Community Informatics - Conceptual Approaches

Conceptual Approaches

As an academic discipline community informatics (CI) can be seen as a field of practice in applied information and communications technology. Community informatics is a technique for looking at economic and social development within the construct of technology – online health communities, social networking websites, cultural awareness and enhancement through online connections and networks, electronic commerce, information exchanges, as well as a myriad of other aspects that contributes to creating a personal and group identity. The term was brought to prominence by Michael Gurstein. Michael Gurstein says that community informatics is a technology strategy or discipline that connects at the community level economic and social development with the emergence of community and civic networks, electronic commerce, online participation, self help, virtual health communities, “Tele-centres,” as well as other types of online institutions and corporations. He brought out the first representative collection of academic papers, although others, such as Brian Loader and his colleagues at the University of Teesside used the term in the mid-1990s.

CI brings together the practices of community development and organization, and insights from fields such as sociology, planning, computer science, critical theory, women's studies, library and information sciences, management information systems, and management studies. Its outcomes — community networks and community-based ICT-enabled service applications — are of increasing interest to grassroots organizations, NGOs and civil society, governments, the private sector, and multilateral agencies among others. Self-organized community initiatives of all varieties, from different countries, are concerned with ways to harness ICT for social capital, poverty alleviation and for the empowerment of the "local" in relation to its larger economic, political and social environments. Some claim it is potentially a form of 'radical practice'

Community informatics may in fact, not gel as a single field within the academy, akin for example to Information Systems or Management Information Systems, but remain a convenient locale for interdisciplinary activity, drawing upon many fields of social practice and endeavour, as well as knowledge of community applications of technology. However, one can begin to see the emergence of a postmodern "trans-discipline" presenting a challenge to existing disciplinary "stove-pipes" from the perspectives of the rapidly evolving fields of technology practice, technology change, public policy and commercial interest. Whether or not such a "trans-discipline" can maintain its momentum remains to be seen given the incertitude about the boundaries of such disciplines as community development.

Furthermore, there is a continuing disconnect between those coming from an Information Science perspective for whom social theories, including general theories of organisation are unfamiliar or seemingly irrelevant to solving complex 'technical' problems, and those whose focus is upon the theoretical and practical issues around working with communities for democratic and social change

Given that many of those most actively involved in early efforts were academics (drawn from a variety of disciplines including Anthropology, Computing Science, Development Studies, Information Science and Systems, Management, Planning, Sociology, and Social Work among others) it is only inevitable that a process of "sense-making" with respect to these efforts would follow on quite quickly from the flurry of "tool-making" efforts. These academics, and some community activists connected globally through the medium.

A first formal meeting of researchers with an academic interest in these initiatives was held in conjunction with the 1999 Global Community Networking Conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This meeting began the process of linking Developed Country community based ICT initiatives and research with initiatives being undertaken in Less Developed Countries often as part of larger economic and social development programmes funded by agencies such as the UN Development Programme, World Bank, or the International Development Research Centre. For the first time, the efforts being undertaken in using ICT for economic and social development purposes in the Developed Countries began to find common interests and common cause with parallel efforts in Less Developed Countries and similarly those with academic or research activities in these areas began to see common and overlapping interests. For example, the issue of sustainability as a technical, cultural, and economic problem for community informatics has resulted in a special issue of the Journal of Community Informatics as well as the subject of ongoing conferences in Prato, Italy and other conferences in South Africa.

Social informatics beyond an immediate concern for a community

Social Informatics refers to the body of research and study that examines social aspects of computerization – including the roles of information technology in social and organizational change, the uses of information technologies in social contexts, and the ways that the social organization of information technologies is influenced by social forces and social practices. Historically, social informatics research has been strong in the Scandinavian countries, the UK and Northern Europe. Within North America, the field is represented largely through independent research efforts at a number of diverse institutions. Social informatics research diverges from earlier, deterministic (both social and technological) models for measuring the social impacts of technology. Such technological deterministic models characterized information technologies as tools to be installed and used with a pre-determined set of impacts on society dictated by the technology’s stated capabilities. Similarly, the socially deterministic theory represented by some proponents of the social construction of technology (SCOT) or social shaping of technology theory as advocated by Williams & Edge in 1996 see technology as the product of human social forces.