Community & Technologies - Challenges and Opportunities for Future Research
Michael Gurstein (1) & Volker Wulf (2)
In September 2003, the biannual conference series 'Communities and technologies (C&T)' was started with a meeting in Amsterdam attracting some 350 participants and operating somewhat in parallel with the more policy, advocacy and practice-oriented Community Informatics (CI) conferences in Prato, Italy which began in 2002.
10 years later it is worth looking back to evaluate what has been achieved for both streams of community-oriented ICT research and to identify convergences, overlaps divergences and common paths and challenges for future research, advocacy, policy and practice.
For both the C&T and CI streams the concepts 'communities' as well as 'technologies' are somewhat contested. There are considerable debates about the existence/manifestation, importance, and definition of the term 'community' (Tönnies, Durkheim, Etzioni, Nancy, Rheingold, among others). Even as the terminology of "community" appears to be coming into wider and wider general use (by Facebook to describe its groupings, by some to talk about the entire conglomeration of Internet users (ICANN), and increasingly by environmentalists to talk about all in the context of threats to mankind) the term seems to become ever more fuzzy and difficult to grasp as the boundaries blur between the physical and the virtual (and back again).
Even as definitions become more difficult the task of using ICTs as a means to develop and strengthen communities and to enable and empower communities in the face of implacable issues and overwhelming threats becomes ever greater. There are thus good reasons to focus specifically on the boundary-spanning activities at the edges of communities. Given the fact that IT artifacts are becoming ubiquitous in peoples' lives, it is worth investigating their role in shaping and enabling the social practices of communities.
The concept of 'technology' is equally manifold and quickly changing. In 2003, both the C&T and the CI communities looked at a world which was not yet widely networked by social media applications such as Facebook or Twitter. Mobile phones were still in an infant state in many countries of the developing world. Broadband was still in its infancy as a means for intensive digital transfer and dramatically widening the range of ICT applications. Meanwhile, the considerable development of technologies offering additional and advanced potentials for appropriation by communities has deepened and widened the scope of possible research and practice while maintaining the broad framework of requirements and opportunities.
Schuler's (2009) exploration of communities, ICT, and civic intelligence raises several relevant issues: "Why focus on the relationship between communities and technology? The implication is that the two somewhat ill-defined entities are involved in a dynamic and possibly antagonistic interplay and, at the very least, each has the potential to influence the other. One provocative yet reasonable response to the question is that it enables us to explore the broad potential of collective intelligence engendered by new ICT." Some of this potential involves the role of ICTs in the delivery of locally developed and controlled services, the empowerment of communities through the use of ICTs and so on.
We need to explore the way IT technologies become an infrastructure for any community. On the one hand, their appropriation may become a self-organized activity of community members. On the other hand, the development and introduction of information technology may be at the initiation of actors external to the community to be served. Therefore, projects in the domain of community and technologies can contain very different levels and layers of participation.
This special issue offers a collection of position papers discussing the state of the art and future research challenges in the field of Communities & Technologies and Community Informatics and represents the beginnings of a more formal convergence and "reconciliation" of the two communities. Early versions of these papers were initially presented at a workshop held at the University of Siegen in January 22 - 24th, 2014.
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Schuler, D. (2009, June). Communities, technology, and civic intelligence. In Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Communities and technologies (pp. 61-70). ACM.