The 12th International Conference on Information & Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD 2022), to be hosted at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA on June 27-29, 2022, invites you to submit research papers and notes.

ICTD 2022 provides an international forum for scholarly researchers to explore the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in social, political, and economic development. The ICTD conferences have been taking place approximately every 18 months since 2006. Recent proceedings have been published in the ACM Digital Library.

***A selection of the best papers will be invited to publish on the journal Special Issue “Information & Communication Technologies and Development better world with better technologies” of Information Systems Frontiers***

Important Dates

~~15 January 2022 22 January 2022 (extended!): Deadline for submission of Full Papers and Notes~~

~~25 February 2022: Notification of acceptance for Full Papers and Notes~~

15 March 2022: Camera-ready deadline for Full Papers and Notes

All submissions are due 11:59 pm AoE (Anywhere on Earth).

Submission details are below. If you have any questions, please contact the Papers Chairs at ictd2022@gmail.com.

Background

For the purposes of this conference, the term “ICT” comprises electronic technologies for information processing and communication, as well as systems, use of big data, interventions, and platforms built on such technologies. “Development” includes, but is not restricted to, the process of improving people’s lives through poverty alleviation, education, healthcare, communication, gender equality, better governance, improved infrastructure, improved agricultural practices, environmental conservation, and sustainability. The conference program will reflect the multidisciplinary nature of ICTD research and publishing traditions, with anticipated contributions from fields including (but not limited to) anthropology, sociology, communication, geography, HCI, data science, design, economics, computer science, electrical engineering, information systems, political science, public health, and relevant different methodological approaches. Considering the character of the conference, papers need to address and appeal to a wider multidisciplinary audience.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are ever more pervasive in the lives of people around the world. ICTs can facilitate different areas of people’s daily lives, ranging from economics to health care, education to governance, advocacy to work, family life to artistic expression. The disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have further increased the need and the presence of ICTs and the Internet in all aspects of people’s lives, as many sectors were forced to a rapid digitization. At the same time, the pandemic exacerbated pre-existing inequalities and divides, especially for underserved social groups who may lack meaningful and quality access, and for communities who are not represented or are suffering from historical and structural forms of oppression.

There are multidisciplinary challenges associated with the research, design, engineering, application, and adoption of ICTs by underserved communities or by social groups in low- and middle-income regions and other resource-constrained settings. These have implications for methodologies, design, policy, and practice. ICTD provides a forum for analyzing, critiquing, refining, and inventing new ways in which individuals, communities, and societies interact with and make use of ICTs.

Full Papers

To be accepted, a Full Paper must make a new research contribution and provide complete and substantial support for its results and conclusions. Accepted papers typically represent a major advance for the field of ICTD.
Full Papers will be evaluated via double-blind peer review by a multidisciplinary panel of at least three readers, one of whom will come from outside the paper’s disciplinary domain in order to ensure broad readability. Reviewers will have 4 weeks to complete their reviews.
Full Papers will be evaluated according to their novel research contribution, methodological soundness, theoretical framing and reference to related work, quality of analysis, quality of writing and presentation, and relevance to a broad audience of researchers. Manuscripts considering novel designs, new technologies, project assessments, policy analyses, impact studies, theoretical contributions, social issues around ICT and development, and so forth will be considered. Well-analyzed negative results from which generalizable conclusions can be drawn are also sought. Authors are encouraged to address the diversity of approaches in ICTD research by providing context, implications, and actionable guidance to researchers and practitioners beyond the authors’ primary domains. Full Papers typically present mature work whereas Notes (see below) are used for presenting preliminary research that is still work-in-progress.
All acceptance will be conditional , the final version of the paper will be checked by the initial reviewers before final acceptance.
To be considered Full Papers, contributions should be more than six pages long (single column template, as specified in the “Submission Instructions” section below). There is no hard page limit, but long papers without a proportional contribution are more likely to be rejected. Previous papers (if converted to the new ACM single-column format) would have run 14-18 pages in length.

Notes

With a shorter six-page limit (single column template, as specified in the “Submission Instructions” section below, and excluding references), Notes are intended to introduce work-in-progress that may be published later in a journal, as well as to document shorter project write-ups. An ICTD Note is likely to have a more focused and succinct research contribution to the ICTD field than Full Papers. For example, Notes on novel ICTD systems may not cover the entire design of the system but may instead go into depth in specific areas (e.g., how the system was evaluated with real users or how the formative work to create the system was conducted). Notes are also not expected to include a complete discussion of related work that is as broad as that of a submission to the Full Papers venue.
Notes will be evaluated by at least two multidisciplinary reviewers in a double-blind fashion and will be assessed according to their research contribution, methodological soundness, quality of analysis, and quality of writing, and presentation. Reviewers will have 4 weeks to complete their reviews.
Manuscripts considering novel designs, new technologies, project assessments, policy analyses, impact studies, theoretical contributions, social issues around ICT and development, and so forth will be considered. However, Notes need not necessarily be as comprehensive, novel, or generalizable as Full Papers.
Accepted notes authors will be invited to present a poster. All acceptance will be conditional , the final version of the note will be checked by the initial reviewers before final acceptance.

Submission Instructions

Please submit your papers and notes using this portal.
Paper contributions are expected to be in proportion to the paper’s length. Disproportionately long papers with few contributions will not be reviewed as favorably as the same set of contributions expressed in fewer pages.
Full Papers and Notes must use the ACM templates and reference formatting (LaTex and Word available). Please, note: As described in the page linked above, manuscripts for review should be submitted in a single column format. Manuscripts submitted for review should use the “Submission Template” (Microsoft Word) or “Primary Article Template” (Latex -\documentclass[manuscript,review,anonymous]{acmart} ) as described at the link.
Upon acceptance, you will receive instructions on how to prepare your paper for publication.
Papers must be submitted in a form suitable for anonymous review. No author names or affiliations may appear on the title page, and papers should avoid revealing their identity in the text. When referring to your previous work, do so in the third person, as though it were written by someone else. Only blind the reference itself in the (unusual) case that a third-person reference is infeasible. Publication as a technical report or in an online repository does not constitute a violation of this policy. Submissions that are not anonymized will be rejected without full review.
Submissions not in the template format, not related to the conference themes, not anonymized, and/or not meeting a minimum bar of academic research writing will be rejected without full review.
For each accepted submission, at least one of the authors will be required to register and present it at ICTD2022. Else, the submission will not be published in the final proceedings.
For Full Papers, see the ACM’s copyright policies and options. Copyright for Notes will be retained by the authors.
Only original, unpublished, research papers in English will be considered.

Human Subjects and Ethical Considerations

Authors are strongly encouraged to read and follow the community-defined minimum ethical standards for ICTD research. These standards are the result of a three-year participatory process to co-define ethical standards in ICTD, and were voted on and adopted at the ICTD conference in Ahmedabad in January 2019. You can also read more about how these standards were created.

In addition, submissions that describe experiments with human subjects, that analyze data derived from human subjects, or that otherwise may put humans at risk should:

Disclose whether the research received an approval or waiver from each of the authors’ institutional ethics review boards (IRB) if applicable.
Discuss steps taken to ensure that participants and others who might have been affected by an experiment were treated ethically and with respect.

If a paper raises significant ethical concerns, it might be rejected based on these concerns.

Program Committee

Program Committee Chairs:

Sara Vannini (University of Sheffield)
Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed (University of Toronto)

Program Committee:

Aaditeshwar Seth (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India)
Aditya Vashishtha (Cornell Tech, New York, NY, USA)
Agha Ali Raza (Lahore University of Management, Pakistan)
AKM Najmul Islam (Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology, – LUT – Finland)
Aldo De Moor (Community Sense, The Netherlands)
Alim Al Razi (Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh)
Amy Ogan (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
Anand Sheombar (University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht, The Netherlands)
Andrea Jimenez (University of Sheffield, UK)
Andrew Cox (University of Sheffield, UK)
Anirudha Joshi (Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India)
Antonio Diaz Andrade (Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand)
Aparna Moitra (Ulula, Toronto, ON, Canada)
Arnab Mandal (Tata Trusts, India)
Ayushi Tandon (Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India)
Balaji Parthasarathy (International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, India)
Barath Raghavan (University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA)
Bilal Siddiqi (University of California Berkeley, CA, USA)
Bill Thies (Microsoft Research India)
Brian DeRenzi (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
Caitlin Bentley (University of Sheffield, UK)
Carleen Maitland (Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA)
Caroline Khene (De Montfort University, Leicester, UK)
Chipo Kanjo (University of Malawi, Zomba, Malawi)
Chris Coward (University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA)
Christian Sturm (Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences, Germany)
Christopher Foster (University of Manchester, UK)
Colin Rhinesmith (Simmons University, Boston, MA, USA)
Danilo Giglitto (Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK)
David Nemer (University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA)
Devinder Thapa (University of Agder, Norway)
Dilrukshi Gamage (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)
Dipanjan Chakroborty (Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India)
Dorothea Kleine (University of Sheffield, UK)
Efpraxia Zamani (University of Sheffield, UK)
Eiad Yafi (Institute of Business, Timor-Leste)
Elisa Oreglia (King’s College London, UK)
Elizabeth Belding (University of California Santa Barbara, USA)
Ellen Zegura (Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA)
Faheem Hussain (Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA)
Firaz Peer (University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA)
Indrani Medhi (Microsoft Research India)
Ingmar Weber (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Ar-Rayyan, Qatar)
Isabella Rega (University of Bournemouth, UK)
Izak Van Zyl (Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town, South Africa)
Jacki O’Neill (Microsoft Africa Research Institute, Nairobi, Kenya)
Janaki Srinivasan (International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, India)
Jay Chen (University of California Berkeley, CA, USA)
Jay Taneja (University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA, USA)
Josiah Chavula (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
Joyojeet Pal (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA)
Kagonya Awori (Microsoft Africa Research Institute, Kenya)
Katherine Reilly (Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada)
Kurtis Heimerl (University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA)
Lars Rune Christensen (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Laura S. Gaytán-Lugo (University of Colima, Mexico)
Luis Fernando Baron (Icesi University, Cali, Colombia)
Maggie Jack (Cornell Tech, New York, NY, USA)
Mahdi Nasrullah Al-Ameen (Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA)
Malay Bhattacharyya (Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India)
Mamello Thinyane United Nation University, UNU, Macao)
Maria Garrido (University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA)
Mario Marais (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, South Africa)
Marisol Wong-Villacres (Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral, Guayaquil, Guayas, Ecuador)
Marta Pucciarelli (SUPSI, Switzerland)
Maryam Mustafa (Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan)
Md Munirul Haque (University of Indianapolis, IN, USA)
Melissa Densmore (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
Michaelanne Thomas (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA)
Mike Best (Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA)
Mohammad Rashidujjaman Rifat (University of Toronto, Canada)
Mohit Jain (Microsoft Research India)
Mukulika Maity (Institute of Information Technology Delhi, India)
Mustafa Naseem (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA)
Naeemul Hassan (University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA)
Niall Keleher (Stanford University, CA, USA)
Nigini Oliveira (University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA)
Nimmi Rangaswamy (Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India)
Nipun Batra (Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, India)
Oliver Zhang (Edinburgh Napier University, UK)
Padma Chirumamilla (National University of Singapore)
Pamela Abbott (University of Sheffield, UK)
Patrick Olivier (Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Petter Nielsen (University of Oslo, Norway)
Pitso Tsibolane (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
PJ Wall (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
Priyank Chandra (University of Toronto, ON, Canada)
Pushpendra Singh (Indraprastha Institute of information Technology Delhi, India)
Rajesh Veeraraghavan (Georgetown University, Washington D.C., USA)
Ranjit Singh (Data & Society Research Institute, New York, NY, USA)
Richard Heeks (University of Manchester, UK)
Rijurekha Sen (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India)
Robert Soden (University of Toronto, ON, Canada)
Rose Pritchard (University of Manchester, UK)
S M Taiabul Haque (University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO, USA)
Saiph Savage (Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA)
Salihu Dasuki (University of Sheffield, UK)
Sam Sudar (Substack, USA)
Sandip Chakraborty (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India)
Sayan Sarcar (Birmingham City University, UK)
Shaddi Hasan (Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA)
Sharifa Sultana (Cornell Tech, Ithaca, NY, USA)
Shirin Madon (London School of Economics, UK)
Silvia Masiero (University of Oslo, Norway)
Sunandan Chakraborty (Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN, USA)
Sundeep Sahay (University of Oslo, Norway)
Suvodeep Mazumdar (University of Sheffield, UK)
Suzana Brown (Stony Brook University – SUNY, Incheon, Korea)
Sveta Milusheva (World Bank, USA)
Tariq Zaman (University College of Technology Sarawak, Malaysia)
Tony Roberts (Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, UK)
Vigneswara Ilavarasan (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India)
Wallace Chigona (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
William David Tucker (Stellenbosch University, South Africa)
Yasir Zaki (New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE)
Yingqin Zheng (Royal Holloway University of London, UK)