Dear all Final push for this one: the proposal needs to be submitted by next Monday (30 April). Details as per my previous message, copied below. Interest so far has led to two fairly concrete subtheme ideas which should work well as 90-minute sessions within a wider symposium: banking and the cashless society, co-ordinated by Bernardo Batiz-Lazo, and information systems in biology/biomedical computing, co-ordinated by Miguel Garcia Sancho. I think we can build a good case for an overarching theme titled something like "Data at work", with some focus on typical SIGCIS interests but an appeal to some of the Congress's other constituencies. Ideally, I'd like to include at least one more full session (three or four papers) for breadth. We don't need to include precise details or firm commitments in the symposium proposal, but it would be good to have as concrete a definition as possible. Interested? Drop me a line by the middle of next week, and we'll discuss further. All best James --- Dear SIGCIS members I'm writing to draw your attention to the current call for themed sessions for ICHSTM, the International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine, to be held in July 2013 here in Manchester. Full details are on the Congress website at http://www.ichstm2013.com/ ICHSTM happens every four years and is the largest meeting in the field, drawing around a thousand delegates and lasting a full week. Its constituency is more global than most, with strong participation from China, South America, India and Eastern Europe. The organisation behind it (for details of which, see http://sites.google.com/a/dhstweb.org/www/ ) is structured around international commissions for a variety of sub-disciplines, each of which contributes a "symposium" -- basically, a substantial themed speaker session or group of sessions, covering half a day or more. However, any organisation or (if they represent more than one country) group of people can propose a symposium -- and that, I hope, is where we come in. There is, at least at present, no formal commission representing history of computing and allied interests, whereas SIGCIS is the most active international community in the field. Putting together a SIGCIS session for Manchester would help to raise our profile among the wide range of subject communities present. It would also tie in nicely with Helena Durnova and Slawomir Lotysz's planned session on COMECON computing, which you may recall was announced on this list earlier this month. Their session has been submitted to ICOHTEC (the International Committee for the History of Technology), whose 2013 meeting will be very closely integrated with the Congress, sharing a venue, a single registration, and much of the central organisation. If we can pull together a SIGCIS session, I'll try to persuade the programme planners to run it consecutively with the COMECON session for the benefit of anyone planning a shorter trip. And, of course, I would be very pleased to see as many of you as possible in Manchester, and can promise a friendly environment and a fun programme -- we'll be making the most of the region's industrial culture with plenty of excursions, and we're currently in discussions towards special sessions debating the relationship between historians and science/technology policy and showcasing work to bring history to wider public audiences. The theme of the Congress is 'Knowledge at work'. Conveniently, it so happens that I'm the local committee representative who ended up with the job of explaining what on earth this means: I've put a list of suggested approaches on the site at <http://www.ichstm2013.com/call/>, but notice the customary "may include, but are not limited to" -- all suggestions are welcome. Possible SIGCISsy ideas might include: cultures of working (formal or informal) in IT production and use; the relevance of the fieldwork concept to our research; pure/applied boundary work and its relation to the shape of the computer science discipline; the history of debates over computer literacy in education; computing and craftsmanship. The deadline for symposium submissions is Monday 30 April. We don't, in fact, need detailed abstracts for all papers (there's a later call for these), but would need a schedule of committed participants with titles, and an overview of the session's theme and aims. If you're interested, please drop me a line soon with an indication of what you'd like to present on, and we'll take it from there. All best James