Community Informatics (CI) in Vienna

Michael Gurstein held a lecture yesterday about "what is community informatics and why does it matter?" at the Austrian Computer Society in Vienna.

Gurstein states that one of the important aspects of CI is to bring researchers, practitioners, and policy makers together to work within a processual structure.

CI aims to solve real live problems of communities by integrating information and communication technologies (ICT) in different community processes. Thus, the community becomes the “user” of ICT and not the individual. This bottom-up approach should ideally lead to the empowerment of the community through ICT.

In contrary to the concept of the “digital divide”, CI is about “effective use of ICT” and not about access to ICT. Within the context of CI, ICT is to enable people to e.g. decentralize institutions or distribute local knowledge. A good example of such a decentralized institution is the Keewaytinook Internet High School (KIHS) of the KO Tribal Council in Northwestern Ontario, which enables First Nations’ students to stay in their remote communities while attending school.

Jana Herwig wrote a nice report in German about Gurstein’s lecture and the follow-up discussion for her blog.

Michael Gurstein in Vienna

One of the founders of community informatics, Michael Gurstein, visits Vienna to introduce this new disciplin to an audience at the Austrian Computer Society. The event is co-organized by the Graduate Students' Centre of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Vienna.

frome the Wikipedia:

Community informatics (CI) refers to an emerging set of principles and practices concerned with the use of information and communication technology (ICT) for the personal, social, cultural or economic development of and within communities. CI as an academic discipline (and as a practice) is often located within Information Systems presented however, in conjunction with community development and other social academic and practice areas. It can be considered as a cross or interdisciplinary approach utilising ICTs for different forms of community action.
(...)

for more information see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_informatics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gurstein
http://www.ciresearch.net
http://ci-journal.net
http://www.communityinformatics.net