CFP: Special track on BLOCKCHAIN AND DECENTRALIZED TECHNOLOGIES FOR SOCIAL GOOD (BANDIT) @ ACM GoodIT 2023

https://sites.google.com/unipi.it/bandit2023/home

6-8 September 2023, Lisbon, Portugal

Accepted papers will be included in the ACM Digital Library.
Special issues associated with the conference are being organized. Selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version to those journals.

## MOTIVATION AND RATIONALE
Social good has a big impact on society. Indeed, the term “social good” refers to something which benefits the general public, and at the same time, it is something which 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. A lot of 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 in order to improve all the aspects of the social good. Blockchain and decentralized technologies have been 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 potentially involve novel tokenization mechanisms based on smart contracts that necessitate further investigation and discussion. While the revolutionary potential of blockchains has been largely tested (in the financial domain in particular), its possible applications in social domains and to address sustainability challenges have been explored far less. The aim of this special session is 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 system. 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 session 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 and the not-for-profit sector, etc.




## TOPICS
* 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



## IMPORTANT DATES
* Papers submission: 1st June 2023
* Notification of acceptance: 7th July 2023
* Camera-ready paper due: 18th July 2023