Source-linked AI summary
What is Community Informatics (and Why Does It Matter)?
Michael Gurstein
TL;DR
Community Informatics addresses how ICT can enable community processes and objectives beyond merely providing access, especially for excluded populations. It develops a community-centered approach to ICT research and practice, emphasizing local empowerment and context-sensitive implementation. Its supported conclusion is that CI links technology with community action, social justice, and political empowerment, while remaining partial and locally contingent.
Problem
CI responds to limits in access-centered ICT approaches by asking how technology can become usable and useful for excluded communities and support their objectives.
Method
CI studies ICT through community characteristics, social relationships, local control, and strategies for enabling community processes rather than treating technology as socially neutral.
Results
CI connects community-centered ICT use with empowerment, social justice, political participation, and alternatives to centrally controlled information systems.
Takeaways & Limitations
CI provides a framework for designing, evaluating, and extending community-based technology initiatives in ways that reflect local needs and support bottom-up development.
Takeaways & Limitations
CI theory and practice remain partial, temporal, and context-specific rather than universally necessary or applicable.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
Community Informatics (CI) is the application of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to enable community processes and the achievement of community objectives. CI goes beyond the "Digital Divide" to making ICT access usable and useful to excluded populations and communities for local economic development, social justice, and political empowerment. CI approaches ICTs from a "community" perspective and develops strategies and techniques for managing their use by communities both virtual and physical including the variety of Community Networking applications. CI assumes that both communities have characteristics, requirements, and opportunities that require different strategies for ICT intervention and development from individual access and use. Also, CI addresses ICT use in Developing Countries as well as among the poor, the marginalized, the elderly, or those living in remote locations in Developed Countries. CI is of interest both to ICT practitioners and academic researchers and addresses the connections between the policy and pragmatic issues arising from the tens of thousands of Community Networks, Community Technology Centres, Telecentres, Community Communications Centres, and Telecottages globally along with the rapidly emerging field of electronically based virtual "communities". Michael Gurstein, Ph.D. is Executive Director of the Centre for Community Informatics Research, Development and Training (Vancouver BC), a Director of The Information Society Institute, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town South Africa; and Research Professor in the School of Computer and Information Systems at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark.
PUBLISHING STUDIES
The passage identifies Giandomenico Sica as the director.
- Giandomenico Sica is identified as the director.
Polimetrica
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INTRODUCTION
Community Informatics frames ICT use around communities rather than isolated individuals, emphasizing local control, empowerment, and context-sensitive development. It connects community-based technologies to social justice, public participation, and alternatives to centrally controlled networked systems.
- INTRODUCTION: Community Informatics is presented in multiple ways, including as ICT-based community development, an Information Systems approach, and an emerging movement.The volume is explicitly an introduction to the author's thinking rather than a definitive introduction to CI.
- INTRODUCTION: CI applies ICT to enable community processes and achieve objectives such as local economic development, social justice, and political empowerment.
- INTRODUCTION: CI develops strategies for managing ICT use by communities and is closely linked to Community Networking research and applications.
- INTRODUCTION: A CI approach centers lived physical communities, disadvantaged users, user-focused technology, and applied social leadership.
- INTRODUCTION: CI challenges technologists, researchers, and policymakers to make ICT useful for living conditions, governance, self-organization, and self-management.
- INTRODUCTION: CI also supports local innovation and civic presence in an increasingly commercialized Internet.
- INTRODUCTION: CI is framed as empowering people who are normally excluded from power exercised through conventional information systems.
- INTRODUCTION: The networked society is described as increasingly organized through ICT-mediated productive relationships and dispersed network structures.
NOTES
The notes connect Community Informatics to prior work on networked society, community technology, globalization, and Canadian community-access programs. They also document contrasting rural and urban implementation experiences.
- Networked society: The notes contrast community-oriented structures with networked individualism, where geographically dispersed individual actors become central nodes.This discussion frames networks around autonomous individuals rather than particular places, groups, or organizations.
- Related work: Community Informatics is linked to research on community information systems, community networks, sustainability, and the future of information science.The notes cite related work on Community Informatics, Community Networking, systems design, social capital, and management information systems.
- Globalization: Globalization is described as a conceptual space involving unified business operations and the movement of goods, services, capital, and labor across national boundaries.The notes emphasize that the term has no single universally recognized definition.
- Canadian Community Access Program: The Canadian Community Access Program achieved widespread rural uptake, voluntary participation, enthusiasm, participant satisfaction, and political support.The program focused on facilitating Internet access in rural and remote areas.
- Canadian Community Access Program: When the program expanded to urban Canada without adapting its rural strategies, launch was delayed and local sponsorship and sustained community support proved difficult to secure.The urban program was delayed by almost two years and struggled to find local sponsors, counterparts, and champions.
LIST OF KEYWORDS
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