Fun for All: Promoting Engagement and Paraticipation in Community Programming Projects

When we wrote this chapter in 2003, we were in the midst of a long-term engagement with residents of Blacksburg, Virginia, USA, as research participants in the Blacksburg Electronic Village project, the first Web-based community networking project in the U.S. (Carroll and Rosson 1996). During the ten years we lived in Blacksburg we continuously worked with a variety of community groups on various projects around the theme of integrating information and technology infrastructures into community life. Since that time, community informatics (the design and appropriation of computational systems in support of geo-located communities) has expanded and gained more prominence in HCI and CSCW research (Carroll and Rosson, AIS Trans Hum Comput Interact, 20, 2013). Through that same period, research on tools and methods for end-user programming and development has continued, though there has still been relatively little attention to community applications of novice programming (Paterno 2013).