INLS 490-121: Collaborative Writing Exercise/Community Informatics

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The field of community informatics studies how people use information and technology though a community development lens. A primary concern is access to information and technology, both in the physical sense (computers, connectivity, etc.) and the intellectual sense (information literacy and skills). CI is informed by a social justice agenda, and its literature often speaks of empowering under-served communities and engaging community members in the articulation and resolution of their own information/technology needs.

Community informatics is a rather young and highly multidisciplinary field; it is still in flux and its edges have yet to be defined. Michael Gurstein's 2007 piece aptly titled What is community informatics (and why does it matter)? explores some of these boundaries and possibilities.

Research

Community Informatics is the subject of diverse research, and some leading library and information science schools (notably, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) have research centers devoted to this. Bishop and Bruce, two UIUC library and information science professors, articulate four guiding research questions for the future of community informatics in their August/September 2005 ASIS&T paper, as follows:

  1. How do actual communities work to address their problems?
  2. What theory adequately accounts for the complexity and diversity of distributed, collective practice?
  3. What tools are needed to mediate work on concrete tasks within communities?
  4. What is the most effective process for developing shared capacity in the form of knowledge, skills and tools?

While these questions are primarily theoretical, Bishop and Bruce spend the majority of the paper discussing actual community inquiry in very concrete ways. Indeed, the University of Illinois Community Informatics Initiative website indicates the prevailing concern of the field with practice over theory.

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