Cafe Kreation: An Open Platform for the Development of Virtual Cafes for Social Inclusion

Development of an innovative communication platform for the creation of shared environments (virtual cafes) to facilitate the social inclusion of marginalised young people.

The goal of the Cafe Kreation project is to develop an open platform for the creation of virtual public places where marginalised young people could create and share creative art experiences (music, video, ...) and participate in collaborative gaming experiences. Although it is not expected that the project will solve the problem of marginalisation of young people, the developed technology will facilitate the integration of these groups, reducing the ICT opportunity gap, and ensuring that support reaches those who need it most.

Cafe Kreation will use new Web technologies to recreate social links. Based on Web 2.0 concepts and tools, collaborative games and multimedia mushups, Cafe Kreation will stimulate the participation of young people in online communities. Project results will be evaluated on a number of small scale testing environments. As a secondary goal, the project will contribute with an analysis of the state of the art and determination of the most important technology challenges to prepare a future research agenda.

Edutaiment
social inclusion
web 2.0
open source software
casual games
collaborative games
multimedia mushups

• Experience in multimedia environments and multimedia mashups
• Experience in the development of Web 2.0, AJAX and LAMP based web services
• Organisations having a track-record in research on ICT and marginalised young people

• Development of advanced web based collaborative services
• Development of collaborative casual games and lobby services
• An architecture and an abstraction layer for the deployment and management of collaborative services
• Development of real scenarios for technology demostration

Research centers, universities, and large companies that have the technical skills listed above.

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