Blockchain and Decentralized technologies for social good (BANDIT)
Special track of the ACM International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good (GoodIT2025)
3-5 September 2025, Antwerp, Belgium

https://sites.google.com/unipi.it/bandit2025

IMPORTANT DATES
Papers Submission deadline: May 4th, 2025
Notification of acceptance: July 8th, 2025
Camera Ready: July 19th, 2025

AIM AND SCOPE
Social good has a big impact on society. Indeed, the term “social good” refers to something that benefits the general public, and at the same time, it is something that reflects and respects their wishes, being ‘from’ the people. The social good can be envisioned as global citizens uniting to unlock the potential of individuals through collaboration to create a positive societal impact. Much interest has been produced in the last years, and new proposals and technologies have been considered. Among them, Blockchain, distributed ledger technologies, and decentralized technologies in general, such as IPFS, have been considered to improve all the aspects of the social good. Blockchain and decentralized technologies have had a big impact on the world. In particular, Blockchain technology has been applied to several fields, such as e-health, IoT, media, etc. The big question around the definition of this track is: “How does the blockchain have a big impact on the social good? And how can decentralization improve the ICT industries?”. The track manages the possible application of decentralized technologies in research fields included in the global scope of the social good. These address sectors such as agriculture, supply chain traceability, energy, health, property rights, and digital identities, ranging from a global to a local scope. More recently in the realm of civic participation, civil society initiatives and social economies, blockchains are being tested to implement collaborative models: social finance and local currency schemes, peer-to-peer production and exchanges, decentralized organizations management and decision-making, purpose-driven tokens that incentivize pro-social behaviors, etc.
Examples of applications involving considerable experimentation and innovation are complementary and community currency systems. These systems aim to support humanitarian aid initiatives, self-organizing local community development, and basic income projects.
These involve novel tokenization mechanisms based on smart contracts that require further investigation and discussion. While blockchain's revolutionary potential has been largely tested (in the financial domain, in particular), applications in social domains and for addressing sustainability challenges have been explored far less.
This special track aims to explore and debate the main concepts and implications of blockchain technology, how it can be a driver of innovation, and its positive effects on our societies, industry, legal systems, and economic/financial systems. Also, the risks and uncertainties that blockchain arrows are welcome to be debated in this section, as regards: conflicts arising from the introduction, in mutable social interactions, of logics based on tokenization, automation, and trustlessness; energy consumption and environmental impacts; technical accessibility and digital skill divides.

This special track will provide both academic and industry researchers with a forum to discuss the impact, future, and limitations of blockchain technology regarding its effect across specific industries, economics, finance, law, civil society initiatives, social economies, the not-for-profit sector, etc.

TOPICS of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Blockchain and decentralized architectures and algorithms
- Protocols for management and access using blockchain
- Consensus and Mining Algorithms Suited for Social Good
- NFT and Web3 for Social Good
- Security and privacy in Blockchains and decentralized platforms
- Blockchain application in civic participation initiatives in local communities
- Blockchain application in social and collaborative economies in local communities
- Blockchain-based local currencies for financial inclusion
- Tokenomics and collaborative incentives models for local communities
- Decentralized Autonomous Organizations for Smart Communities
- Voting and opinion formation systems
- Blockchain applications for environmental sustainability
- Blockchain applications for public administration
- Blockchain applications in IoT
- Blockchain applications in healthcare
- Blockchain applications in business
- Blockchain applications in supply-chain management and certification
- Blockchain applications in the industry
- Blockchain applications in mobile communications and wireless networks
- Decentralized Technology for Social Media
- Blockchain in Social Networking
- AI for blockchain


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Please submit your papers through our online submission portal, available at https://goodit2025.hotcrp.com

Paper Lengths
Papers should be a maximum of 9 pages, using the ACM double-column format, and including references, tables, and figures. Documents with a length disproportionate to their contribution will be rejected.

For templates and format requirements check here: https://goodit2025.idlab.uantwerpen.be/call-for-papers/

CO-CHAIRS
Andrea Michienzi, Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, Italy
Claudio Schifanella, University of Turin, Italy
Fadi Barbara, University of Turin, Italy
Alexander Norta, University of Tallinn, Estonia