Hi folks - Following on Tom's email about SIGCIS panels for SHOT, I wanted to send another (complementary) call to see if anyone is interested in contributing to a paper on the topic of "Standards for Information and Communication Technologies: Lessons Learned." The "lessons learned" aspect of this topic seems especially relevant for the "Looking Forward" theme of SHOT's extended 50th; but it is also related to an edited volume that Andreas Fickers and I are preparing, to be published in IGI Global's "Advances in IT Standards and Standardization Research" series, which is edited by Kai Jakobs. We will soon be circulating a formal call for chapters for this volume, but we thought that a panel or 2 at SHOT might be a good way to get a conversation started. Our current idea is to organize 1 or 2 sessions; perhaps one on ICT standards and another (of lesser interest to this list) on standards more generally. Of course if there is overlap with SIGCIS proposals, I will work with Tom to fit things together. If you are interested in contributing (either to a panel or to a book), please get in touch with me (or Kai or Andreas). Or, if you have colleagues not in the SIGCIS orbit (poor souls!) who might be interested, have them do the same. Thanks! Andy Russell John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Duke University alr18@duke.edu On Feb 28, 2008, at 3:51 AM, Thomas Haigh wrote:

Hello everyone,

This email is a request for people who are interested in participating in SIGCIS sponsored panels at the annual meeting to get in touch with me. The deadline is March 14, which means I need to hear from you within the next few days with an initial expression of interest. SHOT does not need full papers, but I would need an abstract and one page resume by March 9. The normal SHOT format is for three or four talks of 20-25 minutes each followed by a commentator and questions. I can’t promise that all ideas can be fitted neatly into one of our panel proposals. However if I can’t accommodate whatever you are interested in within a panel then you still have the option of submitting your abstract as an individual paper.

What I’ve done for each of the past three conferences is to circulate a call like this and receive a short summary from interested people of the work they’d like to present. Then I look for connections among the ideas and group them into one or more thematically coherent panel proposals. I work with the authors to strengthen their abstracts and to tweak them to better fit the panel. This has worked well in the past. Last year we submitted three panels, all of which were accepted. For the previous year we had two panels, both accepted. Once we see how things are shaping up we may use the list again to appeal for additional papers on specific topics or for chairs or commentators.

You’ve already seen a couple of reminders of the upcoming SHOT 2008 meeting from other people. Lisbon, October 10-14. Lots of information including maps, hotels, travel, etc. is now online at http://www.shotlisbon2008.com/meeting.htm.

The call for papers is at http://shotnews.net/?p=401. It mentions looking for papers on how the history of technology might be written in the future, so this may lead to a panel of historiographical papers about the future of the history of computing. However other ideas are also welcome. It also appeals for papers “from those new to SHOT regardless of discipline.”

If you are a graduate student there is an additional reason to join one of our panels. At the last meeting we raised enough money with our collection and book auction to fund two graduate student travel awards of $300 each to support the cost of attending the meeting. Any student presenting in a SIGCIS sponsored panel will be eligible for consideration for one of these awards.

It promises to be a great meeting, and I hope to see many of you there in Lisbon. At the last SHOT meeting we had far more history of computing panels than ever before – so let’s try to set another record this year.

Tom Haigh

www.tomandmaria.com/tom