What is Community Informatics (and Why Does It Matter)?

Community Informatics (CI) is the application of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to enable community processes and the achievement of community objectives. CI goes beyond the “Digital Divide” to making ICT access usable and useful to excluded populations and communities for local economic development, social justice, and political empowerment. CI approaches ICTs from a “community” perspective and develops strategies and techniques for managing their use by communities both virtual and physical including the variety of Community Networking applications. CI assumes that both communities have characteristics, requirements, and opportunities that require different strategies for ICT intervention and development from individual access and use. Also, CI addresses ICT use in Developing Countries as well as among the poor, the marginalized, the elderly, or those living in remote locations in Developed Countries. CI is of interest both to ICT practitioners and academic researchers and addresses the connections between the policy and pragmatic issues arising from the tens of thousands of Community Networks, Community Technology Centres, Telecentres, Community Communications Centres, and Telecottages globally along with the rapidly emerging field of electronically based virtual “communities”. Michael Gurstein, Ph.D. is Executive Director of the Centre for Community Informatics Research, Development and Training (Vancouver BC), a Director of The Information Society Institute, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town South Africa; and Research Professor in the School of Computer and Information Systems at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark. His seminal book "Community Informatics: Enabling Communities with Information and Communications Technologies" (Idea Group, 2000) spurred the emergence of Community Informatics as the discipline underpinning the social appropriation of ICT. Dr. Gurstein has served on the Board of the Vancouver Community Network, the BritishColumbia Community Networking Association, Telecommunities Canada, and was a Charter Member of the Steering Committee of the Global Community Networking Partnership. He is the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Community Informatics and was Foundation Chair of the Community Informatics Research Network.