Purpose

The comprehensive and profound impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on Society is a very known fact. In turn, private, public and academic organizations are generating new requirements and demands that must be addressed by ICT. Demand-Pull and Technological-Push are interacting with each other through cybernetic loops. Society and ICT are co-regulating each other via negative Feedback Loops and synergistically co-evolving via positive feedback loops. On the other hands, ICT is increasingly supporting synergistic relationships among three important societal domain: the private, the public and the academic sector. The known universities-industries-governments Triple Helix Model support the conception, design and implementation of ICT-Driven Triple Helix Innovations.

The purpose of the Organizing Committee of the International Conference on Society and Information Technologies (ICSIT 2013) is to support and accelerate the cybernetic loops between Society and ICT and to help in the creation of relationships among different societal sectors, by means of bringing together researchers, professionals, practitioners and decision-makers from the Academic, Private and Public Sectors to share their findings, experience and knowledge with regards to the applications and impact of ICT.

ICT Applications originally created and implemented in a societal sector showed to be also useful and effective in another sectors. Analogical thinking and interdisciplinary approaches have supported the re-conception and re-design of an ICT application that showed to be effective and useful in one domain to another societal domain. The conception of Science 2.0 for example has been done by means of analogical thinking applied to the concept of Web 2.0, and the spread socio-technical systems, as it is the case of MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia, flickr, YouTube, etc.

“MySpace and Facebook [for example] encourage casual social networks, but they may soon play more serious roles in facilitating emergency/disaster response.” (Sheiderman, Science 2.0, in Science Vol. 319 7 March 2008). “Science 2.0 – affirm Shneiderman - will be especially important to meet the design challenges in secure voting, global environmental protection, energy sustainability, and international development among many others. Conceiving Science 2:0 is an example of the ways how ICT-Driven Triple-Helix innovations can be used to generate Triple-Helix Synergy and Society-ICT cybernetic loops.

ICSIT 2013 Organizing Committee hopes to contribute to the catalytic process required for the generation of ICT-Driven Triple Helix Innovations, the generation of Triple Helix Synergy and the formation of co-regulative and co-evolutionary cybernetic loops between Society and the ICT.