Introducing Community Informatics

The application of information and communications technology (ICT) to enable and empower community processes, the goal of Community Informatics is to use information communication technologies (ICT) to enable the achievement of community objectives including overcoming “digital divides” both within and between communities. However, community informatics goes beyond discussions of the “Digital Divide” 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.

Community informatics as a discipline is located within a variety of academic faculties including Information Science, Information Systems, Computer Science, Planning, Development Studies, and Library Science among others and draws on insights on community development from a range of social sciences disciplines. It is a cross- or interdisciplinary approach interested in the utilization of ICTs for different forms of community action, as distinct from pure academic study or research about ICT effect on the elderly, or those living in remote locations in Developed Countries.

At the forefront of this new field of research is Michael Gurstein, Director of the Center for Community Informatics Research, Training and Development in Vancouver, Canada, which works with communities, ICT practitioners, researchers, governments and agencies as a resource for enabling and empowering communities with Information and Communications Technologies. In community informatics, the past decade has also seen conferences in many countries, and there is an emerging literature for theoreticians and practitioners including the on-line Journal of Community Informatics.

What is intriguing is that in a recent ReadWriteWeb article outlining Gurstein's thoughts, community informatics takes a micro-analytical approach in studying how information affects communities. In this instance, it's found that opening up data freely on the web actually had adverse effects. In one informatics study called Bhoomi: ‘E-Governance’, Or, An Anti-Politics Machine Necessary to Globalize Bangalore?, digitization and related digital access to land title records in Bangalore had the direct effect of shifting power and wealth to those with the financial resources and skills to use this information in self-interested ways. This type of study is a counterbalance to what many have proposed for the open data movement. Will opening up information benefit society or just a segment of society of the wealthy? It is these types of questions which will be important for the next version of the web.