communicating in the information society - United Nations Research ...

A Community Informatics for the
Information Society
William McIver, Jr.
Abstract
Community informatics is an emerging, interdisciplinary field concerned
with the development, deployment and management of information
systems designed with and by communities to solve their own problems.
From academic and policy-making perspectives, community informatics
is now concerned with developing a coherent theory and methodology
drawn from a now significant history of projects and the ever-increasing
efforts to use information and communication technologies to solve lifecritical
community problems.
Community informatics might be considered analogous to the wellestablished
discipline of management information systems (MIS), where
the former is tailored to the unique requirements of communities and the
critical problems they pose for developers of information systems. These
requirements and problems are significantly different from those faced in
MIS, thereby warranting a unique disciplinary focus.
The goals of this paper are to:
• motivate the need for a community informatics in the context of
the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS);
• give an overview of conceptual and methodological issues; and
• propose the parameters of a community informatics sufficient for
addressing development goals established in recent United
Nations initiatives, including the Millennium Declaration and
the ICT (information and communication technology) Task
Force, and, in particular, the forthcoming WSIS.
Many of the concepts and issues discussed here are the results of
research and practice in the developed world. Nonetheless, an effort is
made in this paper to link community informatics to the realities of
communities in developing countries, as well as disadvantaged communities
in highly developed countries. Suggestions for new areas of
research are also made. A set of related resources is listed in the annex to
this paper.
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