[Sigiii-l] Global Information Village Plaza 3

[Nadia Caidi]

Dear All,

Please help us circulate the cfp widely. 
Thank you,

Nadia Caidi

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3rd Global Information Village Plaza - The Power of ‘What 
Ifs’

Moderators:
Nadia Caidi
Faculty of Information Studies, 140 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3G6, Canada, 
caidi at fis.utoronto.ca 

Michel J. Menou
CIDEGI, B.P. 15, 49350 Les Rosiers sur Loire, France, Michel.Menou at wanadoo.fr

Presenters: ASIS&T members, especially SIG/III members, and conference attendees
The Global Information Village Plaza is now in its third year of existence. This new edition 
differs substantially from the previous ones. The new format will feature a request for 
questions rather than answers. Questions will be purposefully formulated in a “What If?” 
format intended to elicit provocative debates and open dialogue among participants. The 
Global Plaza will however maintain its successful interactive format, aimed at giving ASIS&T 
members an opportunity to express their personal views about the challenges and 
opportunities that they encounter in the so called "information society" both at a  personal and 
professional level. 
As in the past, the overall theme will revolve around the recurring themes of the information 
society (whose information society?); areas where more research is needed; links to existing 
resources, initiatives, policy statements, etc. 
To keep up with the spirit of the Global Information Village Plaza, personal submission of 
“What If” questions will be sought from the information professionals’ community around the 
globe. The process is due to run from May through October 2004. It will include posting and 
discussion on ASIS&T and other professional listservs. The questions will be clustered in a 
series of posters during a special session. During the session, participants in the Annual 
Meeting will be invited to first browse through the posters comment   and vote on what they 
deem the five most provocative/relevant questions. Five ‘surprise’ guests (a scholar, a 
practitioner, a government representative, a student and a colleague from a developing 
nation) will be selected by the moderators from among the conference participants and asked 
to discuss briefly the selected questions. A general discussion will ensue. SIG/III plans to 
publish a summary of the process and its outcome. 

SCOPE OF GLOBAL INFORMATION VILLAGE PLAZA 3
Asking the right questions is often half of the answer. “What if?”-type of questions are often deemed 
irrelevant –or even useless- because they steer us away from agreed upon conventions and set 
frameworks. There are instances, however, when “what if” questions help us think in new and creative 
ways about our assumptions and goals.
For the past two years, the moderators have been on a quest to engage the information science 
community –both specialists and lay professional public- in a dialogue about the major features of the 
so-called “information society" and its increasingly global nature. In particular, we were interested in 
the lay professional public’s views: what does this “new” society mean to them in a real and concrete 
sense?
This project aims at providing an opportunity for all ASIS&T members and information professional 
at large to express and share their personal views using the new format of  “what if” questions.

Before the Annual Meeting: What Can I Do?
In June 2004, a call for participation will be issued on all ASIS&T listservs and other professional 
lists around the world, as far as possible. People will be asked to send questions to the SIG/III mailing 
list. These questions will be based on the model of those that emerged from the 2003 Global 
Information Village Plaza statements and subsequent discussions at the Annual Conference, for 
instance:
*   What if we made it a requirement for admission to information studies programs that 
    students spent at least one year in a remote/rural area; low-income community or in a 
    developing nation?
*   What if people from various parts of the world did not want software and products in their 
    local languages?
*   What if we left the private sector ‘take over’ the globalization of information products and 
    services?
*   What if broadening access to ICTs was simply not enough?
*   What if the information science community was the leading voice at the World Summit of 
    Information Society?
As far as possible, questions will be selected and grouped into clusters. They may also possibly be 
amended and/or merged, and reposted for discussion on the SIG/III list.  In preparation for the session, 
the questions and discussions about each main topic will be summarized in a poster by the moderators.
At the Annual Meeting 
During the session at the Annual Meeting 
a) The posters will be placed on the walls around the room. Participants will be invited to move 
around the room and add their comments on stickers. They will also be able to vote for the most 
provocative questions.
b) After 30 minutes, individual discussions will stop. The moderators will tally the votes for the five 
most provocative questions, and invite the audience to gather around a panel of five surprise ‘guests’ 
selected from among the conference participants. The guests will stand on a platform in the middle of 
the room, surrounded by the audience. The surprise guests will consist of: one scholar, one 
practitioner, one government representative, one student and one colleague from a developing nation, 
c) Each special guest will be asked to select one question, and will have five minutes for presenting 
their position about the issues raised by the question.  A general discussion with the audience will 
follow and will be recorded. The idea is to engage a dialogue between the guest speakers; between the 
speakers and the audience; and between audience members.  
After the Annual Meeting
After the Annual Meeting the final version of the most significant contributions and outcomes will be 
edited and assembled into a paper for publication in a professional journal (such as the Bulletin of the 
American Society for Information Science and Technology).