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Welcome to the Connected Sustainability Workshop to be held at C&T 2015 in Limerick, Ireland, on Sunday June 28, 2015.

This website provides regular updates about the workshop topics, important dates and organising committee. Follow us on Twitter. The official hashtag of the workshop is #ConSus2015.

Call for participation

Recently, global economic turmoil has led to the rise of many grass-roots movements and communities that share a strong sustainability agenda and the desire for political, economic and societal change in the world. Digital technologies play a role in supporting these growing communities in achieving their goals, maintaining and extending their practices and connections. This marks a new area of research for HCI, that of Connected Sustainability. We propose the term Connected Sustainability to emphasise a focus that extends beyond the individual, towards communities, with shared commitments, interests and practices, that are considered within their social, political and infrastructural context. Furthermore, Connected Sustainability addresses the challenge of integrating digital technologies to connect communities and promote sustained positive change. In this workshop, we seek to understand the values and practices of such communities; the role of digital technologies in shaping and sustaining identity and community action; and existing challenges and opportunities.

How to participate
We invite interested researchers and practitioners to submit either

  1. a position paper (2 to 4 pages) in the ACM SIGCHI Extended Abstracts format about work in progress, recent results, study methods, or perspectives related to the topics listed below,
  2. or an already published work that shows how your current interests are related to the topics below.

Submissions are intended to help the organisers structure the workshop to benefit all participants. 10-15 participants will be selected by relevance and likelihood of stimulating and contributing to this discussion. Submissions should be in PDF format and emailed to Dr. Nadia Pantidi at konstantia.pantidi@ucc.ie by May 8th, 2015 (deadline extended).

One author of each accepted position paper must attend the workshop. All participants must register for the workshop via the C&T 2015 conference website at http://comtech.community/.

Topics of interest
Submissions should cover topics around the issues of sustainability and community, including but not limited to:

  • The role of technology and related social, political and cultural factors in supporting connected sustainability.
  • Empirical, theoretical, and critical methodologies, concepts and tools for the study of connected sustainability.
  • Designing digital infrastructure to foster sustainability aims and to sustain community engagement by understanding and supporting, for example, factors such as community championing.
  • Challenges and opportunities, design, use and evaluation of digital technology in communities with sustainability aims.