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SUMMARY OF CURRENT DISCUSSION
on Open Archive Community Informatics text
Community Informatics: Building the Information Commonwealth
by Michael Gurstein, Ph.D.
Visiting Professor: School of Management
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Newark, NJ

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) present significant opportunities and even advantages to local communities. They reduce barriers of distance and location. They support local communities in remote or distributed self-management. They can be used to access skills and training remotely. They provide the means to decentralize information-intensive public and private sector services and industries. ICT's present the opportunity for:
  • information;
  • participation in information intensive activities at a distance;
  • introduction of local priorities into the processing of information to take advantage of economies of disaggregation, synergies of distributed production networks, and
  • the flexibility of small scale distributed management and control.

For small communities, ICTs can mean access to markets and suppliers, to information providers and to others for mutual support and the possibility of competing effectively if remotely with globalized producers (Gurstein, 1998). Local groups can emerge, inspired by the activities of others in distant places but with common concerns and common goals. Information can be shared seamlessly back and forth and in individual locales. Local concerns and local resources can supplement and complement the broader frameworks and add strength both through numbers and through technical and other specialized contributions to an overall project. Community Informatics (CI) is the application of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to enable community processes and the achievement of community objectives including overcoming "digital divides" both within and among communities. But CI also goes beyond discussions of the "Digital Divide". It goes on to examine how and under what conditions, ICT access can be made usable and useful to the range of excluded populations and communities and particularly to support local economic development, social justice and political empowerment using the Internet.

Thus there is emerging a framework for systematically approaching Information Systems from a "community" perspective based on the assumption that geographically-based communities (also known as "physical" or "geo-local" communities) have characteristics, requirements and opportunities that require different strategies for ICT intervention and development from the widely accepted implied models of individual or in-home computer/Internet access. CI represents an area of interest both to ICT practitioners and academic researchers and to all those with an interest in community-based information technologies and addresses the connections between the academic theory and research, and the policy and pragmatic issues arising from Community Networks, Community Technology Centres, Telecentres, Community Communications Centres, and Telecottages currently in place.

What characterizes this approach to public computing is:

  • a commitment to universality of technology-enabled opportunity including to the disadvantaged,
  • a recognition that the "lived physical community" is at the very center of individual and family well-being-economic, political, and cultural,
  • a belief that this can be enhanced through the judicious use of ICTs,
  • a sophisticated user-focussed understanding of Information technology, and
  • applied social leadership, entrepreneurship and creativity.

This includes the on-going economic/institutional "sustainability" of local access and questions on how Community Informatics approaches will survive once initial funding sources and volunteer participation are exhausted. A theory and a practise of Community Informatics is thus gradually developing. Partly, this is arising out of experiences with community access and community networks in the US and Canada and elsewhere and partly out of a need to develop systematic approaches to some of the challenges which ICTs are surfacing with astonishing speed. This includes the recognition that access in itself is insufficient, Rather, it is what is and can be done with the access that makes ICTs meaningful and a recognition that there is a need to ensure a local, civic and "public" presence in an increasingly commercialized Internet environment.

Equally, the use of ICTs as a basis for local economic development and as a way of enabling and supporting local innovation and of communities having to adjust to the often dramatic changes in local circumstances and opportunities resulting from technology change and globalization of production and competition.

Meanwhile, ICTs are emerging as a tool for enabling the development and enhancing the effectiveness of local leadership. They are providing the means to create collaborative networks of economic, social and political initiatives particularly for local responses to externally imposed change. The development of strategies to enable management use of ICTs to accomplish corporate ends is a well-recognized and widely supported component of business research, education and training. Community Informatics provides a parallel set of opportunities for those with an interest in enabling community objectives with ICTs.

Community Networks or community networking are ways to develop and control locally based information systems to support local development. Even though those local processes are in opposition to or even in direct conflict with globalized and remotely managed technology and economic activities. Where MIS empowers and enables managers and particularly corporate managers to extend the power and practice of increasingly globalized corporate structures, Community Networking and CI are looking to enable local communities to develop the means and the capacity to counter the typically hierarchical processes of large scale organizations. In this, it is using technology systems and particularly networking capacity to support the management of local activities and to create mutually supportive networks of efforts whose functioning acts to distribute control rather than centralize it (Gurstein, 1999).
A variety of new applications develop as computing facilities are made available in communities. Locally based enterprises begin to use the Net to promote and advertise their products. Local destinations present themselves on the Net as destinations which include local hotels local entertainment facilities, and to visit local artists or artisans. Other communities use the opportunity to take possession (and ownership) of its own "memories" or history and particularly the outputs of its own culture and language.
An area of particular interest and potential long-term importance local and community empowerment is in the area of Community Telehealth/Telemedicine. Health resources are increasingly being made available on the Net, often through commercial and sometimes questionable sources. Internet users are increasingly migrating to the Net as sources of health related information and as "second opinions" concerning professional medical advice. Having access to Internet based information and Internet delivered medical or health services will significantly enhance the health care available locally in remote or underserved areas and support the development of local processes of health care management.
Finally, there is an ever increasingly close linkage between communities and those with highly developed technical skills and a social activist perspective many of whom are involved in the Free Software Movement and Open Source developments such as Linux. The significance of Free Software, Shareware or Open Source software for community technology initiatives is in part that many community initiatives use these software platforms and products because of cost and to a degree because of a belief that there is a shared set of broader anti-monopolist social values.
It is within this context that we are developing and making electronically available this Community Informatics "text" in both Russian and English. This text as currently presented is only the beginning… we are looking to having the text grow organically as ICTs become ever more implanted as a means for enabling local communities within the CIS to develop and flourish economically, socially and culturally.