This book includes 23 papers dealing with the impact of modern information and communication technologies that support a wide variety of communities: local communities, virtual communities, and communities of practice, such as knowledge communities and scientific communities. The volume is the result of the second multidisciplinary "Communities and Technologies Conference," a major event in this emerging research field. The various chapters discuss how communities are affected by technologies, and how understanding of the way that communities function can be used in improving information systems design. This state of the art overview will be of interest to computer and information scientists, social scientists and practitioners alike.

This volume presents the proceedings of ECSCW'09, the 11th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Each conference offers an occasion to critically review our research field, which has been multidisciplinary and committed to high scientific standards, both theoretical and methodological, from its beginning. These proceedings represent discussions and contributions to ongoing challenges. One challenge comes from emerging new technologies connected to 'social computing', gaming, as well as applications supporting citizen participation in their communities. As boundaries between home and work erode with the increased movement of work into home environments, and new applications further blur the once separate conceptions of work and leisure, our intellectual community faces challenges in the ways we think about and study work. Other challenges result from transformations of the world of work itself and the role of IT in these. They have been taken up in in-depth studies of design practice, software development, and manufacturing, as well as in the growing body of research on health care contexts and applications. Finally, there is the question of what is the European perspective in our community and whether it is worthwhile to anchor our research more firmly in such a perspective. Of high relevance to our field is the strong grounding of technology development in an understanding of human activity.

The nineteen full papers, four short papers and one discussion paper selected for this conference deal with and reflect on some of these challenges, thus representing the lively debate currently ongoing in our field of research.

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is an interdisicplinary research area devoted to exploring the issues of designing computer-based systems that enhance the abilities of cooperating workers to coordinate and integrate their activities in an efficient, effective, and flexible manner. This rigorously selected volume represents both practical and theoretical approaches from many of the leading researchers in the field. As an interdisciplinary area of research, CSCW is characterized by bringing together widely disparate research traditions and perspectives into an arena of collaboration and contention. The selected papers reflect the diverse approaches and cultures of this multi-disciplinary field. This collection will be of interest to a wide audience - because of the huge practical import of the issues and because of the interdisciplinary nature of the problems and the solutions proposed. In particular, the volume will be of interest to researchers and professionals in computing, sociology, cognitive science, and human factors.

Knowledge management (KM) is more a nd more recognized as a key factor of success for organisations: not only stru ctured companies, but also virtual enterprises, networks of organisations or ev en virtual communities. These organisations of differentki nds, are becoming increasingly aware of the need to collect, organise, mobilise, increase, in sum manage, the knowledge characterising their ability to stay alive, adapt and evolve in a turbulent context. Through various organisationaland t echnological approaches, KM aims at improving knowledge access, sharing and reuse as well as new knowledge creation. KMIA 2008 highlights problems, requirements and solutions that are derived from actual, concrete experiences. The fourteen papers accepted at KMIA 2008 give various answers to the following questions: What organisational strategies can enable to enact and promote KM within organisations? How to link these organisational strategies withth e ICT technology? Organisational strategies can be related to the evolution of the organisation itself or to its environment: intra organisational and inter organisational strategies can thus bedi stinguished. Some papers emphasize the importance of collaboration and knowledge transfer for team work and collaborative projects that may be intra organisational or inter organisational (e.g. intero rganisational outsourcing relationships). Strategies for designing and manufacturing innovative products are recognised as crucial for enterprises that operate in competitive sectors. Networkso forg anisations can help to improve the competitiveness of these organisations: KM can thus enhance competency management in such networks and help an organisation to find relevant costumers, suppliers, or cooperation partners.

This volume presents the proceedings of ECSCW'09, the 11th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Each conference offers an occasion to critically review our research field, which has been multidisciplinary and committed to high scientific standards, both theoretical and methodological, from its beginning. These proceedings represent discussions and contributions to ongoing challenges. One challenge comes from emerging new technologies connected to 'social computing', gaming, as well as applications supporting citizen participation in their communities. As boundaries between home and work erode with the increased movement of work into home environments, and new applications further blur the once separate conceptions of work and leisure, our intellectual community faces challenges in the ways we think about and study work. Other challenges result from transformations of the world of work itself and the role of IT in these. They have been taken up in in-depth studies of design practice, software development, and manufacturing, as well as in the growing body of research on health care contexts and applications. Finally, there is the question of what is the European perspective in our community and whether it is worthwhile to anchor our research more firmly in such a perspective. Of high relevance to our field is the strong grounding of technology development in an understanding of human activity. The nineteen full papers, four short papers and one discussion paper selected for this conference deal with and reflect on some of these challenges, thus representing the lively debate currently ongoing in our field of research.

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is an interdisicplinary research area devoted to exploring the issues of designing computer-based systems that enhance the abilities of cooperating workers to coordinate and integrate their activities in an efficient, effective, and flexible manner. This rigorously selected volume represents both practical and theoretical approaches from many of the leading researchers in the field. As an interdisciplinary area of research, CSCW is characterized by bringing together widely disparate research traditions and perspectives into an arena of collaboration and contention. The selected papers reflect the diverse approaches and cultures of this multi-disciplinary field. This collection will be of interest to a wide audience - because of the huge practical import of the issues and because of the interdisciplinary nature of the problems and the solutions proposed. In particular, the volume will be of interest to researchers and professionals in computing, sociology, cognitive science, and human factors.

This book includes 23 papers dealing with the impact of modern information and communication technologies that support a wide variety of communities: local communities, virtual communities, and communities of practice, such as knowledge communities and scientific communities. The volume is the result of the second multidisciplinary "Communities and Technologies Conference," a major event in this emerging research field. The various chapters discuss how communities are affected by technologies, and how understanding of the way that communities function can be used in improving information systems design. This state of the art overview will be of interest to computer and information scientists, social scientists and practitioners alike.

Knowledge management (KM) is more a nd more recognized as a key factor of success for organisations: not only stru ctured companies, but also virtual enterprises, networks of organisations or ev en virtual communities. These organisations of differentki nds, are becoming increasingly aware of the need to collect, organise, mobilise, increase, in sum manage, the knowledge characterising their ability to stay alive, adapt and evolve in a turbulent context. Through various organisationaland t echnological approaches, KM aims at improving knowledge access, sharing and reuse as well as new knowledge creation. KMIA 2008 highlights problems, requirements and solutions that are derived from actual, concrete experiences. The fourteen papers accepted at KMIA 2008 give various answers to the following questions: What organisational strategies can enable to enact and promote KM within organisations? How to link these organisational strategies withth e ICT technology? Organisational strategies can be related to the evolution of the organisation itself or to its environment: intra organisational and inter organisational strategies can thus bedi stinguished. Some papers emphasize the importance of collaboration and knowledge transfer for team work and collaborative projects that may be intra organisational or inter organisational (e.g. intero rganisational outsourcing relationships). Strategies for designing and manufacturing innovative products are recognised as crucial for enterprises that operate in competitive sectors. Networkso forg anisations can help to improve the competitiveness of these organisations: KM can thus enhance competency management in such networks and help an organisation to find relevant costumers, suppliers, or cooperation partners.

Innovative research solutions increasingly require deep engagement with practitioners to manage the complex problems they are attempting to solve. This often project-based research is equipped with finite resources over a limited period without much thought into future-proofing the practice. These projects must face questions of what happens when a product comes to an end and whether there are any lasting positive effects once the IT systems are no longer being actively developed. From a computing perspective, the challenge is to design IT artifacts that contribute to improving the user's work and everyday life in a sustainable way, thereby also contributing to social and ecological sustainability. Future-Proofing: Making Practice-Based IT Design Sustainable documents the experiences made by several leading research groups in Europe, North America, and South Africa. It describes their efforts to achieve sustainable design results, the difficulties that barred the way but also the strategies they adopted to achieve the goal of sustainability. The analysis of these cases has inspired thinking about how to more systematically address and possibly overcome the impediments to sustainability. This book develops a strong future-oriented perspective that conceptualizes sustainability as a complex and highly variegated issue and formulates insights and recommendations with a view to help researchers to better design for sustainability.