Hello everyone, The 2008 4S conference begins in Rotterdam on Wednesday, August 20th. http://www.4sonline.org/meeting.htm Following our customary practice I am proposing to organize an informal and affordable dinner for anyone with an interest in the history of computing. This would probably be on Thursday night before the panel. If nobody is going to the official and hugely expensive banquet then we could instead aim for Friday night. Please email me if you are interested - I will send the final details ONLY to people who confirm interest to avoid spamming the list. If you can't get to email you could also text my cell phone during the meeting: +1 414 526 6631. For the third successive year this includes a SIGCIS organized panel, this one prepared in collaboration with the Software for Europe Project. I'm please that we were able to get celebrated STS scholar Trevor Pinch as commentator, which should give our panel a little visibility in the ever-expanding ocean of concurrent sessions that 4S has become. It's an exciting panel, looking at the relationship between computing practices and national/transnational identities on both sides of the iron curtain. Our session is on Friday, 22 Aug from 11.00-12.30 am. Session 2.2.4: Symbolic Internationalism: Computing, Users and (Trans)national Agendas Organizer: Thomas Haigh Room: T3-31 Chair: Thomas Haigh, University of Wisconsin, thaigh@computer.org Policy Machines: Shaping European Computer Users Corinna Schlombs, University of Pennsylvania, schlombs@sas.upenn.edu Transnational Technology: The Unified System of Computing and its Discursive Practices Simon Donig, University of Passau, simon.donig@uni-passau.de Socialist Internationalism and its Limits in Czech Computing Helena Durnova, Brno University of Technology, durnova@feec.vutbr.cz The Goodbye Petrovka Plan: Internet Use and National Identity in Ukraine Maria Haigh, University of Wisconsin, mhaigh@uwm.edu Discussant: Trevor Pinch, Cornell University, tjp2@cornell.edu The conference program is dominated by medical and environmental themes. IT shows up in a number of contexts, including panels on standards, online game worlds, and open source and the fashionable world of surveillance studies. Please reply ASAP if you may be interested in dinner (this includes the panel participants). Tom