Interdisciplinary 2015 - Do-it-yourself Networking: an Interdisciplinary Approach

This workshop wishes to build on a recent successful interdisciplinary Dagstuhl seminar on DIY networking, which brought together a highly diverse group of researchers and practitioners to reflect on technological and social issues related to the use of local wireless networks that operate outside the public Internet; see our final report, which documents our interdisciplinary exchanges and the description of selected case studies for which DIY networking solutions can facilitate the creative interplay between technological and human networks in the city.
The main objective of the workshop is to continue this effort and make a first pragmatic step to bridge the existing gap between engineering and social sciences, beyond wishful thinking. For the technical program, we invite 1) technical contributions that render DIY networking technology easier to understand and use by for less technically savvy people and 2) theoretical contributions that can facilitate the understanding of the various inherent trade-offs in the design of DIY networks and the translation of engineering decisions to constraints and requirements for applications developers and vice versa.
The workshop will include a special interdisciplinary session, which will facilitate the participation of a more diverse audience than typically observed in engineering conferences like Mobisys. For this session, we will invite the presentation of working prototypes of mature DIY networking frameworks, novel application ideas by designers and social scientists, and short tutorials on important concepts such as power, privacy, self-organization, space, community and dialectics in light of the application of such technology in urban settings.