This effort builds on and assumes continued growth and increasingly widespread availability of computer and communications technology. It couples that with investment and innovation. Steady increase in access to digital data of visual and auditory form enables a new vision of computer use. The transmission and processing of image, motion, and speech data can support different modes for social interaction. The vision is for new research about multiplying the reach and depth of interaction of distant individuals. This research should lead to new interactive modes. Although these are things now not present, they can become prevalent. Stimulating development of new technical systems using computers and communications can change the nature of society.

The inter-net, electronic messages (email), and cellular telephones are inclusive and access-enabling technologies. They represent a revolutionary change in computers. Now the mediating role - essentially computer as a system component - becomes invisible to the ordinary user. In the past two main methods dominated approaches to extended impact of digital technology. The first increased users' knowledge. The second simplified their access to computers. Today's technology presents another way: access through the system function. Many things can be furthered through investment in technology. As high-speed, low-cost, digital processors, and wide bandwidth communications systems become increasingly the norm, systems that use audio and video can provide new forms of systems, tailored to personalized information exchange. We call making technology-provided solutions increasing access to and interaction within, local, national and global communities, organizations, or non-government entities, social computing.

Today efforts are underway planning new systems where computer technology will play a wider, social-oriented, role. Computer-based systems can replace failure-prone mechanical voting machines. Yet doing that introduces new possibilities and system safeguards need to be introduced. Technology's social role could increase governmental participation. It could continue to change recreation. Or it could take an economic direction. In each area systems, particularly software tailored to geographically diverse computations, are the core technology. We have moved from a stand-alone to interactive uses of digital devices. Yet we stand closer to the start and cannot yet envision the destination.

There is no question that lowered costs, miniaturization and increased speed will expand the roles of computer and information technology systems. Where the past viewed computers as stand-alone components, today communications and other aspects of networking changes that. The future will include great increases in the ways human beings access information. The greatest impact and farthest reach of computers will be in changing the way images and sounds are located, perused, employed, and disseminated. The availability of digital data means that audible/viewable information now involves remote-site and multiple-mode qualities. This inevitably means change in entertainment (movie, mass media, personal expression) and governmental functions. For future systems multiple uses mean that developers have to concentrate on varied and innovative global functions. We need system designs that use many digital components and produce new and compelling modes of access for visual and auditory as well as text-based information. Causing those efforts to increase inclusion and dialogue with traditional groups is a worthwhile part of the expansion.

Current social uses of technology have grown out of the computer culture. We see that chat groups, video games, and narrow cast news via the world wide web provide interactive and individualization possibilities that are unimaginably varied compared to the services previous eras had available. Extensions based on available and new systems designs should be grand challenges.

Finally, economic transactions have been transformed by the use of auctions, internet-based sales, and just in time manufacturing. All are social interactions mediated by computer-based systems. Each of them exemplifies a different kind of market-access. However, this remains the initial side of such technology. New systems that further economies, productivity, access, and exchange of goods/services also should be grand challenges. They will impact taxation, education, and military organizations.