This presentation, "Community Informatics for Community Informaticians: Making History in Historic Times" was a keynote presentation at CIRN 2010, Prato, Italy. It advocates for more formalization of both our technological and our organizational frameworks.

1. Community Informatics for
Community Informaticians
Douglas Schuler
Community Informatics Research Network Conference
Prato, Italy
October 27, 2010
Making History in HistoricTimes

2. Disclaimers
• I'm a "newcomer" to this conference, but not to the field
• (As you probably know) I'm not the first person to bring
up these suggestions…
• These proposals are offered from my perspective but
please consider them as Wiki-style templates.
• If I had had more time, this would be shorter. Probably
better organized too... i.e. this is a work in progress.

3. Why do I say “Historic?”
Life on the planet is going through fundamental shifts.
The opportunities we have now are time-limited.
The actions we take now may actually establish set the
directions we take in the future.
Our community focuses on a critical — though often
overlooked — area.
It’s actually an understatement

4. Our Goals
• Research / understand our environment and our
actions
• Empower communities
• Promote equitable and effective policy
• Develop civic and community applications
• Claim / identify / create the role of community and
civil society in cyberspace and in information
systems generally
• Change the world

5. The State of our Enterprise
• Our glass is not empty, but not full either.
• A network, but not necessarily an intentional one.
We can do better...

6. The Challenge
What can we do the improve the
effectiveness — or what I’d call the Civic
Intelligence — of our community?
Can we apply what we know to
actually help ourselves?

7. How Can We
Achieve This?
•Building a shared technological platform
•Building a stronger and more intentional network
Through two mutually reinforcing activities:
We should spend more time and effort applying
community informatics to our own community

8. Networks
• Lots (and lots) of connections
• Free flow of information
• No control
• Lack of focus
• Not conducive to decision-making
Much exalted but not without problems

9. Hierarchies
• A special kind of network
• Regimentation / Chain of Command
• Constrained communication
• Bureaucracy and “fiefdoms”
• Decisions are basically “final”
• Organizations as “machines”
• Focus and coordinated action easier
Much disparaged but not without advantages

10. The software and the community
that uses it can be more
intentional.We can create a
hybrid network / hierarchy.
How do we “Structurize” our Network?
• Interest groups
• Dynamic leadership
• Issues as nodes
• Shared projects

11. Why this should be easy for us —
• We have similar interests and motivation
• We’re oriented towards actual projects especially
community work
Why this could be hard for us —
• We’re individualistic
• Not enough resources?
• Maybe we’d fight over resources? Who would be able to
fundraise in “our” name?
• We’re geographically distributed; we come from different
“worlds”
• Inertia. It’s easier to keep doing what we’re doing.

12. Possible Uses of a
Shared Technological Resource
• Find the information you need
• Share policy documents, applications and other resources
• Identify other people with similar interests
• Develop and test theories
• Find other people with whom to collaborate
• Create software,APIs, and other useful artifacts
• Carry out larger research and other projects less expensively by
sharing the load more broadly and intelligently
• Create and manage projects or campaigns
• Make our work more accessible to the rest of the world (as well as
more legitimate, necessary, possible, and effective)
• Build our community

13. • Fulfill general individual needs
• Fulfill general organizational needs
• Easy join / some commitment (many small
contributions can create an enormous resource)
• "Big tent" philosophy
• Reciprocal sharing and log-ins
• Look and feel sharing
Some Requirements for a
Shared Technological Resource

14. General Requirements
(continued)
• Structure of organization / technical approach should help us to do
what we want to do
• Support for the data objects for community informatics repository
(ICT policy info, papers, events, projects, people, news, etc. etc.);
context information; other "objects" (e.g. patterns)
• Theory development / research directions
• Internationalization

15. A Civic Intelligence Orientation
• What knowledge do we need?
• How can we support our processes?
• Think about focus
• Think about learning, monitoring, memory, negotiating, etc.
• Collaborative modes like collaboration, deliberation, etc.
• Tech development: Smart or public or civic intelligence
search engine(s)
Generally this means
promoting civic ends through civic means

16. A Civic Intelligence Orientation
• Civic intelligence is established as an explicit frame
• Design using civic intelligence and models
• System promotes civic intelligence in users
• The system is built to demonstrate and manifest civic
intelligence as an evolving intelligent artifact
Four Main Approaches for Design*
* From my planned (but temporarily abandoned) Prato submission....

17. No Intelligence Without Focus
• Can technology (or organizational structure)
help sustain individual and collective focus /
attention ...
• ... on content, on projects, on situation, on
people, on tools, or on issues.
• How do we indicate our attentional interests
and how do we learn about what we need to
learn about and hear about changes?
Help is (Possibly) on the Horizon

18. General Approach
• Build on existing data and processes
• Build incrementally towards planned and
emerging goals
• Collaborative development
• Roll your own and use existing platforms
• Build the community intentionally (and,
probably, formally)

19. Organizational Recommendations
• Global organization including people from all over the world -- diversity
can be strength!
• Network of networks // Project oriented / Non-partisan
• Basic principles
• A formal (i.e. legally established) organization
• some designated leaders — at least at first
• Try to model new organizational forms that are more suitable to future
work
• Support for activities (e.g. collaboration and deliberation)
• Build on new findings (from social media, network theory, collective IQ
findings!) and build bridges to other disciplines

20. Support for Intelligent Interactions
• deliberation
• collaboration
• project / campaign development
• question and answer
• Multi-user document editing
• Etc. Etc.

21. Some short-term goals
Some progress towards organization and technological
development for our community.
Identifying other people and groups who ought to get involved.
Identify the objects to support
Identify a core group of people
Directories and repositories for applications
Maybe an RFC for this campaign?
Develop a set of principles
Wiki-based requirements documents
profile definitions
cross-site linking
CI search engines
CI ontologies
etc.
etc.
Some slightly random suggestions

22. What am I offering?
• Organizational support (CPSR, PSP)
• Encouragement
• Some (hopefully) interesting ideas
• PSP technology including pattern development and
annotation
• My efforts
• And, last but not least, a Pattern workshop on
Friday (October 29)! The workshop can help move
the initiative I’m proposing — or any other
community project further along.

23. Final Reiteration
•Building a shared technological platform
•Building a stronger and more intentional network
We achieve this through two mutually
reinforcing activities:
We should spend some time and effort applying
community informatics to our own community