Call for papers: Co-creation of technology. Innovation by communities.

In the last decades studies and experience have shown that users matter in regards to technological innovation. Books such as "The Co-Construction of Users and Technology ", analyzes the creative capacity of users to shape technology in all phases, from design to implementation. Lately, citizen´s labs are also trying to integrate individuals and communities to technological innovation. They try to combine the old “collaboratory” concept launched in the 1990s in academic environments, or virtual laboratories, where scientists collaborate though networking, with the concept of citizens´networks, in which citizens collaborate in a digital environment for various uses, and that, according to the Spanish antropologist Artur Serra, have become freshly popular through social networks such as Facebook otr Twitter.

Individuals, groups and community have actively participated in the process of technological innovation and are increasingly aware of their capacity for making and changing technologies. Internet - based social networks, open source software, content creation, redesign by use, citizens´participation in living labs, are just a few examples of people actively enlarging the original uses of information and communication technologies (ICT).

The goal of this special issue is to examine, using a variety of multidisciplinary approaches, the mutual interaction between ICT and users. The authors are welcome to reflect on the hypothesis that any understanding of users must take into consideration the multiplicity of roles they play, and that the conventional distinction between users and producers is mainly formal and artificial.

Contributing knolwledge about the process in which individuals and communities appropriate and makes information and communication technology functional for their own specific purposes is the goal of this special issue of JOCI. The objective is to advance on the subject of how communities utilize technology, meanwhile creating innovative uses. The papers should consider how users consume, modify, domesticate, design, reconfigure, and resist technological development, as well as in which ways users are changed by ICT.

Some of the key issues to be reflected upon are: