Community and Social Informatics (Mar. 15)

We have covered the background of what ICT is, what its relationship to society entails and what the consequences might be if a digital divide is present. We moved to the positive or proactive stage when we framed this within digital inclusion, but it still remains mostly conceptual in order to raise awareness of the issues and of the complex relationship between ICT and society, taking into account its diversity. We now need to focus on opportunities for ICT to benefit society and methods to make it happen.Community informatics and social informatics have been around for a while as a way to frame these opportunities and make sense of how to go about developing systems that are truly aimed at improving people's lives.

Social informatics (pioneered and led by Rob Kling) is the "interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technologies that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts" (Kling, 2007, originally published in 1999). In order to present his case, Kling starts by focusing on uncritical positive views of technology as exhibited by the "IT pundits". These are people who see technology through successful exemplars and then make the case that this means that IT should imply profound (and positive) social change. Usually, their assertions are bold, their data is cherry picked and their analysis is not systematic or in-depth. Of course, IT pundits are not researchers, they are simply opinionated writers that produce interesting "sound bites" for magazines or blogs. Kling then moves on to discuss the "IT productivity paradox", which questions the very assumption on which most IT (at least in business) is built: that it leads to increased productivity. Back in the late 80s the Nobel Laureate Robert Solow questioned this assumption, triggering a widespread discussion on the actual returns of IT investment. This paradox has not completely left us; in 2003 Nicholas Carr, as editor of the Harvard Business Review published an essay reviving this paradox and telling us that "IT Doesn't Matter". In his view, IT does not provide any competitive advantage and has becomes an infrastructure commodity (like electricity) which is a must-have but not a strategic asset, and he went as far as suggesting that IT investments should be cut down and that management should focus on the risks, rather than on the opportunities brought on by ICT. Some have questioned this negative view either by suggesting that it is a problem in measurement (we don't know how to measure ICT's indirect benefits) or a shortsighted view of ICT (while some is indeed common infrastructure, some other is more strategic and unique). Kling, for his part, suggested that the problem was neglecting the social explanations behind ICT success or failure. Building on top of the socio-technical tradition (the same from which Orlikowski's understanding f ICT comes from) the idea was to shift the emphasis on technological determinism ("I plug in system X and I should obtain benefit Y") towards an emphasis on contextual inquiry. For example, the success of a system may be linked to occupational power or to incentive structures in the organization (not to the ICT alone). There are no fixed effects of technology: the same tool may be useful and successful in one organization (or user group) and a failure in another (for example, when he describes the use of Lotus Notes in PriceWaterHouse as opposed to Ernst & Young, a case used by Orlikowski too in developing her theory many years ago). This focus on social context and work practices as critical for the understanding and assessment of ICT was then labeled under "social informatics" by Kling and others. The idea was to produce a broad body of knowledge based on empirical (and typically qualitative and in-depth) research in order to contribute concepts to help in designing, using and configuring ICT systems. It is interesting to note that the two journals he uses as example (same IT infrastructure but different level of success based on work practices - e.g. the review process - rather than on technology) are both extinct now, meaning that even with a contextualized understanding of ICT, success is not guaranteed in the long run. It should also be noted that social informatics received some criticism and did not pick up as fast or spread as wide as Kling intended, perhaps due to a counter-movement against critical theory and its associated disciplines (cf. Latour, 2004 "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?", Critical Inquiry, 30: 225-248).

Community informatics is a closely related field (maybe contained within social informatics) with perhaps a more applied perspective. It is defined by Gurstein as a field of interdisciplinary scholarship and practice devoted to enabling communities with ICT. Thus, the emphasis is placed explicitly and emphatically on the benefits of ICT for particular communities. Indeed, the community, not the ICT, is the unit of analysis (Bishop and Bruce, 2005). Carroll et al. (2009) give an account of several research projects aimed precisely at enabling (scientific, emergency response, and student) communities through ICT. Their re-hashing of finished or ongoing projects is aimed at revising the notion of design as problem-solving. Roughly speaking, while "design-as-problem solving" (based on Herb Simon's tradition) is backwards looking given that it is aimed at satisficing solutions to given requirements through selection, "design-as-possibility" is oriented towards creative new possibilities through exploration. To illustrate this, they take collaboration technologies: on one hand, they may use face-to-face communication as the "gold standard" which ICT should aim at emulating; on the other hand, the may be built to go "beyond awareness" and provide mechanisms that improve on face-to-face interaction. Going beyond awareness means finding uses for ICT that support different stages of "activity awareness" starting by a shared common ground, going into communities of practice, then on to social capital generation and finally for human development (individual and group capabilities). For example: social bookmarking may be used to build on existing common ground in scientific collaboration; case studies and role playing may be used to emulate communities of practice in a university course; social capital may be improved around improvisation in emergency response by allowing annotations of rationale (logic of reasoning behind decision-making) in shared GIS-based maps; and human development may be improved in the same university course by allowing students to document their projects in the same space which they use to find their cases.

In sum, both community and social informatics focus on the relationship between ICT and society, and integrate this understanding in their methods of inquiry and design. As we have said before, this means using participatory approaches, looking creatively at the uses of ICT, and recognizing that these are shaped through their interaction within a specific context of use. For our course, it is expected that each group use these ideas in trying to find new ways to interpret, design and use ICT in their specific case settings. Also, since we are using design science research to guide our projects, then it is advisable to look at design from a more positive perspective (design-as-possibility), while at the same time, tempering creative ideas by also looking at design from a problem-solving point of view in order to consider real-world possibilities and restrictions and avoiding disappointments - beware of the IT paradox...