Digital cooperation to bridge digital divides

Balaji Parthasarathy’s work broadly explores the relationship between technological change, economic globalisation and social transformation. One strand of his work examines the impacts of public policies and firm strategies on the social and spatial organisation of production in the ICT industry. Another strand examines how ICTs are deployed in various domains of economic activity to transform social relationships, especially in underprivileged contexts.

Deputy Director of the i2cat Foundation (www.i2cat.net) and Research Director of Citilab in Catalonia,Spain (www.citilab.eu). His two research goals are: high tech as a post-scientist epistemology and the technoanthropology as social high tech.

He got the Ph.D. In Cultural Anthropology in the Universitat de Barcelona in 1992, after completing a three years fieldwork at Carnegie Mellon University, doing an ethnographic fieldwork about the “Design Culture” of this American university, specially its School of Computer Science.

In i2cat, he’s promoted the area of convergence media, Internet and people. In 2006, he started the Anella Cultural project, Cultural Ring. Then It inspired the Anilla Cultural in Latinamerica and finally the Creative Ring network in Europe. http://www.creativering.eu/

Since 2016, he’s been working with the Catalan gov. and a group of living labs in building Catlabs, a prototype of collaboratory or universal innovation system at the regional level.

See, presentations, Ph.D. dissertation, articles, at https://es.slideshare.net/arturserra

Specialties: Internet, community networking, design knowledge, living labs, citilabs, R+D+i politicies.