About C&T
The Conference on Communities and Technologies is a biennial meeting bringing together an interdisciplinary network of researchers interested in the many ways that information and communication technologies relate to both physical and virtual communities. C&T emerged from a number of sources, including a workshop examining the "ambivalent relationship between IT and social capital," hosted at the Free University of Amsterdam in June of 2001 (see the MIT Press book "Social Capital and Information Technology" by Marleen Huysman and Volker Wulf for a collection of papers that evolved from this meeting).
Together with other networks of scholars studying such topics as community informatics, computer-supported cooperative work, online communities, and social aspects of business communities, the workshop evolved into the 1st International Conference on Communities and Technologies, also held in Amsterdam in September of 2003. Several hundred scholars from around the world, representing a multitude of disciplines, attended both a series of pre-conference workshops as well as the competitive paper session that involved a highly selective peer review. The conference proceedings was published by Kluwer Academic Publishers (which merged with Springer in 2004).
Following this success, a second international conference was organized in Milan in 2005 and hosted by the University of Milan and the University of Milan Bicocca (this conference web site is no longer online, but an archived version remains available at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine). This meeting confirmed that there was strong interest among a global community of scholars for a continuing series of meetings focusing on communities and technologies.
The third international conference, the first to be held in North America, took place on June 28-30, 2007, on the beautiful campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. MSU's Charles Steinfield and Brian Pentland were joined by the University of Michigan's Mark Ackerman and the University of Illinois' Noshir Contractor as conference co-organizers.