Revival

GrowingPains has been hibernating since November. The reason it's been so quiet on my blogging front is that in between the last and this post, I have moved jobs! I am no longer an assistant professor at Tilburg University, but am now a senior researcher at the Semantics Technology and Applications Research Laboratory (STARLab) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (the Flemish Free University of Brussels). From my window on the 10th floor, I overlook "the capital of Europe", including the European Parliament and Commission buildings, so I am continuously inspired to think hard about the complexities of community governance :-)

The reason I am restarting this blog today is that I am currently attending the 2nd International Conference on Communities & Technologies in Milan. I would say it's the most important academic conference dedicated to (online) communities. It's got interesting presentations and a range of well-known speakers. I would recommend the proceedings to anybody who wants to get up to speed on the current state-of-the-art in hardcore online community research. Especially interesting are the many original applications of social network analysis approaches.

A comment  I heard from several attendees is that many of the more sexy and up-to-date tools and approaches are lacking that one sees at the more practitioner-oriented conferences like the Community Network Analysis conference and the Community Informatics Research Network conference. Given the more traditional scientific focus of the current event this is understandable. Still, at a future edition of this conference having a special demo session of  tools like the  Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism would help to better bridge the gap between theory and practice.

Comments

[Su]

Welcome, Aldo!
If you can, blog about the conference. I'm interested in the proceedings. How can I have them?
kiss from Brasil,
Suzana

[Elmine]

Hey, great you're back. Hope you're enjoying your new position.

[Andrea]

welcome back and great to meet you at the conference!

[Aldo de Moor]

Thanks all, for your warm welcome. It makes me realize I really missed the 'excitement of the unexpected' provided by the blogosphere :-)

Here are the bibliographical data of the proceedings:

van den Besselaar, P, De Michelis, G., Preece, J. and Simone, C. (eds.). Communities and Technologies 2005: Proceedings of the Second Communities and Technologies Conference, Milano 2005. Springer, Berlin. ISBN 1-4020-3590-X

[Dan]

Hey Aldo

We met at the C&T conference. Stumbled back here on to you via Piers/monkeymagic. Small world.