All submissions must have at least two authors. The (first) two authors must be the (main) practitioner and the (main) researcher (in either order). The first author is responsible for the final editing and submission of the project summary and for communication with the conference organisation.

Any one or more authors may present their project at the conference. We hope that first authors will participate in project presentations, but will not require them to do so. Video conferencing with an author in a remote location may be possible.

The format of submissions should correspond to that of our template file, which you can download here as word or pdf. Please also read the following text carefully. Detailed guidelines are necessary to ensure that the conference achieves its stated aims, the evaluation procedure is conducted fairly, and the accepted and revised project summaries can be printed in the conference handbook well before the start of the conference.

Your text should begin with:

• the title (6-12 words),
• the names of the author(s),
• their main relevant affiliations 
• organisations, institutions or other groups
• the affiliations should suggest who is primarily practical and who is research oriented
• ideally, readers should be able to find further information about the affiliations by copying this text into a search machine
• if the main language of the affilation is not English, please provide the original name followed by an English translation in brackets
• a contact address, which should be the email address of the first author, and
• the preferred mode of presentation (talk or poster).

The main text must be structured with the following six headings:

Practical background
What is the main practical issue? What problem needs to be solved? Why is that issue or problem important? How have practitioners previously addressed that issue or attempted to solve that problem? What have they (not) achieved? (Optional: evaluate the approaches and achievements that you have mentioned.)

Research background
What is the main theoretical issue? How have other researchers addressed that issue? What specific research questions have been posed and how have they been answered? What were the main findings of relevant empirical studies? What specific claims (ideas, theses) have been formulated and defended? What questions have not been answered? (Optional: evaluate the approaches and ideas that you have mentioned.)

Aims
What is the main aim of your project? How does your project link together theory and practice (i.e. the previous two sections)? We prefer a concise statement of aims, so this is usually the shortest section.

Main contribution
Describe your collaborative project in detail here, balancing theoretical and practical aspects. This is usually the longest section and might for example comprise three paragraphs. Describe the specific practical and theoretical approach(es) that you have developed to address the aim(s) set out in the Aims section. Name and/or describe any relevant paradigms, schools or methods. Cite others whose approaches are/were similar. The last paragraph of this section should clarify what you have already achieved or are likely to achieve before the conference. Mention specific project outcomes such as insights, results, or concrete developments in social attitudes or political infrastructures.

Implications
By "implications" we mean concrete consequences of the specific achievements listed at the end of the "main contribution" section. What are the relevant political, social, cultural or academic implications of your project? 

Literature
This section comprises references  to some 5 to 10 literature sources. It should include only those sources that you consider most relevant to your project. About one half of the sources should be practically oriented, the other half research oriented (but there is no need to explicitly mark them as such). The main aim is to help readers find books, articles, internet pages and so on that were referred to in previous sections. An additional aim is to acknowledge the contribution made by the authors of that literature. Begin each entry on a new line with author, date and title (possibly with an English translation in brackets). Do not include sources without authors (e.g. wiki pages). Sort the list into alphabetical order of the author's family name. Ensure that all entries are referred to in the main text, either by (author, date) or by superscript numbers (footnotes). Follow any familar reference format (and do so consistently).

Please ensure that your project summary is consistent with the following general points. The connections between the sections should be clear; for example, it should be clear that the research presented under theoretical background is directly relevant for the material in the practical background section. Most sections should include references to relevant literature. Please write in such a way that you cannot be identified after the names and affiliations have been removed from beneath the title.

The entire text, including all headings and administrative detail, should not exceed 800 words (to  allow accepted summaries to be published on two facing pages in the conference booklet). Project summaries should be submitted in the English language as email text or attachment (pdf or word) to cair10@uni-graz.at by 31 August 2009. Evaluators’ comments and notifications of acceptance (as talk or poster) or rejection will be sent to first authors by 15 November 2009. First authors of accepted project summaries will be asked to revise their summaries for publication in the conference handbook by 31 December 2009, taking into account evaluators' suggestions. These authors will then be offered the opportunity to publish a longer description of their project on the cAIR homepage (proceedings; deadline 28 February 2010).

Why bother? Advantages and disadvantages of submission, presentation and participation

Why bother submitting your work to cAIR? Is this a good investment of your time and energy? In the following text we try to answer this question in a general way. Of course we cannot address the specific agendas, constraints, and situations of individual submissions. 

It is not easy to submit to cAIR, for several reasons:

• It is difficult to work across the boundary that separates practice from research in any field, because practitioners and researchers often have very different ways of thinking, communicating, and generally approaching and doing things. 
• For that reason, it is also difficult for potential co-authors to negotiate the exact content of their project summary. What should be included and what left out? What is the most important point? How should it be expressed? 
• The material has to be sorted under the headings required by the submission guideline, and the draft revised several times, making sure it follows the details of the guideline.
• It takes time to find the best reference material for the literature section and make sure that it is incorporated into the argument and referred to clearly. 
• Such tasks tend to be more difficult for practitioners than researchers, because they have less experience with the art of writing concise, clearly structured texts. 
• If English is not your native language you will have additional problems of translation and formulation. 

Advantages of submission. Since submission is the first step and takes considerable work, it is important to be aware of the possible advantages of investing the time and effort, for you personally. Here are some possibilities:

• You clarify your goals and thinking, which can improve the efficiency of your project. In the future, that can prevent you from wasting time, energy, creativity and resources pursuing inappropriate goals.
• The submission procedure forces you to (re-) consult relevant literature in both practice and research, which can give you new ideas about how best to proceed with your project.
• Your submission might become the basis of a later grant application. Sources of financial support tend to appreciate clear applications that are organized into sections such as practical background, theoretical background, aims, main contribution, implications, and literature. cAIR10 will give you expert feedback on your submission that could indirectly help you to get grant money.
• <Since practitioners are often better able than researchers to understand the practical implications of a given piece of research – since they often have a clearer idea about what will work in practice and what will not – the submission procedure is an opportunity for researchers to improve their practical skills under practitioners’ guidance.
• Conversely, since researchers tend to be more skilled than practitioners in the art of formulating concise, clearly structured texts for anonymous evaluation (“abstracts for peer review”), the submission procedure is an opportunity for practitioners to improve their practical skills under researchers’ guidance.

Advantages of presentation. If your paper is accepted for presentation at the conference and you accept the invitation, you can look forward to the following additional spinoffs:

• Interested members of the audience will talk to you afterwards and give you new ideas.
• You may meet new collaborators for future projects whose knowledge and/or expertise is complementary to your own, leading to new successes (productivity, synergy and so on).
• You will likely meet people who can support your project in other ways, or you find out about possible sources of funding. 
• Audience members will take your ideas home with them and apply them to other situations or projects. People in other areas of interaction between practice and theory may find they can use your ideas. You will benefit at unpredictable future times in unpredictable ways.
• It will become clearer to you whether and to what extent your project is interesting for people in other countries. You will get a better idea of what material is publishable, and where it might best be published to reach your desired target audience and/or the largest possible audience.
• If English is not your first language, you will get valuable practice presenting your work in English, which will help you to communicate more effectively in the future.

Advantages of participation. Even if you do not present a paper or poster at cAIR, you can benefit from attending the conference in several ways:

• You will meet many interesting people, some of whom may become long-term friends and colleagues.
• Through active interaction with like-minded practitioners and researchers, you will learn more about relevant projects, methods and so than you would ever learn by staying home and reading the literature.
• You will return home with fresh ideas and renewed motivation.
• If the conference becomes a series that is repeated in different lands (perhaps on different specific themes), you will become part of a new global community dedicated to addressing and solving some of the most important problems facing today’s world,.