The idea for this special issue arose from a discussion on an electronic mailing list devoted to community informatics (CI). With its focus on “community”, a contested concept with scores of definitions and meanings, the uneasy and fuzzy line between community and not-community is obviously critical to the study and practice of community informatics. The discussion reignited the idea that CI should be used for the benefit of global communities as well as “local” ones. The diversity of opinions and the amount of interest that was aroused show us that the topic was worth exploring in more depth.
When we first began this enterprise about two years ago – encouraging authors, collecting and reviewing papers – we had no idea that the local/global distinction was about to be further assaulted, first by the Arab Spring and, shortly after, by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Interestingly, these powerful movements demonstrate a rich interplay of local and non-local forces, including community, solidarity as well as material forces comprising large numbers of non-violent protesters and the sometimes lethal resistance with which they were met.
Because community informatics is a young field of research and practice, we have the rare opportunity to help shape our field. It might not be possible to conceptualize a social enterprise that is relevant today without explicitly acknowledging climate change, environmental degradation, oppression, poverty, human rights, war, militarism and other "global" problems that face us all, however indirectly it may seem to some people. How should these manifest "global" concerns be factored into our enterprise? And how does the role of ICT, which lays at the foundation of our enterprise, change the way we answer these questions? As CI integrates research and engagement, its view of localism and globalism needs to be informed through those perspectives.
Community informatics is the study and practice of information and communication technologies for the benefit of the community (Gurstein, 2007). Regardless of the agreement on this broad definition, there are inherent tensions within the CI community and with the CI perspective itself. Is, for example, a "virtual community" a real community? And are there any compelling reasons to remove all non-electronic communication from our enterprise, knowing the fluidity of information and communication and our propensity for using a variety of approaches? Another tension, of course, is between the local and the global, the focus of this special issue. What's local and what's global? How do we define the two terms so that they are meaningful and useful to our work? Perhaps these terms even distract us from conceptualizing our enterprise in ways that are more useful.
As CI implicitly embraces the tension between the local and the global, on some level, global and local suggests two (or more!) types of forces, sometimes acting against each other, sometimes acting in concert. How do practitioners of CI address this clash or intermingling of forces? Does it advocate larger barriers, shelters, or hiding places from these forces or do they work to inspire or promote an engaged type of collective intelligence that goes beyond "using ICTs?"
The idea of community invokes localism, while informatics, especially networked and varieties of mass communication, offers a variety of challenges, generally of a globalist flavour, to the local, often beleaguered community. Is localism always kind and considerate — in a word, neighbourly — and globalization always anonymous, unfeeling and exploitive? If, for example, a league of local communities developed a "bill of rights" for local communities around the world and demanded its adoption worldwide, would this be a "global" effort? Or does local always mean the particular?
What processes are considered to be forces of glocalization? How do these forces originate, diffuse, and make their effects felt? And what should CI researchers and practitioners do in relation to those forces? Is the issue trying to help communities use ICTs more effectively, or is it working in a general way to develop communication systems that will help local communities intelligently address the problems that they and the rest of the world face?In some situations, for example, this would mean helping to develop collective problem-solving tools so people can more effectively resist oppression or fight the status quo. The holistic view of community informatics would suggest that all people would have the right to be full citizens of the world with the rights and responsibilities that accompany that status.
Rationale for the special issue
One of the rationales behind this issue is that as communities are becoming increasingly glocal, CI is no longer only for the empowerment of the community per se. It is also applied to the shared, translocal electronic space that in turn might impact local communities. Consequently, CI can be seen as one of the driving forces that could help shape equitable and sustainable development in the world. This brings forth both the emergence of new transnational identities and global citizenship. It also highlights the role of civil society as the site of many public interests that take place in different kinds of public spheres. These might resist corporate and governmental actors who seek to appropriate and segment the electronic space.
The multi-scalar politics of local actors comprise, according to Saskia Sassen (2004), at least three types of local-global conflicts in which cyberspace becomes a place where informal and non-cosmopolitan political actors can be part of the political scene:
the direct local-global transactions in which the scale of struggle remains the locality and the object is to engage local actors in other places around the world who are engaged in similar localized struggles with similar local actors, for example the Arab Spring revolts;
multi-scalar interaction in which localized struggles are aimed at engaging global actors, such as the WTO or multinational firms and banks either at the global scale or in multiple localities, such as in the Occupy Wall Street movement; and
local political practice which transforms a single event into a global media event, which in turn serves to mobilize individuals and organizations around the world in support of that action, such as the Zapatista movement in Mexico.
However, our findings have revealed a complex dynamic between local situations and concerns and other, more “global” situations. It seems that any typology that attempts to characterize local, glocal, and global phenomena would need to account for several elements, namely the principals or stakeholders that are engaged, their transactions, their network configuration, and the patterns of transactions and interactions through the networks.
Managing the glocal requires capacity and competence
Perhaps the local-global transactions, suggested by Sassen, only emerge when the motives for glocal mobilization and transactions are highly charged, either politically or economically. Therefore, only one of the six articles in this special issue includes protest movements that fit the typology described by Sassen. The rest of the articles represent the more ordinary or “normal” appropriation and expanded deployment of CI in everyday life. The geographical distribution of the articles covers all the continents, except South America, and they deal with both rural and urban areas of the developing and developed countries. The first set of three articles focus on the different kinds of empowering activities of civic associations in which the glocal transactions play a certain role, although not to the extent described by Sassen. The settings, rather, deal with various micro-environments with a global span. The second set of articles comprise analytic descriptions of the state of the art of the broad band or multi-scalar conditions for applying CI in–, and across, specific regions, countries or even continents.
The shared theme in all of the articles is that for meaningful and effective application of CI for glocal purposes, the acquisition and maintenance of necessary technological, organizational, institutional, and social capacities and competencies is required. The community´s ability to bond and bridge, using deliberation and other skills, is decisive in becoming a glocal player. On the other hand, the ability to manage glocal transactions is becoming increasingly important today at the local level. Therefore we need, as Peter Jones claims in his Point of View, conceptual frameworks to help define, differentiate and yet also conjoin what is local, global and glocal. This would also help the balancing of the local and the global in the use of ICTs, so that the explicit consideration of trans-locality and globalism within CI does not mean paying less attention to the local community.
Efforts to deal with the glocal
In their article “Beyond Community Networks,”Fiorella de Cindio and Douglas Schuler focus on the necessity of designing and implementing online deliberative environments and tools, as well as thinking beyond the community to encourage active, influential, and intelligent engagement. On the basis of several efforts in Italy and the United States, they recommend that communities must necessarily work with and integrate both local and non-local perspectives. They also build the case that in the quest for more active and effective civic intelligence (Schuler, 2001), the need exists for more purposive modes of communication, including deliberation that can be supported through informed development and use of technology. The design of such deliberative tools must explore and balance needs and opportunities in two ways: (1) developing tools that embed democratic participation protocols that have stood the test of time in the offline world while leveraging the affordances of ICTs to reduce traditional space and time constraints; and (2) conceiving new participation modalities that rely on digital networked technology and extend people’s deliberative capabilities.Findings and recommendations based on experiences with software developed by the authors and their groups, namely e-Liberate and openDCN, are provided in their paper, so that “successful models evolve through trial, use, and refinement” (Handler et al., 2008). The paper also reminds us that "digital inclusion" work must be ongoing for the result of this work to actually help create a more genuinely democratic society.
David Sadoway investigates in his article “From associations to info-sociations: The co-evolution of civic associations & ICTs in two Asian cities” the ICT-linked organizational, participatory and spatial transformations in four cases of civic environmental associations in Hong Kong and Taipei. These information associations, which the author calls ‘info-sociations’, are civic-cyber organizations, movements and counter-publics that use ICTs and operate at polycentric scales. They are multimodal (employing an array of ICTs including social media); multiplexed (blending virtual and physical practices) and multi-scalar (varied in geography, from the local to the global). The participatory transformations imply the reconfiguration of public (cyber)sphere via online forums, news or blogs, interactive map mash-ups, and multi-mediation with audio, video and text. They also tend to construct cyberspaces of hope by creating counter-spaces through catalyzing ideas and ideals. However, the question remains, are civic associations ably shaping the uses and applications of ICTs towards the just and livable city for all?
The aim of the article by Sirkku Wallin and Liisa Horelli is to present Finnish examples and to discuss how community informatics may provide opportunities for stakeholders to “play with the glocal” in the context of participatory e-planning in Finland and beyond. The endeavour is a complex, multi-dimensional process that takes considerable time to develop. The preconditions for an NGO to become a glocal player have been in the Finnish context the supportive infrastructure of everyday life, as well as the systematic development of competence as a civil society actor. This implies the co-creation of technical, organizational and institutional capacities which enable people and groups to transcend the local to the regional and, eventually, to transnational levels.
The glocal cross-border networking around participatory structures and environmental improvement by a variety of municipalities in different countries has meant an expansion, not only of the concept of e-planning, but also of community informatics, as the local communities have begun to shape the global ones.
CI adoption constrained by the national and regional structures
Janet Toland, in her article “From Rural Women´s Groups to the World”, applies a historical approach to plot the development of both people-based “soft” and business-based “hard” networks and their impact on the regions in New Zealand. She examines how ICTs enhance the bonding and bridging roles of social capital in the development of local, regional and global networks. Two regions, an urban and a rural one, have been studied from 1985 to 2005. Tacit or soft knowledge has been built up through networks such as “Women in Dairying” and “Grey Power”. The soft social networks interact with hard ICT-based networks within the regional setting. When they have been brought together they can facilitate both national and international information flows. New Zealand has become culturally more diverse and tolerant of different lifestyles especially in the urban areas. However, the bridging links are imbalanced and the bonding is failing to connect the different sectors or silos of the “learning regions”. The question remains, how to enhance the organizational and institutional competencies of the stakeholders in the ICT-assisted bonding and bridging in the context of regional networking, in order to transgress the boundaries of silos and sectors?
Marco Adria and Dan Brown point out in their article “Ambiguity and uncertainty in the ‘last mile’”, how broadband networks are an important means by which rural communities around the world can gain access to global networks of knowledge and communication. In fact, the rural broadband can be seen as a critical nexus between global and local flows of both capital and ideas. Nevertheless, Alberta, Canada, in spite of a significant investment into the construction of a unique high-speed, high-capacity fiber-optic network, connecting rural communities throughout the province, ranked in 2005 among the last Canadian provinces in terms of rural broadband access, three years after construction. The authors examine the reasons for this, by applying Weick’s (2001) sense-making framework. A primary finding is that several areas of ambiguity and uncertainty were related to rural broadband adoption, which created self-fulfilling prophecies about the broadband network's construction and use. These resulted in constraints in the bonding and bridging of social capital that is necessary for “effective” adoption and useby rural communities.
Although the African continent currently boasts the highest mobile telephony growth rates in the world, bringing new communications possibilities to millions of people, much remains to be done by governments, as well as the private sector, non-profits, and academics in order to support further growth of telecommunications markets and services. Laura Hosman and Elisabeth Fife highlight in their article “The Use of Mobile Phones for Development in Africa” some of the breakthroughs and the development possibilities promoted through the use of mobile phones in different parts of Africa. They argue that an important area for future research, theory-building, and development activity is at the nexus of where local, bottom-up needs and innovation meet top-down capabilities and funding. This requires support, however, from the government, the private, and the third sector for the technological, institutional, social and organizational capacity of the stakeholders.
Last, but not least, Peter Jones reflects in his Point of View on the different definitions of the “glocal”, by applying the conceptual framework of Hodges´s (1989) model. Glocal is, according to the author, a dynamic and mobile locus that runs throughout the community. The phenomenon has historical roots, because humanity´s roots can be defined as a journey or transition from the local (in Africa), to global and finally to glocal again. Jones ends by asking: are the nomads, migrants and refugees the true glocals of today?
Final Thoughts
Although it can change trajectory, stop, or even reverse its course, the process of globalization seems to be continuing its apparently inexorable diffusion throughout the world. We can safely assume that networked, digital technology will continue to play a strong role in this. This secures the place of technology in the consideration of what happens to real people in real places, i.e., what takes place “locally” and how this creates effects and is affected by non-local events and activities. Thus, the end of the story is not yet written. We believe that there is considerable theoretical and methodological work to be done in the area of local meets global. On the other hand, we believe that there is much room, and reasons to encourage, the development of social movements, in addition to technological innovations in the service of securing a better future. The nascent, interdisciplinary field of community informatics can and should play a role in this exciting new venture.
References
Gurstein, M. (2007). What is community informatics (and why does it matter)? Milano: Polimetrica.
Handler, J., Shadbolt, N., Hall, W., Berners-Lee, T., & Weitzner, D. (2008). Web science: An interdisciplinary approach to understanding the web. Communications of the ACM, 51(7), 60–69.
Hodges, B.E. (1989). The Health Career Model. In S.M. Hinchcliffe (ed.) Nursing Practice and Health Care (1st ed. only). London: Edward Arnold.
Sassen, S. (2004). Local Actors in Global Politics. Current Sociology, 52(4), 649–670.
Schuler, D. (2001). Cultivating Society’s Civic Intelligence: Patterns for a New ‘World Brain’. Journal of Information, Communication and Society, 4(2).
Weick, K. (2001). Making sense of the organization. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.