COMINF06 wiki | Main / TheBigQuestions

This area is meant to collect valuable research questions related to the workshop. The idea originated in the CIRN 2006 Prato Conference, where a list of key questions was created by the conference participants. For COMINF 2006, we would like to do a similar thing, organized by workshop session. If you have any question you would like to see addressed, please edit this page by clicking 'Edit' and add your questions in the appropriate section. If added before the conference, we will discuss them in the relevant sessions.

Community Informatics Foundations

I do not know if there is a certain foundation to CI...so my question is, to what degree is CI an inter-cross disciplinary field? Is is possible to have certain foundations when there is no shared theoretical or practical paradigm? (Larry Stillman)

I would say that as with all such undertakings, CI began as a response to a set of conditions, problems, issues--itches that needed scratching as it were.

In this case, the "itches" were the need to come to grips with Information and Communications Technologies not as they were presented theoretically but as they were being manifested in practice. Who was doing what with them, what were they doing, where was it going (or very importantly where could it go), and how to make it all work.

I think the basic BIG question I would like to address (and that I'm trying to address in the theoretical writing I'm currently doing is whether and how one can see "communities" as "agents" in a world of ICTs. I think the dominant notion (and to a degree the reality) is that ICT agency is individualized and individualizing. However, in reality people don't live as isolated invididuals, they live as families and in communities and hyper-individualism (let's call it for the sake of argument--networked individualism--is a debilitating condition not a goal. In fact we should be aiming for integration within individuals, families and communities--so in that sense community informatics is the solution if networked individualism is the disease. (Mike Gurstein)

Capturing Community Meaning

What is the meaning of meaning (seriously)?
Are we confusing this with ideas about community memory (in all media), which can become seen through rose-tinted and expert glasses?
Whose meaning and how is memory filtered and recorded?
The problem of the colonisation of meaning/memory. What are the ethics of working with communities and the power and expertise problem?
What about when people don't want to share their meaning and memory? In whose interests are we working?

(Larry Stillman)

My own position is that "community" is not a noun but a verb. Community is an emergent circumstance or condition being created through the process of acting (in the broadest sense) collabortively. In that case then, community memory is the as it were DNA-genetic code out of and through which the community evolves and when the community stops having this DNA (live) then it dies. The notion of memory is not passive and objective, but rather it is the living shared experiences of those who choose to act together in this way.

(Mike Gurstein)

Improving Community Communications

What are the most appropriate means by which to get people to discover what are there most important (and other ) communications and the means by which ICTs can improve or work with them?

(Larry Stillman)

Analyzing and Designing Community IS

Enterprise sponsored virtual communities are an attempt to bring virtual community social interaction models to an organizational context and apply it to improve collaboration within and between companies. There basically is an utilitarian view in this approach. In deseigning a community IS we are designing a socio-technical system which is a virtual community. Does it make sense to "design" such a socio-technical system? Does it make sense to design a community after all?
Community IS need specific analysis and design methodological tools? Tools from the requirements engineering field (such as workshops, scenarios, storyboarding, prototyping, etnographies) are effective in the elicitation of community IS requirements? How can we specify the requirements for a social structure that is mainly characterised by emergent properties?

(António Lucas Soares)

Community Evaluation and Assessment Methodologies

To what extent can standard IS and software quality measurement frameworks and methodologies be used in community IS evaluation and assessment? (Aldo de Moor)

To what degree are we reinventing the wheel in talking about evaluation rather than paying much better attention to fields such as Program Evaluation or Community development? (Larry Stillman)

Is Community Informatics a Discipline or a Practice?

I think there is a fundamental issue (and possible mistake) in thinking about whether Community Informatics is a "discipline" i.e. something that should have a common methodology, common set of research practices, common terminology, integrated theory and so on. My own feeling is that CI is more of a "practice" -- that is it is what folks doing community informatics do...

The "research" and "theory" side comes from attempting to make sense of what it is that those doing community informatics are doing and putting it into a larger explanatory framework.

I don't see that CI could in any way develop as a conventional "scientific" discipline as for example attempting to develop "predictive" theories. (Mike Gurstein)

What does Community Informatics Know That Anyone Else Might Be Interested In

If CI is to develop (whether as a "practice" or as a "discipline" q.v. above) it is important to think through what it is that CI can contribute that might be of interest to other people--communities, practitioners, policy makers, business whoever

Some suggestions for areas where we do have something worthwhile to contribute: --strategies for making ICTs useful on the ground --describing and modeling things that don't work for ICTs on the ground --how to link ICTs into on-going local processes--social, economic, political etc. --how to assess the above --(more) (Mike Gurstein)

TheBigQuestions