conference is organized by SISWO/Social Policy Research in close co-operation with (and funded by) NWO-MES (The Dutch 'Society and the Electronic Highway' research funding programme) and the Dutch Cultural Planning Office SCP.

Book your place for the conference using the online registration form.

Abstract (at least three A4-pages) for a thematic workshop has to be sent to the convenor of that workshop.

Note: I didn't see any other dates (deadlines for submission).

Women and technology

A paper in BBC News on "Technology's gender balancing act" by Jo Twist.

It sounds like the discovery of women as a new group of possible buyers of all kinds of technologies and the different types of demands they have. Did nobody as us what we want? And not only which colour? As Mia Kim, editor of Popgadget, says that she welcomes the attention to women bu is not happy with what companies think women want:

"Their solution is to do things like add mirrors to cell phones, make things pink, instead of really dealing with the issue of not marketing to women and not having media or retail outlets that are women friendly."

Maybe it's a matter of selling the right way as the paper suggests:

Perhaps the technology does not need to be different, just the language that explains and sells it. .... Many women feel alienated by technology magazines because of the marketing and imagery used.

Mia Kim again:

"Ask women what they want, design the products that appeal to women and then make the effort to get the word to women through channels that are friendly to women - most technology publications definitely are not."

RSS presentation

Yesterday we (Rogier, Lilia and myself) about RSS, notification and aggregation. The subtitle was "Doing smart things with stupid meta data". Lilia wrote down some notes about our presentation. A lot of questions came, like (quote from Lilia's post):

Questions people asked

What's in it for me?
Why is it better than existing ways of distributing/aggregating data?
How many feeds are there? Where do I find them? What if a website doesn't have an RSS feed?
How comes that it is supposed to reduce information overload if it looks like increasing it?

I remember another question: What is the impact of RSS? (Sounds a bit like: Why are you so enthousiastic?) For me, the impact is in the efficiency of not having to visit a lot of sites, but getting new contributions (not only to weblogs, but also journal papers and 'ordinary' news) in one glance.
I also found out that it's better to show it to people than tell. After the presentation, several colleagues came to my room who wanted to try Bloglines, one of the RSS-readers we showed.

Our collegues mostly are not weblog readers (nor writers), so demonstrating Bloglines was perhaps not a good choice, because it suggests that you need to read weblogs. I hope we showed that RSS has more use than only weblog reading.