This is a call for participation in a (Virtual) Community Informatics workshop at CPSR's eighth biannual "Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing" (DIAC) symposium: Shaping the Network Society: Patterns for Participation, Action, and Change. Information on the symposium and its focus on patterns are also found on this page.
Community Informatics is the application of information and communications technologies to enable community processes and the achievement of community objectives, such as overcoming "digital divides", "wiring (and ensuring connectivity for) the farthest reaches of a far-flung nation", creating on-line "communities of interest" and "communities of practice", and others. Even more important, Community Informatics involves working to find ways of making the enormous opportunities of Internet connectivity of real value to various communities --- local and virtual, in achieving their economic, social and cultural objectives. Community Informatics traditionally has been applied to "geo-physical" communities, which concentrate on a particular local geographical area.
Virtual communities on the other hand have no geographical limits. Virtual communities serve a diversity of groups, including people with common interests; groups fostered by particular organizations, industries or marketplaces; those who face similar life circumstances (such as a medical problem); as well as those who simply wish to socialize, play games or participate in fantasy experiences together on-line. Virtual communities, by definition, depend on technology, but often are only using limited tool sets to support specific types of interaction.
Currently there is no formal interaction between geo-physically oriented Community Informatics and virtual communities research communities or practitioners (and little informal as far as we can determine). We believe that both geo-physical and virtual communities could benefit from the concepts, techniques, practices and suite of tools, being developed for each one separately.
Typically people working to support geo-physical communities and virtual communities are working with only limited theories, and often without taking full advantage of rapidly developing technology opportunities, while having little systematic contact with or feedback into on-going organizational design, technology design, or emerging business models.
Without systematization there is the need to continuously reinvent concepts and approaches. It is difficult to propagate and disseminate findings and lessons learned. Neither research nor practice is able to achieve economies of scale. In both instances they have little opportunity to have input into or influence technology design.
In the Community Informatics area, as in others, academics provide research and testing with intellectual rigor. Communities and practitioners could provide test beds and feed-back on interventions, technologies and strategies.
(Virtual) Community Informatics lies at these dual cross-roads: bringing together people concerned with Geo-Physical and Virtual or On-Line Communities; and bringing together the researchers and practitioners (developers, leaders and participants) in these two domains. (Virtual) Community Informatics promotes the cross-fertilization found at this cross-roads, bringing together researchers and practitioners from such varied disciplines as Sociology, Social Services, Planning, Computer Sciences, Information and Library Sciences, (Management) Information Systems, among others.
(Virtual) Community Informatics is a new concept. We are conducting a 3/4 day workshop as part of the DIAC 2002 program. The workshop has the following goals:
- developing a fuller understanding of (virtual) community informatics
- developing approaches for bringing together the fields of Virtual Communities and Community Informatics
- developing approaches for bringing together researchers and practitioners in these domains
- determining a research agenda for (virtual) community informatics as field of study and practice
- identifying and synthesizing the "patterns" that may be common to virtual and geo-physical community informatics as, for example, in training, boundary identification and maintenance, decision making, problem solving
The workshop will include short presentations by invited speakers, a panel discussion with a lot of audience participation, and a lot of time for brainstorming and collectively developing the goals above.
Position statements are strongly encouraged by not mandatory. They will be distributed at the workshop. Please email a position statement to both Michael Bieber (bieber@homer.njit.edu) and Michael Gurstein (gurstein@adm.njit.edu) by Tuesday April 30, 2002. We will email people who have expressed an interest more information closer to the date.
A variety of events are planned ranging from invited speakers, panel discussions, and pattern presentations to informal working sessions -- both planned and spontaneous. Symposium topics include the digital divide, human rights and privacy, cyberspace and economic development, open content research, pattern language development, community networks, wireless community networking, developing a civil society charter for the UN Summit on the Network Society, virtual communities and online activism, cross-border collaborations, and MORE!
Join 500 researchers, practitioners, activists, journalists, educators, artists, policy-makers and citizens from around the world to address critical questions and develop action plans.
Based on the insights of architect Christopher Alexander, DIAC-02 is soliciting "patterns" that people use to create communication and information technology that affirms human values. We will use these patterns to craft a "pattern language" - a useful and compelling "knowledge structure" based on the collective wisdom of our community. Ideally our pattern language will help articulate -- and promote interest in -- engaged and effective research and activism.
Our pattern system (http://diac.cpsr.org/cgi-bin/diac02/pattern.cgi) includes the 150+ patterns that we've collected. It also includes facilities for entering and editing additional patterns. All of the patterns entered so far and those entered before the May 1st deadline will be reviewed at the symposium for possible inclusion in the final pattern language.
We encourage you to submit a pattern -- or, better, several patterns!
CPSR's eighth biannual "Directions and Implications of Advanced
Computing" (DIAC) symposium:
Shaping the Network Society: Patterns for Participation, Action, and
Change
DIAC-02 in Seattle, May 16-19, 2002
http://www.cpsr.org/conferences/diac02
If you would be interested in further developments concerning (Virtual) Community Informatics, please email Michael Bieber (bieber@homer.njit.edu) and Michael Gurstein (gurstein@adm.njit.edu).
For more details, please contact:
This page: http://ccsweb.njit.edu/~bieber/vci-diac2002.html
To comment on this page, please email bieber
@ homer.njit.edu