Publications

Part II of the 2013 P3T3 Discussion Papers includes 24 cases originating from 13 countries in Europe: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal, Serbia, Spain, Sweden and the UK. The largest group, nine cases in total, are road and motorway projects: one of the best known application areas for PPPs. Cases presented range from conventional toll motorways in Greece through a road tunnel in the Netherlands financed by availability payments, to an airport access road built by the Flemish Government using a public sector corporate entity and a “shadow” DBFM agreement. 

COST Action 298 ‘Participation in the Broadband Society’ has been working towards understanding the factors that both constrain and enable users’ abilities to shape and use ICTs and more broadly have a bearing on different cross-cultural experiences of technology. As in the previous and successful conferences, COST 298 invited technology and product developers, desginers, social scientist, policy makers, community representatives and early stage researchers who are interested in the conference topics, to join our attempt to develop this discussion on a common, shared and transdisciplinary ground. We asked participants to

– strive to present their approach to technology from a human-centric point of view, and to
– present their topic in a language that attempts to transcend disciplinary boundaries, a language that non-experts can also understand, and to
– not only report on their work, but also to engage in the conference debate which aims to develop ways to understand the interests of people and society, to evaluate developments against such an evolving understanding, and to chart interesting and desirable future directions.

In addition to promoting and understanding of the current and future developments in a broadband information society, the event aimed to promote networking between and a dialogue with colleagues from around Europe and the rest of the world.