Indigenous knowledge systems differ fundamentally from the knowledge systems that underlie technology development. Numerous initiatives aim to enable remote diverse communities to share their wisdom and practical know-how with conventional digital technologies but often overlook the very systems that they use to organize and make sense of the world. Further, many indigenous communities, especially those in rural places, have few opportunities to appropriate new technologies emerging in ubiquitous computing, such as social networks, flickr, virtual and augmented realities.

To design digital infrastructures for currently unserved knowledge systems we must account for the transformations that occur as technology interacts with the ways of knowing, doing and being that constitute indigenous knowledge systems.

Aim of IKTC2011

The aim of this conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners, from different disciplines, who are engaged in supporting indigenous and local knowledge representation and dissemination.

We will pursue a critical dialogue that considers the tensions arising in representing indigenous knowledge digitally and the factors that contribute to these tensions. Through this we aim to identify opportunities and new epistemological and methodological perspectives that will enable developing technologies that can extend the practices of indigenous knowledge and support the emergence of local socio-technical systems globally.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

The use of technologies that link to the overall theme of the conference, such as in:

Methods to design for and support communities that are marginalized in the global knowledge economy, such as

Perspectives on the politics, social and cultural dimensions that contribute to tensions between digital artifacts and marginalized knowledge systems