Introduction

COST 298 ‘Participation in the Broadband Society’ has been working towards understanding the factors that both constrain and enable users’ abilities to shape and use ICTs and more broadly have a bearing on different cross-cultural experiences of technology. This is important because it can have a bearing on people’s involvement in a broadband information society, referring to a possible, but not inevitable, substantial transformation of our experience of telecommunications based on these technologies allowing in principle information and communication technologies to become available to and usable by everybody.

As in our previous and successful conferences, COST 298 invites technology and product developers, designers, social scientists, policy makers, community representatives and early stage researchers who are interested in the conference topics, to join our attempt to develop this discussion on a common, shared and transdisciplinary ground. We ask participants to

1) strive to present their approach to technology from a human-centric point of view, and to

2) present their topic in a language that attempts to transcend disciplinary boundaries, a language that non-experts can also understand, and to

3) not only report on their work, but also to engage in the conference debate which aims to develop ways to understand the interests of people and society, to evaluate developments against such an evolving understanding, and to chart interesting and desirable future directions.

In addition to promoting and understanding of the current and future developments in a broadband information society, the event aims to promote networking between and a dialogue with colleagues from around Europe and the rest of the world.

We look forward to seeing you in Copenhagen for a conference that is once again designed to be exciting, thought-provoking and challenging.

 

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