One of the big bonuses of interacting with new people is that you add connections of personal relevance. At Indiana University, we have a fine social informatics department, but I had never heard of the formal subspecialty, community informatics, until receiving a reply to a RootsCamp-related email.
Community informatics (CI) is devoted to enabling communities with information and communications technologies (ICTs). In a 2001 publication, Keeble and Loader described CI as a “multidisciplinary field for the investigation and development of the social and cultural factors shaping the development and diffusion of new ICTs and its effects upon community development, regeneration and sustainability.” I especially like this description:
Inherent in CI is the need to understand how knowledge is shaped and shared in communities, to investigate the underlying information phenomena and processes we find when we take “community†as our unit of analysis. (ASIS&T Bulletin)
Here at Indiana, CI is absorbed into other areas at SLIS, the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics and even network studies. Among the participants at a Michigan workshop last month were two IU Ph.D. students from SLIS — Wayne Buente and Kathryn Clodfelter. I have no idea what Wayne is studying, but it is probably worth an email or a trip down 10th street to find out. I met Kathryn at the NetSci 2006 conference in Bloomington last May. She’s particularly interested in issues of Digital Divide.
In looking through the session notes (PDF) of that conference, I did see some inclusion of complexity and chaos in their analysis of community. Again, that fits well with my interests. The big question, of course, is: “What is community?” I had to try and answer that for my capstone project last year, and I don’t think I did a great job of it. It may have been one of the reasons, to be honest, I focused more on something a community does — dialogue — than what makes up a community in the first place.
In the Michigan conference, this panel talked about CI in the same kinds of ways David Hakken did in his I501 class this fall () … What are the shared set of values that define the field? Is there a need for conceptual foundations to connect research and practice with other universities? Is there a common vocabulary? How can the field be mapped, especially when the core concept of community is changing? There is a journal of community informatics that recently began, and talk of creating wiki spaces to help with this ongoing definition.
This is an interesting problem, the definition of new fields. Particularly in technology, the landscape changes so dramatically from decade to decade, it is difficult to imagine any definition having much staying power. Our discussions with other students on the subject, as it pertains to Informatics, came up with two great insights. First, that definition might be best based on a question rather than a method or technique. Second, is there really a need to have such definitions in the first place? Perhaps the problems Informaticists address are unduly constrained by identifying them as a “CI” problem, as opposed to complexity, HCI, or social informatics.