Categories
BlogSchmog

Community Informatics

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.

By Kevin Makice

A Ph.D student in informatics at Indiana University, Kevin is rich in spirit. He wrestles and reads with his kids, does a hilarious Christian Slater imitation and lights up his wife's days. He thinks deeply about many things, including but not limited to basketball, politics, microblogging, parenting, online communities, complex systems and design theory. He didn't, however, think up this profile.

2 replies on “Community Informatics”

Hi Kevin, i would say (as i think you are suggesting) that categorization of a set of problems is unduly constraining – in any field. In medicine, for example, where does psychology end and medicine begin? Any M.D. worth her weight will tell you that the two are part of the same system, and that ignorance of one is ignorance of the other. In a sense, i think there needs to be a continuum between all fields, where one blends into the other, rather than by seeking to define the boundary.

Now for the real reason for my post: one place you might look for ideas about ways to think about CI is in linguistics. It has a long history of wondering how language forms perception, and how ideas are conceived and spread within a (linguistic) community, as well as how ideas are formative of communities.

The the first part (the constraint of categorization) is a really tricky issue for me. Like all people, I make sense of the world by sticking concepts into little mental bins. It is much cleaner to have big buckets that encompass everything. However, this semester in particular, this idea of a tree hierarchy really has been called into question, through exposure to networks, lifeworlds and lengthy discussions about professionalism. Is there anything wrong with defining Community Informatics as something unique? No. Not until that definition starts excluding related work because it would make CI too broad. Not until the establishment of a definition – a tradition of the domain – becomes the measure by which new work is judged.

I like the idea of the community new definitions can bring, particularly when that process involves drawing from different experiences to create something new.

Linguistics, for whatever reason, is very intimidating to me. Not sure why that is. Probably trauma doing word diagrams in junior high. I think based on my early interests, you are right … I need to find a foothold there.

Comments are closed.