ECSCW-OLCACP 2011 - ECSCW Workshop Online communities in social and caring professions

On-Line Communities for Social and Caring Professions

ECSCW 2011 Workshop on September 24th at Aarhus University, Denmark

Workshop submission deadline: June 1st 2011

Workshop homepage:https://sites.google.com/site/olcacp/



Workshop Theme


Understanding and supporting the practices of collaborative work is one of the core goals of CSCW research. Online communities are an important setting in which shared work practices can emerge and become subject to joint improvement. The concept of communities of practice is frequently mentioned in this context. This workshop will take a closer look at the interplay of technical, social and learning aspects of communities of practice for social and caring professions. These domains have in common that the typical primary activity does not involve computer use to a large extent. Communities of practice still exist (and have their value), but the opportunities for computer mediated communication in these communities are not well investigated. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners experienced in communities for social and caring professions. We will discuss lessons learned with the goal of finding socio-technical design patterns and determining a research roadmap.

How to Participate


We invite you to share your experiences with designing, facilitating or studying online-communities in caring and social professions. Relevant topics are (but not limited to):

- Self-organization and moderation of these communities
- Communities of practice involving both professionals and volunteers
- Communities of service providers and their relationship with service users
- Sharing innovative work practices in on-line communities
- Communities for learning, support and improvement of practices
- Inter-organizational learning in communities
- Communities fostering Open Innovation
- Blended interactions in communities (combining co-located face to face interaction with distributed online interaction)
- Engagement of "digital immigrants" (i.e. people who are less familiar with digital communications technologies) in online communities
- Knowledge sharing in communities
- The role of mobile devices as community support technologies
- Communities that cross international borders

Please submit a short position paper no longer than 6 pages. Submissions should be sent electronically to till.scheummer-AT-fernuni-hagen.de. Please adhere to the ECSCW style guidelines found at the ECSCW web site (e.g., http://www.ecscw09.org/authors/ECSCW_template.doc).

The workshop organizing committee will review all papers. Workshop participants will be selected based on the appropriateness and quality of their position paper. On acceptance, you will be asked to 1) prepare a poster about your position paper, 2) read two other position papers to serve as a discussant, and 3) prepare one slide, answering the following questions:

Who is the community?
How big it the community (number of participants / broadness/ ...)?
Major challenges faced?
Number one recommendation for someone else?
Stuff not to do?

All accepted position papers will be published on-line. We are currently negotiating publication opportunities in special issues of highly visible journals in which extended versions of the best contributions shall appear.

Important Dates


1st of June 2011: Deadline for submitting position papers electronically to Till Schuemmer (till.schuemmer-AT-fernuni-hagen.de)

15th June 2011: Acceptance notification

28th June 2011: Early registration deadline for ECSCW 2011

24th or 25th September 2011: Workshop in Aarhus, Denmark

Please note that workshop participants are required to register for the full conference.

Workshop Organizers


Till Schuemmer
FernUniversitÃ?t in Hagen, Cooperative Systems (Germany)
Till.schuemmer-AT-fernuni-hagen.de

Niels Pinkwart
Clausthal University of Technology, Department of Informatics (Germany)
niels.pinkwart-AT-tu-clausthal.de

Andrew M. Dearden
Sheffield Hallam University (UK), Communication & Computing Research Centre (UK)
a.m.dearden-AT-shu.ac.uk

Ann Light
Sheffield Hallam University (UK), Communication & Computing Research Centre (UK)
a.light-AT-shu.ac.uk