Community Informatics workshop in Montpellier

Last week I attended the First International Workshop on Community Informatics (COMINF) in Montpellier. The workshop was extremely interactive. Each presentation got multiple comments and several times a long in-depth discussion ensued. Lunch breaks, scheduled to last an hour and half, had to be reduced to a mere 30 minutes. A further indicator of the high degree of interactiveness, and the emergence of a "community of Community Informatics researchers", was that nearly all participants celebrated the success of the workshop with an informal dinner after it finished.

From the presentations I gather Community Informatics is about all of the following (and possibly more):

• Use of ICT in communities. In particular, communities that have no tradition to use ICT and impoverished communities. A nice thought was Engineers without borders similar to Doctors without borders. An issue raised was whether the introduction of ICT can annihilate the traditions of a community.

• Fostering (online) communities. Think of wikis, how to "create" communities, how to "maintain" communities over time, and knowledge sharing. One talk was about community rights: who owns the publications within a community, and who can modify or delete them (e.g. Wikipedia).

• Community analysis. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis were covered.

My contribution originates from a year ago: the A model (now framework) for weblog research post. Because the presentation was one of the last I kept it simple: (1) a few slides introducing the framework and how it can be used to visualise the results of research questions about (weblog) communities; followed by (2) a demonstration of the tOKo-based tool. From the questions and comments it can safely be concluded that the framework and the tool are very useful for practitioners of Community Informatics. Perhaps, Lilia and myself have made a contribution to this emerging field.

Below is the reference to the paper again:

Anjo Anjewierden and Lilia Efimova. Understanding weblog communities through digital traces: a framework, a tool and an example. In Proceedings International Workshop on Community Informatics (COMINF 2006), pp. 279-289, Montpellier, 2006 (November). Springer, LNCS 4277.