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Is Community Informatics good for communities?&
Questions confronting an emerging field
Randy Stoecker
University of Toledo & randy@comm-org.utoledo.edu &
This paper
addresses a number of questions confronting the emerging field of community
informatics.
First, is it a field of study or a field of practice?
Second, is
the focus of community informatics on communities, information, or technology?
Third, does community informatics serve elites, academics, community workers,
or community workers?
The paper moves from these questions to develop an
empowerment model for community informations, emphasizing a community
development approach combined with an information focus and a participatory
It concludes with the question of whether community informatics
should strive to be a supporting field rather than develop as an independent
arena of study or practice.&
Introduction
I have been doing Community
Informatics work for nearly a decade now, ever since we did a needs analysis of
the community organizations in Ohio?s largest cities in 1996 and then built a
local community technology intermediary called CATNeT.
I am now teaching
courses in Social Informatics and Community Informatics. I build my own
computers, manage two servers, and work with a number of different Community
Information technology projects.
But I must admit that thinking of myself as
someone who does Community Informatics has always left me feeling vaguely
uncomfortable.
Perhaps it is because, in contrast to the other fields I mess
around in?community organizing, community development, and community-based
research?Community Informatics has always felt like it was separate.
It has always felt separate to
me because, unlike those other fields, the answer to the social problems of the
day are already implied in Community Informatics.
In some way, shape, or form,
the answers always have to do with computers.
That is not the case in
community organizing, community development, and community-based research,
whose ?toolboxes? include a wide range of tools, and even computers sometimes.
A community organizer friend of mine is fond of the saying that ?if the only
tool in your toolbox is a hammer, all problems look like nails.?
And so it may
be with the emerging field of Community Informatics.
This emerging field, with
its concentration on the computer as the central tool, is in danger of seeing
all problems as technological.
It is interesting how many of us
in this emerging field of Community Informatics seem to share a similar sense
of unease.
Bill Pitkin?s (2001) provocative essay, ?Community Informatics,
Hope or Hype?? expresses the unease as overselling technology as a solution.
One of Doug Schuler?s favorite T-shirts says ?Question Technology.?
unfair to charge this new field with blindly promoting technology, as it is
clear so many of us are worried about just that.
And yet something is missing
for many of us.
I write this essay to better understand the crucial questions
the field needs to face in order to move forward.
And it seems the best place
to start is with trying to define the field itself.
What is Community Informatics?
While the practice of using
information and communication technology to serve communities has been around
for some time, the definition of that practice and the study of its effects is
still emerging as a field.
So young is this emerging field that the Community
Informatics Research Network was founded only in the fall of 2003. It was only in
2000 that the first important hard copy volume of work on Community Informatics
was published (Gurstein, 2000).
Centers devoted to research and practice
in Community Informatics are also quite young.
One of the oldest, the
Community Informatics Research and Applications Unit (CIRA) at the University
of Teesside, was established only in 1996 (CIRA, n.d.).
Other centers devoted
explicitly to Community Informatics, such as the Center for Community
Networking Research at Monash University, and the Community Informatics
Research Group at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, are even younger.
So it should be expected that
the definition of the field should be in some flux as well.
The inventor of
the term, Michael Gurstein (2003), describes Community Informatics (perhaps
unintentionally) as having two forms. On the one hand, ?Community Informatics
(CI) is the application of information and communications technologies (ICTs)
to enable community processes and the achievement of community objectives.?
the other hand ?CI is the terminology that is coming to be used to describe the
academic discipline and practice for systematically approaching Information
Systems from a ?community? perspective.? (Bieber et al. 2002).
There is a
desire to bring together these two perspectives, but as of yet only the Community
Informatics and Information Systems: Mapping the Sector project (n.d.) has
attempted to define the field comprehensively.
And that project is only in its
earliest stages.
So, given that the field is characterized
by both a practice approach and a scholarly approach, it seems useful to better
understand these definitions separately before attempting to combine them.
A field of study
As a field of study, Community
Informatics is woefully underdeveloped.
Indeed, as Tom Denison and colleagues
(2003) have concluded, ?an adequate theoretical analysis of the character of
Community Informatics as a recognizable form of social institution or practice
has not occurred.?
It takes more than a theoretical analysis to constitute a
stable field of study, however.
For Community Informatics to be a field of
study, it must have an agreed upon set of core questions, an array of
methodological techniques and practices, and a set of theoretical approaches.
Is there a set of core
questions? Indeed, a Google search of ?Community Informatics? with ?core
questions? in December of 2004 turns up exactly four hits, none of which
address the issue of what the core questions of Community Informatics should
What we find instead of core questions are a wide array of
discipline-based researchers writing about and conducting research on the
digital divide, NGOs and NPOs, interpersonal networks, virtual communities, and
all manner of other topics related to communities and technology.
To date, no
one has taken that writing and research and attempted to distill a set of
common questions from it.
This in itself would be worthy of a grant to
determine what the boundaries of the field might be and what questions are
being addressed across the blossoming Community Informatics literature.
There is also not a body of
theory that we can point to as constituting a field of study called Community
Informatics, as we have already seen.
Indeed, even if we consider Community
Informatics as a subfield of the broader field of Social Informatics (Kling,
1999), we find less than we would hope.
Manuel Castells? (; 1998)
massive three-volume work has attempted to build some definable body of theory
around information technology in general, but the very massiveness of the work
makes it difficult to apply in community settings.
Much of the writing and
research we do find is driven more by anecdotal reports and story-telling than
by the use of theory (Pitkin, 2001; Denison et al., 2003).
Finally, it is also difficult to
find an agreed-upon set of methodological techniques and practices.
far more anecdotal reports than the average academic field would be comfortable
with, using a case study methodology that many academic disciplines would
consider lacking in rigor.
The opportunities for comparative research, linking
the many analyses of individual community computing centers, have not been
And, of course, the development of a kitbox of research techniques
is hampered by the lack of core questions and theory.
What we have then, is a field of
study that looks very much like the Internet itself.
There are a variety of
researchers doing work that they individually define as falling under the
general rubric of Community Informatics, and hoping to recruit others.
field of study, then, is very much in its infancy.
So much in its infancy is
it that the Sociology and Anthropology faculty at the University of Toledo
refused to make a hire in even the broader area of Social Informatics in 2003.
It is another question
altogether whether it matters that Community Informatics is underdeveloped as a
field of study.
In this post-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary,
non-disciplinary age, things like core questions, paradigmatic theories, and
common methods can seem anachronistic.
So it is important to ask whether we
want Community Informatics to be a disciplinary field of study or only a
topical area of inquiry.
If the former, we have much to do.
If the latter, we
may have already done too much, particularly because so much of the emphasis in
Community Informatics is on applied work.
A field of practice
Community Informatics as a field
of practice is much more developed.
Indeed, many of those now working in
Community Informatics as a field of study began by working in it as a field of
And they have brought those interests with them.
But even the practice of
Community Informatics diverges within itself.
One division is between the
development of community information systems?more or less the community-based
version of management information systems (Bieber, 2002) used in the government
and corporate sectors?and the development of community networks, which begins
to move more in the direction of focusing on building the knowledge and
information capacity of community members, often leading to the creation of
electronic rather than face-to-face relationships (Russian Communities Online, n.d.).
Another set of divisions is between Community Informatics projects that focus
on enhancing democracy, developing social capital, empowering individuals,
building community, and developing local economies (O'Neil, 2001). These are
significantly different areas, requiring dramatically different kinds of
expertise outside of information technology.
In any developed field of
practice you will also find statements of ethics and standards of practice.
There have been some attempts to draw out the ethical issues from specific
application contexts such as Northern Ireland, but there has been no general
set of ethics developed for Community Informatics.
Likewise, there are no
agreed upon standards of practice, though some attempt to develop such
standards.
William McIver (n.d.), for example, has proposed standards of
practice that emphasize accessibility, universal design, and participatory
It?s not fair to say that an ethical vacuum exists in Community
Informatics, since practitioners bring their standards of practice from the
more established disciplines and professions from which they come.
And one of
the reasons so many of us have been drawn to this emerging field of Community
Informatics is because we see the need for integrating technology with social
justice work.
But the lack of a codified set of ethics and practice standards is
a sign of the under-development of Community Informatics as a field of
An integrated field?
Because of the potential
disjuncture between Community Informatics as a field of study and Community
Informatics as a field of practice, we also need to ask what the relationship
between the two should be.
Will it be like the professional fields of public
health, social work, public administration, and others where scholarship and
practice are interwoven?
Or will practice and scholarship keep each other at
arm?s length?
And if practice and scholarship are to be integrated, through
what forms will that integration occur?
Here there are some interesting
possibilities.
Community Informatics is coming of age in the midst of a
revolution in the way we conduct research.
The exploding popularity of
participation- and action-oriented forms of research such as community-based
research (Strand et al., 2003) is occurring at the same time as the rise of
Community Informatics as a field.
The integration of practice and scholarship
occurring in community-based research is already popular among many in
Community Informatics at least in part because of the participatory design
model being used in so many Community Informatics projects (Day, 2000; Campbell
and Eubanks, n.d.; Gurstein, 2003b).
A participatory and action
oriented approach to the integration of research and application will not
resolve the question of what the field itself should focus on, however.
the lack of a defined theoretical perspective may remain the greatest weakness,
particularly since even community-based research can be conducted from
incompatible theoretical perspectives.
A distraction?
Finally, heretical as it may
seem, we must ask whether this field is a distraction.
And I wish to devote
the rest of the paper to this possibility.
If the goal, ultimately, is to
develop strong communities, does creating a field devoted only to the
application of information technology in community settings really serve that
The fields of Social Work, Community Development, and Public Health
have, for some time now, been focusing much more comprehensively on building
strong communities and building up weak ones.
Should we assume that
information and communication technology is such a central part of that process
that it deserves a place as a separate field?
Or, are our efforts better
placed in bringing Community Informatics into those other fields?to make sure
that the community goals drive the technology goals rather than vice versa?
a small rural community, for example, does the technology plan need to be
integrated with the sustainable agricultural plan, and the local business
development plan, and the family support system plan, and the regional medical
care plan, and all the other plans that are needed to lift up disinvested rural
communities?
And does that make the technology plan just a member of the
supporting cast under the rubric of broader fields of practice and study?
To me, the question of whether
focusing on Community Informatics as a field is a distraction is centrally
important.
Because it may be that our fascination with the technology is
distracting us from our concern for the community.
I felt this tension in the
work I did with Larry Stillman surveying the neighborhood houses in Melbourne?s
western region where it became clear how interwoven the information technology
issues were with broader and more fundamental community development
infrastructure issues.
In a similar recent project in Toledo, we focused our
efforts on emphasizing the information issues faced by nonprofit groups, rather
than the technology issues, allowing us to see that in many cases the groups
lacked information that could not be obtained through simply offering more
technology, but instead required resources to support original data gathering.
Dealing with this issue requires
moving onto the next question.
What is Community Informatics
In asking what is Community
Informatics for, I am asking what is its purpose?
Is it to build up
communities, or develop information, or provide access to technology?
answer, of course, is all three.
But that?s the easy answer, not the simple
For these purposes are neither clear nor even necessarily compatible.
And to understand the potential problems in the relationships between these
concepts, we need to first spend some time defining these three building blocks
of Community Informatics.
Defining community is the toughy,
and the one we often get hung up on.
People often groan when I insist on
defining what community is.
But if we are trying to build community, it seems
to me we must define it.
Carefully.
And a careful definition has not
developed within the emerging field of Community Informatics.
Michael Gurstein originally used
the concept to emphasize place-based communities (Gurstein, 2003), but has
since expanded the concept to include on-line communities (Bieber et al.,
2002). But what a community is, beyond some group of people having a sense of
unity, remains out of reach.
In addition, within Community Informatics, the
concept has not expanded to include identity communities (Boyte, 1984) such as
ethnic communities, gay and lesbian communities, and others who are often
scattered beyond a single neighborhood but share free spaces (Evans and Boyte,
1986) such as bookstores, cafes, churches, and other places where they gather
face to face.
What we actually have, then, is a continuum from strictly
place-based communities (Lyon, 1987) where people interact predominantly in a
face-to-face manner, to strictly virtual communities where people interact only
through electronic means.
Importantly, in this continuum, it is the virtual
community where the sense of unity?at least if we take unity to mean some form
of ideological consensus?is most important.
For neighborhood and small town
communities often are characterized by ideological diversity, even when their
members still support and defend one another.
Our use of ?unity? needs to be
much deeper and nuanced, to notice both diversity and consensus.
definition of community draws on both spatial and identity characteristics, and
follows the work of John Logan and Harvey Molotch (1987).
In their definition,
a community provides:
?a focal point in which one?s daily?
infor ?a sense of physical ? an
?agglomeration benefits? (unique goods and services provided because
enough demand has developed in one place); and a shared ethnicity.
This is an
ideal type definition because it outlines the attributes of the most fully
functioning community.
In practical terms, this ideal type community is most
often a neighborhood with a grocery store, hardware store, pharmacy, and park.
It is a place where people feel physically safe, and experience a sense of
current and future security.
And culture is extremely important.
many strong urban ethnic enclaves and alternative communities that approach
this definition in various ways (Abrahamson, 1996). But there are also strong
communities whose identity emphasizes diversity, such as the Dudley Street
neighborhood in Boston (Medoff and Sklar, 1994).
purpose of Community Informatics is to build community, then we must take this
definition into account.
Can technology help create a focal point where people
satisfy their daily needs?
Can technology help provide informal support
Can technology provide a sense of security?
Can it help develop an
Can it help provide unique goods and services?
Most importantly,
can it do any of those things by itself?
Information
Information is often confused
with technology, in the sense that once you have the technology it is assumed
you will get the information.
Nothing could be further than the truth.
United States Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the United Nations, he
was armed with high tech satellite photographs, intercepted communications, and
a variety of other high-tech forms of ?evidence? to assert that Iraq had
enormous stockpiles of horrifically deadly weapons.
All that technology, and
thousands of lost lives later we find out there was no information.
case, and in the case of most of our e-mail inboxes which are now so chock-full
of offensively titled spam that we are becoming phobic about clicking that
?check mail? button, the technology in fact negates the flow of good
information.
VICNET?the famous community network serving the State of Victoria
in Australia?has now locked its e-mail system so tightly that it refuses increasing
amounts of legitimate e-mail.
It is also distressing to me
that the organizations out there dedicated to helping non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) build their information capacity, such as NPower and
Making the Net Work, can provide all manner of tools to assess those groups?
technology needs, but there is nothing to help them determine their information
If our emphasis is on information, then why do all of our tools
emphasize technology? On the other hand, the information needs assessment
projects out there often seem separate from ICT applications (see for example
Michel et al., 2002).
The recent Toledo project mentioned above is
attempting to bridge the gap between information assessment and technology
assessment by looking first at the research and data needs and practices of
Toledo?s nonprofit organizations, avoiding almost entirely the question of
technology.
Now that we have discovered what the information needs are, we are
planning ways to help meet those needs, including possible information
technology applications.
All of this, however, begs the
question of what constitutes information.
Information is much more difficult
to define than community.
But, like community, we can define what is ideal
information.
Perhaps the most important standard for information is that it be
useful?when acted upon, it produces the predicted effect.
What is useful will
vary tremendously from situation to situation, and that is exactly why
information needs assessments are so important.
In many ways, it is the
definition of information that will lead to prescriptions for appropriate
technology.
Technology
Technology is too often the
place where we start, when it should be where we end up.
Too many Community
Informatics practitioners and proponents act as if it is the technology that
will build community, seeing technology as an independent rather than dependent
variable (Pitkin, 2001).
It is in determining the
appropriate role of technology that we can see most clearly the importance of
social theory.
Old school geography used to argue that the driving variables
in urban society were population, organization, environment, and technology?the
POET formulation (Duncan, ; Hawley, 1973).
All four were seen as
relatively independent influences on the shape of urban space and the dynamics
of social life.
But in the 1970s and 1980s a group of critical geographers,
including David Harvey (1985), began arguing that it was the dynamics of
material production and its resultant class structure that determined the shape
of the population, the form of social organization, the type of environment,
and the character of technology.
They argued, for example, that
suburbanization in the United States was not the result of the creation of the
car, but the result of corporate decisions that moved manufacturing out of
central cities and government decisions that subsidized suburban rather than
central city housing development (Gottdiener and Feagin, 1988).
Neither computers nor guns are
neutral pieces of technology.
The design of technology is being driven by the
demands of the rich for profit, not by the demands of the poor for access.
With only a little informal training, and access to some informal technical
assistance, community members can build their own mail order computer for a few
hundred dollars.
But they are still buying branded pre-built computers with
proprietary components for two to four times that much.
Community computing
centers are accepting grants from Microsoft to install proprietary software
requiring high levels of skill in understanding software-based licensing
restrictions and anti-virus defense, rather than free, stable, and easily
defended Linux systems. The computer end-user, consequently, becomes both
de-skilled and dependent.
What would a Community Informatics project look like
that emphasized easily replaceable generic hardware, free and open source
software, and a community relationship-building process that embraced those two
Part of the problem is that, in
contrast to community, which has been so misused that no one wants to try and
carefully define it, and information, which has so many varying definitions
that it is unclear which is the right one, Information and Communication
Technologies, or ICTs, are easy to define.
We?re talking here hardware and
software?phones, radios, televisions, cameras, computers, etc.
concrete, easy to measure stuff.
It?s so much easier to concentrate on the
pieces that we can have some confidence in understanding.
ciT, cIt, or Cit?
Two years ago, when I was in
Australia, I began thinking about an article from the community development
literature on community economic development (CED) (Boothroyd and Davis,
Their play on the acronym CED, capitalizing each letter in turn to show
how the practice would look different if you made one of the concepts more
important than the others, got me thinking about the interplay of community
information technology.
What happens if community is the most important
concept, or if information is, or if technology is?
Since we have not developed
standards for what would constitute a ?community? approach to Community
Informatics, compared to an ?information? approach or a ?technology? approach,
we do not know what happens under the three conditions. But we can imagine that
the consequences might vary significantly (Stoecker, 2002).
A community
approach might emphasize building relationships among community members and a
collective sense of community power, and then explore ways that ICTs can be one
of the strategies for supporting that process.
An information approach might
look at the information needs of a community, and various ways, including ICTs,
that those needs might be met, risking the possibility that the information
development will go to waste if the community is not strong enough to use it.
A technology approach might focus on introducing new technologies into a
community, risking the possibility that it could disrupt rather than build
community relationships and distract community members from information
activities requiring other forms of technology, such as good footwear to pound
the pavement and knock on the doors of their neighbors.
Who does Community
Informatics serve?
Those of us in this emerging
field of Community Informatics focus on serving historically excluded
communities.
But we have already seen that Community Informatics as a field of
study lacks a coherent core, and Community Informatics as a field of practice
lacks explicit standards.
Our definition of community is weak, and information
needs are often considered after technological desires.
Given these issues, it
seems fair to wonder whether we are effectively serving the communities we
target, or perhaps unwittingly expending our energies for the benefit of the
more privileged or even the enemy.
It might seem odd to consider
that Community Informatics would serve elites.
And yet, let us consider the
kinds of projects carried out under the rubric of Community Informatics.
average telecenter, as Scott Robinson (n.d.) points out, is a place where youth
become engaged in mass consumption rather than a place where community power is
And if we look at the education programs conducted through such
centers, they are focused on job training?integrating people into the lower
rungs of the capitalist economy rather than helping them to question it (Penuel,
2001; Youth Development Trust for the IDRC, 2003).
The result is a low-wage,
compliant workforce that does more for stockholders than members of excluded
communities.
This focus on training
individuals in ICTs is hoped to develop social capital, which has been
defined in various ways, but mostly focuses on building individual capacities
and linking those capacities across a community for the purpose of economic
development.
Social capital has been explicitly defined as such to focus on
its role in economic production.
But, when you take social relationships and
deploy them as economic development capital, you turn them into exchange
relationships governed by contracts rather than by friendships (Stoecker,
2004). So once again, we see the influences of a capitalist economy directing
the shape of the community?s development rather than the community establishing
an independent, empowered, sustainable development path.
The next step after individual
training and social capital formation is a community-focused ICT strategy such
as the community portal.
Community portals become one-stop shops for community
commerce, and are increasingly promoted as a form of community economic
development (Creating and Sustaining Online Communities, 2000).
In this case
the entire community, rather than just its individuals, become integrated into
the capitalist economy.
And the portal sector, if we can call it that, is
already being dominated by large corporations (Penuel, 2001).
Market-oriented thinking
regularly works its way into the overall field of Community Informatics.
is often an explicit comparison made between the community information systems
version of Community Informatics, and Management Information Systems, based on
a corporate model, with a corresponding concern that CI has not become as
marketable as MIS (Bieber et al., 2002).
The most cynical analysis, then,
would argue that Community Informatics, through an emphasis on job training,
social capital, and community commerce portals, serves elites in three ways.
First, it quiets discontent by integrating poor people into the system, making
them slightly less marginal, and reducing their energy to organize against the
system (Cloward and Piven, 1993).
Second, it encourages communities to give up
their unique characteristics to appeal to mass markets, reducing
community-based resistance to global capitalism. I remember a conference on the
west coast of Australia a few years ago where community folks expressed
concerns that community portals would force them to market themselves according
to rules set by outsiders, disrupting the unique cottage economy they were
trying so hard to preserve.
Third, by implication, the model on which these
activities are based make it the individual?s, and then the community?s,
responsibility to pick themselves by the bootstraps and fit in.
When ICTs are
provided for people, it is expected people will make use of them to get jobs
and develop their economies, not to try and change the system.
And if they
don?t better themselves, it is their own fault, not the fault of a political
economic system organized by and for elites.
This is the classic
victim-blaming switcheroo, where the poor are blamed for their poverty even
when it is clear that the economy cannot provide adequate jobs, equitable
education, and comparable justice (Ryan, 1976).
How might Community Informatics
benefit academics?
Well, many of us are building reputations and even careers
out of Community Informatics.
We get access to rich data, research projects,
and applied projects.
Yes, we all like to complain (me included) about the
sacrifices we make, since our skills could easily get double the salary in the
corporate market.
But we still have pretty privileged lifestyles, jetting
around the globe to meet with other experts in this emerging field, and writing
journal articles and books for each other.
And the more we academics talk
to each other, the more we feel like we know something, and the more we try and
take leadership in Community Informatics projects.
While the participatory
design emphasis in Community Informatics is quite strong, it is still quite
interesting how many telecentres, or community technology centers as we call
them in the United States, look so much the same.
Community participation is
promoted, but only rarely practiced in ways that can make us all look proud.
When was the last time anyone had even 100 community people turn out to plan a telecenter?
It?s easy to say, ?well, they?re not really interested? when the reality is
that we professionals are simply not good at getting people to a meeting.
besides, we (erroneously) believe that we know what they need anyway.
We contribute to Community
Informatics as an exclusive domain that makes it hard for community people to
want to participate.
Look at what we?ve called the field, for example.
Informatics?
What does that mean to someone whose basic concern is making
their paycheck last through the month?
We publish our work in the terribly
inaccessible PDF format, making it extremely difficult for the people we most
want to help?people too poor to afford any computer or a fast enough computer,
and people with sight disabilities?to even access the things we write.
then let?s not even talk about the way we write.
Community Workers
The poor community workers are
often second rung players in Community Informatics.
Kind of like middle
management, they get the blame when the telecentres designed by the
professionals don?t work, without the power to do anything about it.
Especially since many of them lack the technology skills needed to take
organize Community Informatics projects themselves, they become dependent on
outsider technical expertise.
And the integration of technology expertise with
community development expertise is still rarely achieved.
It is less clear how Community
Informatics serves this group.
In fact, as Larry Stillman and I found in our
work with the Neighbourhood house workers in Australia?s western suburbs,
technology may actually be doing as much harm as good.
At least some of the
technology applications used by community workers is designed to serve elites,
maintaining databases on clients and programs to inform government and funder
elites rather than to directly serve clients.
Community workers, next to
community members, are the people that Community Informatics most needs to
serve, as they are the intermediaries to the community itself.
Community Informatics should serve them is still unclear, as most of our
efforts are still focused on developing the technology rather than the
information or the community.
How to remedy this situation is also compounded
by a split within the field of community work itself between those community
workers who have an individual clinical focus and those who have a community
advocacy focus, which we will address below.
Community Members
This is the group with which we
really are most concerned.
But it is also the group about which we understand
the least, particularly in a Community Informatics context.
The evidence of
whether CI really helps communities is at best speculative and anecdotal (Pitkin,
2001). We know that it helps individual community members.
But we don?t know
whether those individuals would have succeeded even without such projects.
our inability to show such impacts is already hindering the funding of
Community Informatics projects.
We can point to particular
efforts that pay off, however.
The social movement wing of Community
Informatics has the most to show for its efforts.
It has developed models
serving the anti-globalization movement that have the desired effect of
inhibiting global capital from becoming even more powerful than it is already.
It has helped force the Mexican government to negotiate in good faith with the
Zapatistas in Chiapas.
It has built a powerful political force called
MoveOn.Org in the United States (Stoecker, 2002b).
But at the level of the local
community, we are still hard pressed to show impact beyond the level of
individuals.
This is partly a research methodology problem.
Showing the
relationship between a Community Informatics project and crime reduction, or
community relationships, or neighboring patterns, is extremely difficult.
we will see below, that may also be a result of our emphasizing technology as
the main question in Community Informatics.
Toward An Empowerment Model
of Community Informatics
As worrisome as all these questions
are, those of us working in the emerging field of Community Informatics are not
yet ready to give up on it.
Neither, however, should our philosophy be ?damn
the torpedoes, full speed ahead.?
We have the opportunity to make early course
corrections, and we should make the most of that opportunity.
Our goal, I believe, is for
Community Informatics to contribute to empowered communities?communities that
are politically, culturally, and economically strong enough to negotiate
agreements with corporations and higher level governments that bring them more
benefits than costs.
That is a tall order, and it is quite clear that
Community Informatics can?t accomplish those goals by itself.
So those of us
in this emerging field need to think bigger, considering how Community
Informatics fits into an overall community development strategy, using a
participatory process, a project-based research approach, and an information
Community Development Strategy
The model has to begin with
community.
While the call has been made for a linkage between community
development and Community Informatics, that linkage has not been made in any
explicit sense (Bieber et al., 2002).
And that is our first task.
Community development, as it is
used outside of the United States, is a comprehensive strategy including a wide
range of activities from business and housing development, to various forms of
community organizing, to service delivery.
It often uses a systems approach,
considering the entire community?its politics, economics, demographics,
resource base, and other characteristics?in creating a sustainable,
self-sufficient, empowered community (Cook, 1999; Tamas, Whitehorse, and Almonte,
In the United States, the term is mostly limited to business and housing
development, though there is continuous pressure to expand the definition.
Dave Beckwith (1997) explicitly distinguishes community development, community
organizing, service delivery, and advocacy. In this model, community
development is the practice of ?bricks and mortar? physical development.
Community organizing is a confrontational social action form of community
building where community members advocate for themselves.
Advocacy is where
professional activists advocate on behalf of a community, and service delivery
is the typical form of social services.
In the Beckwith approach, which
distinguishes sub-practices within the broader international definition field
of community development, we can begin to think in more detailed ways about how
Community Informatics can contribute.
In such a model, Community Informatics
becomes a support field.
There are no longer Community Informatics projects,
but community development projects that incorporate Community Informatics.
physical development projects, geographic information systems may be of use.
In community organizing, e-mail communication or web-based target research
could be incorporated.
In advocacy and service delivery, electronic databases
could be important.
Community Informatics can study and develop catalogues of
best practices for how information technology interfaces with those different
activities.
And it can provide technical assistance in implementing ICTs in
specific development, organizing, service, and advocacy projects.
Information Focus
The only way to determine what
information technologies are appropriate for a given community is to find out,
first, about the community itself and, second, about the information the
community is trying to get or use.
So information has to be the second
It is appropriate that social informatics is associated not
primarily with computer science but with library science, as it is in places
like the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto.
programs, a focus on information before technology has a fighting chance.
much technology development comes out of the whims of those familiar with
hardware and software and too little comes out of the needs of those familiar
with information.
What does Community Informatics
look like if it takes a community information approach?
From a community
development perspective, CI would look first at what information is needed to
both understand a community and implement a particular development, organizing,
service, and advocacy project.
Is Geographic Information Systems mapping
relevant to a particular project?
Is a database of pending legislation
Is a survey of local housing conditions important?
Is market research
on possible new businesses required?
And what forms of ICTs are needed for
those?plotter printers, digital cameras, web survey applications, good walking
shoes, or others?
A project-based research model (Stoecker,
2005) can help identify information needs.
Project-based research is designed
to follow community development project cycles, from the initial diagnosis of a
community problem, to the prescription of what to do about that problem, to the
actual implementation of the prescription, to the evaluation of the
implementation.
At each stage of the project cycle there are specific
information needs.
At the diagnosis stage, needs and asset assessments are
At the prescription stage, policy research and best practices research
are common.
At the implementation stage, a wide variety of activities such as
community theatre, target research, and other community events build out of a
research foundation.
And at the evaluation stage, of course, is the research
attempting to find out how much change has been produced.
Participatory Process
Participation has become a
crucial component of Community Informatics.
The participatory design
conference held in the United States every two years also focuses on how to
integrate participatory processes with information and communication
technologies.
Participation is a common component in definitions of CI.
of the more interesting is Nancy Campbell and Virginia Eubanks? (n.d.)
definition of Community Informatics as ?a sustainable approach to community
enrichment that integrates participatory design of information technology
resources, popular education, and asset-based development to enhance citizen
empowerment and quality of life.?
What interests me most about this definition
is its emphasis on not just participatory design, but also on popular education,
for the integration of popular education into Community Informatics is still
relatively rare.
If you are not familiar with
popular education, the practice is most associated with the Brazilian educator
Paulo Freire, and in the United States with Myles Horton and the Highlander
Research and Education Center (Horton and Freire, 1990).
The practice is also
growing in Australia through the Centre for Popular Education at the University
of Technology at Sydney, among others.
In brief, popular education emphasizes
the people teaching themselves, rather than being told by outsiders what they
should learn and how they should learn it.
And that is a particularly
challenging leap for those of us in Community Informatics to make.
After all,
computers are complicated things, and few of us can imagine a person who has
never sat down in front of a computer being able to work it without us.
that is also what they said about politics, and popular educators have shown
them to be wrong there.
Yes, people do need training to get the most out of ICTs,
but can they train each other, building the training curriculum out of their
identified information needs, rather than having to submit to canned program
What would Community Informatics
look like if it were participatory in a popular education sense?
First, the
participation would occur in a community development context, as people studied
their own community and began to identify local community development issues.
Second, as part of this popular education process, people would identify a set
of information issues?things they needed to know or information they needed to
better manage?to support specific community development projects.
only then, they could consider particular ICT applications that provided some
potential for helping with those information issues.
Community Informatics as Supporting
This empowerment model of
Community Informatics has a number of implications for this emerging field.
First, we need to subordinate our work to the broader work of community
development, and we need to learn that literature and that theory.
simply one category of tools for community development, just like housing,
small business incubation, family support, and the wide array of other community
development tools.
As a consequence, Community Informatics becomes part of the
supporting cast, not the lead player.
In fact, the most important lesson we
learned in building the CATNeT community networking project in Toledo was not
how to develop small telecenters around the city, but how the process of
developing those centers could build relationships among community members.
Additionally, there remains a
gap between those who are good at community development but not good at ICTs
and those who are good at ICTs but not good at community development.
a misperception in much of the field that it is the technology side that is
really complicated, requiring a great deal of mystical expertise, while running
a community meeting to plan a project requires no training at all.
The reality
is, in fact, quite the reverse.
The reason so many Community Informatics
projects operate with only small numbers of community participants is not that
community members don?t care about such projects, but that those of us
organizing the projects are so bad at recruiting, involving, and empowering
If you cannot get 100 people involved in a Community Informatics project
then you probably need training in how to organize, involve, excite, and
empower people.
It may seem like a pre-emptive
diminution of this emerging field to assign it a supporting cast role.
should not, because Community Informatics has had the good sense from its
inception to concern itself not primarily with its own development, but with
the development of communities around the globe.
The ironic unintended
consequence of that good sense, however, is that Community Informatics has paid
too little attention to itself as an emerging field.
Now is our opportunity to
reflect on where we are, and how to play a conscious role in the transition to
a community-centered world.
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The Journal of Community Informatics. ISSN: