Community informatics

Community informatics is an emerging field focusing primarily on the interaction between local communities and information technologies and a more particular focus within social informatics. It is rooted in library practice, most notably the outreach that led to information and referral (I&R) services, as well as other innovative practices, for example the community technology center and the community network, aimed at strengthening communities faced with the digital era and its attendant disruptions and opportunities. Community informatics research and teaching is carried out at a growing number of library/ information schools and elsewhere, as appropriate to this interdisciplinary endeavor. Community informatics is an emerging field that encompasses both study and practice, although the focus here is on the former. Loader (2000, cited in Ref. [1]) has described it as navigating the interaction between transformation as expressed in information technology and continuity as expressed in a local, historical community. This is a specification of Kling’s definition of the field of social informatics, of which community informatics is a part: “the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technologies that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts.” While social informatics historically most often concerned itself with business and government settings, community informatics looks at a third realm of social activity, the community. The concept of community and the tensions within that concept, set in the context of the nascent information society, are the basis for the core ideas of community informatics. Community informatics practitioners can be found in public libraries, community technology centers, community networks, and in an increasing range of community and economic development activities, employed in the private, public, or nonprofit sectors. Researchers come from the disciplines of library and information science, communications, community development, computer science, informatics, sociology, urban and regional planning, and other fields. Fortunately, the discussion in this encyclopedia entry is informed by the fact that one author (Durrance) comes to community informatics through library practice and scholarship, and the other through community practice and study of the digitization of society, or social informatics (for example, see Ref. [3]). This allows the entry to trace multiple paths that have led to a single, if fuzzy-bounded, interdisciplinary field. By all accounts, however, the starting point is very much the local, historical community. COMMUNITY AS THE BASIS FOR COMMUNITY INFORMATICS Most scholars have defined information technology very concretely as a particular, if evolving, set of digital tools and applications. But defining and understanding community is a challenge that has productively engaged more than a century of scholars. With the last major wave of U.S. migration from country to city, the fate of community within the metropolis occupied a generation of scholars, who themselves referenced the scholarship of those who had earlier grappled with the meaning of the European migration to the cities. The earlier discourse was very much driven by the ideas of Marx, Tönnies, and Durkheim, while the Chicago School (including among others Frazier, Mead, Park, and Wirth) was the most influential in the United States. Community is variously defined in the social sciences and has been examined in many of its guises in community informatics literature. Most often, it refers to a population living within certain geographic boundaries (geographic community), and this gives rise to a local history and culture which is the context for whatever else happens. This definition is bolstered by the fact that planning and funds flows are channeled according to those boundaries and political battles are often fought within these jurisdictions. This can be seen during the 1980s when various cities implemented community technology projects. (For a comparison of four cities, see Ref. [4].) Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, Third Edition DOI: 10.1081/E-ELIS3-120043669 Copyright # 2010 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. 1 But there can be communities within these geographic communities, as for instance the communities of interest that contended—homeless and their allies, and local business and real estate interests—within Santa Monica’s Public Electronic Network. Or Bishop et al’s work on a Web tool for local African-American women working on health issues. And there are communities with a particular geographic, historical origin that are now spread across large or small distances. Diasporic communities have taken to the Internet to maintain close ties with people far away, for example Trinidadians. And one’s community may be spread across a single metropolis, as in Ref. [8]. Wellman, in fact, later proposed and then tempered his assessment that every individual with their ties now represents a distinct personal community, more or less place-based. Benjamin used a recursive definition of community—“people living in a geospatial area who define themselves as part of a community”—in order to analyze why some telecenters succeed and others fail to attract local involvement. This definition has a history in ethnography and acknowledges that communities are quite often self-identified or socially identified. Human activity itself has been theorized as taking place in communities. Rheingold documented the arrival of the virtual community and the cell phone based social network. Rheingold’s online or phone based communities interact in particular ways with the local, the historical community. Online discussion lists, games, and other social computing phenomena have generated interesting work that enriches and is enriched by community informatics per se. There are tensions and overlaps between these various communities. The field of community informatics, by studying the interaction between transformation and continuity, between information technology and local community, is building up a picture of how the social, historical places we live in are evolving as we move from the industrial age to the information age, with particular attention to social and digital inequalities. Moreover, it has done this very much based on practice, both inside and beyond libraries. ROOTS OF THE FIELD OUTSIDE THE LIBRARY: THE SOCIAL INFORMATICS PERSPECTIVE Setting aside for the moment the important role of libraries and library scholars in community informatics, several other interrelated but distinct social trends have also given rise to and continue to shape the field. These can be summed up as the network society, the hacker ethic, and the digital divide. For some time now the network society has been unfolding on and in local communities. What does this term mean? It means that today society is characterized by networks rather than organizations; flexible production with a flexible workforce; an economy that is globally coordinated in real (or chosen, as with e-mail) time. A new space has been identified that contrasts with the space of place, that is, the geographic communities where we live and breathe. This new space is the space of flows that is based on digital tools and systems; in other words, the sum total of all the communications and transportation flows that link the global, mobile, network of human networks. The world’s economies, east and west, adopted digital technologies even as they experienced the economic crises of the 1960s and 1970s; what has resulted is spaces of place that are threatened, because they are mostly bypassed, by the space of flows. In the industrialized countries, one can think for example of Rust Belt, United States or vast stretches of the North of England as thus threatened. Other spaces of place, Silicon Valley, for example, have certainly not been bypassed, and yet even there the space of flows has left toxic dumps for the space of place to cope with. Faced with this, local governments responded with digital initiatives of their own. Among many: In 1989, Santa Monica, California, offered its residents free online discussion lists, accessible in public libraries or from home, and access to city officials, as mentioned above. In 2000, Lagrange, Georgia, offered its entire population free cable Internet. An interesting reflection in academia of this space of place-space of flows or network-communities tension was the 1996 colloquium that became the edited volume High Technology and Low Income Communities. This arose from a dialogue between two mutually exclusive groups in urban planning at MIT, one focused on opportunities for ICT Au1 and the other on low-income communities. They recruited Manuel Castells to the event and produced a proceedings volume that discussed, but did not name, community informatics. On the heels of early experimentation, the second social trend that has given rise to community informatics is the discourse and the activity around the concept of the digital divide. This emerged in the mid 1990s as a popular phrase for the gap between people who access and use information technology and those who do not. In the United States, the Department of Commerce was an early implementer of both research and policy on this. The department launched a (continuing) series of survey reports on individuals’ access to and use of computers and later the Internet and other particular tools such as cell phones. In the realm of practice, the same agency within the Department of Commerce began more than a decade of annual rounds of grantmaking (TIAAP, later the Technology Opportunities Program, or TOP) to organizations in local communities to support their community technology projects. The Department of Commerce initiative was rooted in the economic imperative to develop a market for computers and for e-