[EGOV LIST] CFP Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-57), Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beah Resort, January 3-6, 2024

[Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar]

Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-57), Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beah Resort, January 3-6, 2024 https://hicss.hawaii.edu <https://hicss.hawaii.edu/>
 Digital Government Track

 Smart and Connected Cities and Communities Mini-track

 Cities and communities around the world are entering a new era of transformation in which residents and their surrounding environments are increasingly connected through rapidly changing intelligent technologies, sometimes called smart technologies. This transformation, which has become a top priority for many cities and other local governments, offers great promise for improved well-being and prosperity, but also poses significant challenges at the complex intersection of technology and society.

A smart and connected community can be conceptualized as one that synergistically integrates intelligent technologies with the natural and built environments, including infrastructure, to improve the social, economic, and environmental well-being of those who live, work, or travel within it. Building on the notion of community informatics, smart communities can be seen as enabling and empowering citizens and supporting the individual and communal quests for well-being.

The concept of smart cities and communities is characterized by its multidimensional and multifaceted aspect that goes beyond the mere use of technology and infrastructure. Although technology is a necessary condition to become smart, it is not the only aspect that defines smart cities and communities. Novel studies are indicating that emerging technologies have a huge influence on social life, catalyzing new needs of citizens and transforming the way they are addressed, influencing people’s ability to exercise their “right to the city/community” and impacting on social sustainability on several levels. City administration and community management, information integration, data quality, privacy and security, institutional arrangements, and citizen participation are therefore some of the issues that need greater attention to make a community smarter today and in the near future.

Nonetheless, the literature on smart cities and communities is fragmented, particularly in terms of the strategies that different cities and communities should follow in order to become smarter. What most of the literature does agree on is that there is no single way to becoming smart and different communities have adopted different approaches that reflect their particularities. In addition, the advent of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, open government, open data, big data, blockchain, chatbots and so on, have opened new avenues for smart governance in the urban and communities’ contexts, which fosters new research in this area.

This mini-track aims at exploring these issues, paying particular attention to the challenges of smart cities and smart communities as well as to the impact of these initiatives, to understand how new technologies can shape the social sustainability, the livability of local communities, and the wellbeing of its residents. It also focuses on the orchestrated interplay and balance of smart governance practices, smart public administration, smart communities, smart resources, and talent leverage in urban, rural, and regional spaces, facilitated by novel uses of ICT and other technologies.

As a result, areas of focus and interest to this mini track include, but are not limited, to the following topics:

Taxonomies of smart cities and communities
Smart governance as the foundation to creating smart urban and regional spaces (elements, prerequisites, and principles of smart governance)
Smart cities and smart government (focal areas, current practices, cases, and potential pitfalls)
Smart partnerships (triple/quadruple/quintuple helix, public-private partnerships, and citizen participation)
The impact of digital transformation on the change of citizens’ role in the city
Smart cities, communities and regions (cases, rankings, comparisons, and critical success factors)
Benefits of the impact of emerging technologies on citizens and local communities
Collective intelligence for smart cities and communities
Emerging technologies in smart cities and communities (artificial intelligence, big data, open data, open government, social media and networks, digital twins, chatbots, etc.)
Smart governance in cities and communities in the age of the emerging technologies
Management of smart cities and communities
Outcomes of smart cities and communities
The role of digital technologies in both increasing community livability and improving social sustainability and inequalities
Smart services
Urban-rural gaps in smart communities
Resilience and sustainability capacities in smart cities and communities
Innovative solutions for smart cities and communities
Building knowledge societies for smart cities and communities
Smart cities and communities and their contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
 Important dates (https://hicss.hawaii.edu/):

 June 15, 2023: Papers due

August 17, 2023: Notification of Acceptance/Rejection

September 22, 2023: Deadline for Authors to Submit Final Manuscript for Publication

October 1, 2023: Deadline for at least one author of each paper to register for the conference

January 3-6, 2024: HICSS Conference

Mini-track Co-Chairs:
Gabriela Viale Pereira (primary contact), Danube University Krems, Austria (gabriela.viale-pereira at donau-uni.ac.at <mailto:gabriela.viale-pereira at donau-uni.ac.at>) 

Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar, University of Granada, Spain (manuelp at ugr.es <mailto:manuelp at ugr.es>)

Anna Domaradzka-Widla, University of Warsaw, Poland (anna.domaradzka at uw.edu.pl <mailto:anna.domaradzka at uw.edu.pl>)