COMMUNITY INFORMATICS: INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCES AND CASE STUDIES

摘要

This panel will discuss and present case studies of "community informatics" as a strategy for supporting community use of ICT. Community informatics (CI) as an approach begins with the perspective that information and communications technologies (ICT) can provide a set of resources and tools that individuals and communities can use, initially to provide "access" to information management and processing and thus, with access, to pursue their goals in such areas as local economic development, cultural affairs, civic activism, and community based health and environmental initiatives. CI pays attention to the needs and objectives of physical communities and looks at how technology can support the achievement of those objectives. Thus, a CI approach is concerned with both the technology and the "user" (and the "uses") and with community processes, user access and technology usability as well as systems analysis and hardware or software design. CI takes into account the design of the social system within which the technology resides, as well as the technology system with which it interacts (Pigg 1999). In many respects, CI is an extension of the "socio-technical" approach to systems design but shifting attention from the "organization" to the "community," and thus reflecting the increasingly widespread distribution of ICT access (PCs and the Internet) and their use from organizations to individual end users and communities.