Shaping the Network Society: The Future of the Public Sphere in Cyberspace

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The symposium "Shaping the Network Society: The Future of the Public Sphere in Cyberspace" held on May 20 - 23, 2000 at the University of Washington in Seattle was highly successful. Over 350 people from over 20 countries from a wide variety of academic and other disciplines attended the conference. This symposium helped to identify and give voice to a large body of interdisciplinary work. It helped reveal a rich vein of new research topics and a burgeoning community of researchers eager to work on them: organizers received over 100 submissions in response to our call for abstracts. Perhaps most importantly the community was in good measure a younger one; a new generation of researchers is stepping up to address these insurgent issues. The objective of this support is to disseminate the findings of the symposium to a large number of people. Since this was among the first and most notable of conferences devoted to these themes it is particularly important to make the results available to other researchers. At the same time it is equally important to reach out to non-specialists and the general public. Computer technology is rapidly spreading into all sectors of society and "ordinary" people are intensely interested in how they can shape technology and how technology can shape them. This work will help people understand challenges and opportunities of the Internet and other communication technology and how they might themselves play a part in its ongoing development. The organization plans to build on this work and to further expand the awareness of this new work in many ways. The major tasks covered by this proposal are: (1) to develop a book based on invited panelist papers; (2) to develop a book based on research papers; (3) to develop special sections in journals (particularly the Communications of the ACM); (4) to add current and previous CPSR/DIAC submissions to the web site; and (5) to develop material for the CPSR Newsletter and an editorial for print and electronic distribution. This support helps to leverage a strong volunteer effort.