JoCI Special Issue: Vision and Reality in Community Informatics

This special issue of the Journal includes a selection of some of the best papers of the recent conference “Vision and Reality in Community Informatics” organized in Prato, Italy, Oct 27-29, 2010, by the Center for Community Networking Research (CCNR) of Monash University (Australia), and The Information School at the University of Washington.

Community Informatics, like many other areas of social intervention and development, deals with the real world. In spite of all the effort put into planning and thinking about how things are meant to happen, things never quite work out as they were initially planned. Dealing with the unexpected is well known, recognized, and even expected in business enterprises, but often, in community settings, the unexpected is seen as risky, and sometimes, even evidence of failure. The unexpected or unanticipated is sometimes the most valuable thing to come out of work with a community, and being able use that innovation is of great importance to communities, designers, researchers, and other concerned parties.

What are remarkable examples of unexpected or unanticipated outcomes? Participants at the conference had ample time to discuss some of them, both in formal presentations and in the hallway conversations that generally make conferences a lot more interesting. The conference was structured around three broad topics: (1) Planning CI: making room for the unexpected; (2) Implementing CI: expecting the unexpected; and (3) Evaluating CI: learning from the unexpected. Each of these topics is touched by the selection of best papers we present here. The taste of the rich discussion and side conversations, nonetheless, remains with the participants.

The paper by Arden, McLaughlan and Cooper received the “best paper award” for the conference. It describes a constructivist approach to evaluating the experience of GraniteNet, a collaborative community development initiative in Australia. The power of Participatory Action Research and constructivist evaluation methods helped to effectively document the project, establish an evidence base to inform future decision-making, identify and explore significant contextual factors impacting on the project, evaluate the effectiveness of the models and processes used to guide the project, and build a culture of evaluation that will help to ensure ongoing review and critical reflection on progress. They were able to successfully capture the unexpected and unanticipated outcomes of the project in ways that traditional evaluation approaches would have not been able to.

The paper by Magassa, which received the “best student paper” at the conference, discusses the applicability of the notions of Community Informatics for work with prisons in the United States. What if, Magassa asks, we were able to equip soon-to-be released offenders with the digital and information literacy competencies necessary to fulfill daily needs when they re-enter society? Would the CI approaches, used among disenfranchised communities around the world, be applicable to help improve the lives of these populations? We look forward to the program of studies of this promising doctoral student in this field.

The paper by Gomez and Baron describes part of a larger study in Colombia, in which expected outcomes of CI were mostly absent: public access to information and communication technologies (ICT) has not helped strengthen community organizations or development activities, most likely due to the political violence that has affected the region. The authors conclude that public access to ICT alone does not necessarily contribute to community development, especially if the political environment is not conducive or if there are no strong social organizations in the community. On the other hand, the paper by Prado describes how one of the longest-operating community telecenters in Latin America, in Limon de Ocoa, Dominican Republic, has been successful at leveraging ICT in ways that promote social change, foster community prosperity, solidarity, and well-being.

The paper by Denison and Johanson takes a unique look at e-research infrastructure and its implications for community research. Electronic repositories, archival and collaboration systems are enabling profound transformations of the social relations surrounding research data, research artifacts and products, and published outcomes. The authors explore governance frameworks that can be applied in new e-Community contexts, and identify some of the new management principles required for the authenticity, accessibility, disposition and preservation of electronic research resources, in ways that facilitate stronger participation and community involvement.

French and Johanson, on the other hand, draw from a larger pilot project exploring information and knowledge management in Australian community sector organizations, and explore the potentially unintended impact of compliance overload and data silos on those organizations: they identify a shift to a managed, information-intensive, data-driven welfare approach in community organizations, as opposed to the flexible social and narrative approach traditionally valued in welfare work practice. The paper by de Moor offers a valuable counterpoint, by examining the role of domain, conversation, and functionality roles in modeling community activation.

De Moor goes on to show how collaboration patterns can be used to design appropriate socio-technical solutions, rather than having technical solutions dictate the collaboration patterns. Finally, social representations, and their contribution to CI research, are described by Sarrica. He highlights the importance of understanding how new technologies are constructed, shaped and employed, in order to better understand the relationship between ICT and communities. This, in turn, will help us better understand when and why the unexpected happens in CI.

Two papers focus on the unexpected outcomes of CI in education. Elliott discusses the opportunities to harness digital technologies to support students from low socio-economic backgrounds in Australia, where huge disparities still exist that marginalize those with low incomes and those living in remote communities. Arnold then discusses the differences between open and closed learning management systems and their implications for higher education, and describes a participatory planning process for an e-learning strategy at a higher education institute, including unanticipated alliances and unexpected turns in the implementation process.

Finally, the two papers by Pietrucci, Farinosi and Treré describe the creative ways in which the community of L’Aquila, Italy, used ICT after the earthquake that unexpectedly devastated the city. Citizen activism in post-earthquake L’Aquila is an example of a disempowered public turned into a social movement not losing, in the metamorphosis, its inherent “poetic” capability of carrying out a change in the world. Given more recent natural disasters in New Zealand and as this editorial is being written, Japan, their papers can be used to compare government and community ICT-related responses in other earth-quake prone countries.

This collection of papers is rich and diverse in its understanding vision and reality of CI as it faces the inevitable unexpected.