For Those World Wide Who Are Or Will Be Enabling Communities With Information and Communications Technologies

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) present significant opportunities and even advantages to local communities.

Community Informatics (CI) is the application of 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.

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, UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Equador, Russia and elsewhere and partly out of a need to develop systematic approaches to some of the challenges which ICTs are surfacing with astonishing speed.

The CI-text initiative was launched in 2002 by an international group of researchers and practitioners working with communities and technologies in developed and developing countries on five continents.
The objective of the project is to create an open-archive, multi-lingual, peer reviewed/filtered "text", that will grow organically as ICTs become ever more implanted as a means for enabling local communities in developing and developed countries to develop and flourish economically, socially and culturally.

As the first practical step of the project we are creating a bi-lingual (English and Russian) Russian-English textbook for the "Building the Information Commonwealth" International Conference that will take place in St. Petersburg, Russia, June 30 - July 02, 2003.

Note: this text as currently presented here is only the beginning. The CI-text is an open-ended initiative and we invite all interested parties (organizations or individuals, researchers and practitioners) from around the world with relevant experience and knowledge to join and contribute to our work.

To see the discussion to date visit our archive at http://vancouvercommunity.net/lists/arc/ci-text

Email enquiries can be sent to Editors