Call for Papers for EJISDC Special Issue: Making Openness Work for ICT4D: Experiences and Approaches
Guest Editors: Petter Nielsen and Sundeep Sahay
Background and Topic:
The promise of openness, reflected in for example open source software, open data and open information, is attractive for ICT4D initiatives. Openness is an outcome of sharing and collaborative efforts that reduce costs and produce public goods. Thus, openness should be of relevance in developing countries, and in particular where resources are constrained and where silo thinking and isolated initiatives prevail. Unfortunately, we note that this potential is often not realized.
This special issue on “Making Openness Work for ICT4D” will seek to shed light on how the promise of openness can be realized in our field. Our aim is to explore experiences from a broad range of ICT4D initiatives working towards openness in its different facets. This entails improving our understanding of these different facets of openness for ICT4D, the challenges associated with realizing its potential and successful approaches.
The contributions to this special issue will leverage on experiences from developing countries, and we encourage empirical papers that work towards conceptualizing openness for ICT4D, and building learning from them. We also expect the contributions to critically discuss the foundations, the potential of and the role of openness, and whether it represents hype or reality or both, and why.
We call for a range of topics related to openness for ICT4D, including, but not limited to:
- Open Source Software and Open Data
- Open Information
- Openness and public goods
- Human capacity and openness
- The role of intermediaries in making openness work
- Policy implications of openness from a government perspective
- Design approaches to openness
- The role of communities of practice in openness
- Infrastructure for openness
- Potential and impacts of openness
Submission Process and Important Dates
Submission deadline: November 1st 2015
First round of reviews: March 1st 2016
Submission of revised papers May 1st 2016
Second round of reviews August 1st 2016
Submission of revised papers October 1st 2016
Final decision January 1st 2017
Submission of final version February 1st 2017
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