The "Digital Communities" category focuses on the wide-ranging social and artistic impact of the Internet as well as on the latest developments in social software, user generated content, mobile communications, mash-ups and location based services. Digital Communities" focuses on innovation in human coexistence, efforts to bridge the geographical as well as gender-based digital divide, overcoming cultural conflicts and fostering cultural diversity and the freedom of artistic expression. Consideration is also given to projects that advance the practice of sharing and the formation of a “Cloud Intelligence”, and that facilitate access to technological-social infrastructure. Digital Communities spotlights the political and artistic potential of digital and networked systems and is thus designed to singled out for recognition a broad spectrum of projects, programs, artworks, initiatives and phenomena in which social and artistic innovation is taking place, as it were, in real time. A Golden Nica, two Awards of Distinction and up to 12 Honorary Mentions will be awarded in the Digital Communities category in 2010.

Digital Communities - What are they?

Digital Communities - regardless of wheter their background is social or artistic - give rise to group action and interaction, engender constructive contexts and social capital, and promote social innovation as well as cultural and environmental sustainability. An essential precondition for this is making the respective relevant technologies and infrastructure more widely accessible or even developing them in the first place. But access to content and information is also a core consideration. Digital Communities are committed to achieving comprehensive human development, a key aspect of which is reconfiguring the relationship of power among citizens and political leaders, the state and its administrative bureaucracy as well as financial and commercial interests in the sense of increasing participation, strengthening the role of the civil society and establishing a framework in which democracy can flourish.

Submission

The "Digital Communities" category is open to political, social, cultural and artistic projects, initiatives, groups, and scenes from all over the world that are effectively utilizing digital technology to better society and to assume social responsibility. It is open to the initiators and propagators of these communities as well as the developers of the relevant technologies, and is meant to honor those whose work contributes to the establishment and proliferation of digital communities as well as to promoting understanding of and research into them.

The spectrum of potential entrants to this category is wide indeed: from private initiatives to public institutions, grassroots associations to professional organizations. They might take any number of approaches and focus on all different aspects of community innovation and social software. Particular emphasis is placed on a project’s level of community innovation, its sustainability in cultural, economic and environmental terms, and its use of technology in ways that are sensible and user-friendly. Depending on the particular situation, this might simply be creating a smart linkup to pre-existing tools or optimizing the use of available infrastructure.

Jurors are especially keen on recognizing extremely promising technological-social solutions, social software tools, artistic & cultural endeavors and socio-technological infrastructure, as well as the brilliant implementation of such concepts. Their evaluations and decisions will honor visionary and forward-looking projects, those that display consummate social and technological innovativeness and that have been successfully set up and established. Jurors will place particular emphasis on the reasonableness, appropriateness and openness of the solutions. Digital Communities projects should enable human beings to enjoy the widest possible access to technology, networks, content and the so-called digital commons. The projects singled out for recognition should be able to serve as models to be copied by others, and, in their orientation on the future, be a source of inspiration, encouragement and empowerment.

Among the projects, phenomena, artworks and fields of activity subsumed under the heading Digital Communities are:

• social software
• web 2.0 applications
• social networking systems / friends networks / social self-support groups
• user –generated content & metadata
• citizen journalism / professional amateurs reporting
• crowdsourcing
• real-time web applications
• mapping mashups
• open government data
• artistic collaborative projects
• citizen involvement / citizen journalism
• eRights / eDemocracy / eGovernance

Who can submit an entry?

Individuals, groups, associations, public institutions and private enterprises are eligible to enter. They must, at the time of the judging, be active, extant communities, and must be verifiable through online representation or documentation. Community projects may be submitted only by an authorized representative. Journalistic, scholarly and artistic works may be submitted only by the author or copyright holder or his/her authorized representative. In the case of software, the entry must be a documented program running in real time; it is to be entered by the developer, who must indicate the type of license granted to those using this software. All persons submitting an entry must nominate a proxy in case the winner is unable to appear at the awards ceremony. Purely commercially oriented projects are ineligible.

Entrants are requested to register online at Prix Ars Electronica and to submit a signed print-out of the online registration form along with the entry material by March 5, 2010 to:

Ars Electronica Linz GmbH
Ars-Electronica-Straße 1
4040 Linz, Austria
Code: Prix
oder per Fax: +43.732.7272-674

Nica Winners 2004 - 2009

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