Graeme Johanson, Gary Hardy, Larry Stillman, Centre for Community Networking Research, Monash University
it is easy to become confused by the enormous breadth of literature that is being published about theoretical, practical, and policy-oriented understandings and evaluations of community networking.
"Community Networking" is itself a troublesome catch phrase, packed with a whole range of understandings, assumptions, and expectations. "Network" is as ubiquitous as it is indeterminate, "Community" covers a spectrum from groups located in small specific geographic locations to large widely distributed individuals with a common interest , and the compound, Community Network, applies at once to the sorts of wide scale inclusive infrastructure, education and content undertakings and to relatively small scale intra- or inter - community organisation ICT network based activities. Strong cultural differences - in CP Snow's sense - underlie these differences. A elaboration of these different understandings could lead to better conceptual development and ultimately, cross-discipline integration with better outcomes for "community networking" in practice.
This review looks at a range of key conceptual areas which currently impact upon understandings of what constitutes "community networking". These areas include, but are not necessarily limited to: