CASCI
CASCI, or The Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information, is a multi-disciplinary research center located at the University of Maryland, College Park, United States. The center's goal is to increase understanding of community interactions and to harness the power of novel technologies to support the needs of real and virtual communities. The Center was inaugurated on November 13, 2008. The director is Derek Hansen, an assistant professor in the iSchool at the University of Maryland.
Projects
Ongoing projects include:
- Improving Mass Vaccination Clinic Operations
- External Knowledge Management and Climate Change
- Libraries, Technology, and Older Adult Communities
- How and Why Physicists and Chemists Use Blogs
Funding
At the inaugural ceremony, Dr. Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist for Telligent Systems and founder of the Community Technologies Group at Microsoft Research, presented the CASCI Director with a $2,000 gift to support the Center's activities.
Activities
Each Tuesday morning there is a roundtable discussion; some of these feature speakers from funding agencies interested in community-related projects, while others are more informal discussions. Skill-building workshops are also held, in which professors or students with particular expertise present their ideas to the group.