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

Section/Workshop: Indigenous Peoples Knowledge Society

The section "Indigenous Peoples Knowledge Society" of the KCTOS conference will take place at the 7th of December at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna.

More detailed information can be found in the workshop's program:
fiser_budka_program.pdf

Workshop: Indigenous Peoples Knowledge Society

KCTOS Conference: Knowledge, Creativity, and Transformation of Societies
Vienna, Austria, 6 to 9 December 2007

Conference Section/Workshop: Indigenous Peoples Knowledge Society: Transformations and Challenges / Indigene in der Wissensgesellschaft: Transformationen und Herausforderungen
http://www.inst.at/kctos/sektionen_a-f/fiser_budka.htm

Of the more than 300 Million Indigenous Peoples recognized by the United Nations, a growing minority is actively shaping indigenous visions of a knowledge-based society. These visions are not simply indigenous responses to global mainstream debates over post-industrial development or techno-scientific culture, etc. More importantly, they articulate the actual deployment of new media and information communications technologies (ICTs) by indigenous communities to forward their own policies and practices. They frame how indigenous communities are mobilizing over the internet and on the Web to communicate their lived experiences and extend their local networks to global audiences, including and especially, a global indigenous audience.

For academics in the field, online indigenous communities are opening up spaces of inquiry beyond the digital divide by actively co-creating virtual communities and transforming their cultural experience through ICTs (i.e., real life in cyberspace). Questions about resources, knowledge/power and access continue to be important, but they have become more complicated by issues of networking and social life, virtual reproduction, and information policy. These new social, political, and cultural forms of indigeneity will be discussed within this section.

Papers within this section address one or more themes reflected in the following research questions:

• How can/should social sciences describe and explain local indigenous knowledge production in a potentially global knowledge system? What are the socio-cultural and political inter-linkages between local and global?
• How do indigenous communities integrate new media practices and ICTs into processes of local media production and networking to participate in socio-cultural life, political movements, economic development, healthcare, education, and so forth?
• How might indigenous communities’ uses of new media and ICTs reflect challenges for diversity, conflict, global ethics, pluralism, gender, youth and heritage?
• What best practices have indigenous organizations developed around the inter-linkages of knowledge production, new media, ICTs, and local/global community networks (that could inform practitioners and scholars)?