Society and Information Research Group

I’m pleased to announce that full proceedings of The Difference that Makes a Difference 2011, the workshop on the nature of information organised by David Chapman and Magnus Ramage with help from many other members of SIRG, are now available. They can be found on the workshop website. The workshop was held on the 7th-9th September 2011, at The Open University in Milton Keynes.

The proceedings include an abstract, presentation slides and audio recordings (podcasts) for keynote and other speakers in each of four main sessions, on the themes of “What is information?”, “Understanding with information”, “Engaging with information” and “The impact of information”, plus podcasts of rapporteur summaries and panel discussions for the four main sessions, and the closing plenary discussion. In total there were 25 speakers at the event, from disciplines including philosophy, systems theory, ICT, ecology, physics, linguistics, computing, public policy, semiotics and sociology.

I recently attended the 2nd European Research Conference on Microcredit, held 16-18 June in Groningen, The Netherlands. I was there to present Badruddozza Mia’s paper “Overlapping and Information Systems in Microcredit: A Bangladesh Perspective” (recently also given to SIRG, see following blog entry for the abstract).

Microcredit is an area I’m still learning about, but it arises from an interesting mixture of economics, politics, information, technology and development policy, so fits well into SIRG’s concerns. For more about what I learnt at the conference, see my personal blog.