Ruth Grossman
University of Toronto
Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking

(Refereed Stream)
Archival institutions and the concerns of Community Informatics occupy a great common territory and yet little familiarity (and even less interaction) exists between the discourses. What do community informatics and archives have to talk about? Why are they ostensibly opposed in theory and practice? How might the roadblocks to a growing potential for joint programming be dematerialized and what is the rationale for attempting it? The archives is presented as a site of negotiation between public memory and contemporary aspiration. The proposition of creating primary records within the archives challenges certain assumptions regarding long-term custodianship by taking up the uncertainties of active community identity-building, by transferring the inherent philosophical debate to the archives proper, and by seeking strategies by which the infrastructure and conceptualization of archives would be equipped to facilitate an emerging model of community informatics.

Peter Day, \ Helen Goss & Clair Farenden

A dynamic workshop based on the work to date of Community Network Analysis project.

The workshop will start with a short presentation of innovative research around story mapping – using the combined application of community profiling - storytelling, geographical mapping and collaborative folksonomy and social network analysis.

Since conferences offer unique opportunities for interactive collaboration, the presentation will be followed by a series of applied activities revolving around storymapping as process, with the participants themselves providing the raw data.

Faulkhead, Shannon; Huebner, Sharon; Russell, Lynette, Monash University.

Distrust is a term that encompasses the emotions felt, and opinions held by the Aboriginal community in regards to the capturing and accessing of oral knowledge and records.

The recording and documenting of Australia’s historical knowing is still dominated by the invading colonial culture. Other voices that enter the public domain are often questioned and reinterpreted, fostering distrust by Indigenous communities. Examples include:

Nilsson, Joergen, Hagerfors, Ann
Lulea University of Technology/Division of Systems Sciences

(Refereed Stream)

This paper discusses an approach to preserve presentation by using metadata to describe the ‘look’ of digital documents in order to make them appear in a trustworthy way. The reason for making them appear in a trustworthy way is that documents often get record status, for example in a governmental agency.

Mulholland, Paul,
Gaved, Mark
Collins, Trevor
Zdrahal, Zdenek
Heath, Tom
Open University

(Refereed Stream)

Internet communication technologies (ICTs) enable the development of
memories across a variety of communities, from formal institutions
through to informal gatherings within the public sphere. We identify a
spectrum of deployment from private organizational spaces through to
open public spaces. As we move along this spectrum key variables change

McIver, William, Susan O'Donnell, Sandy Kitchen, Vanda Rideout (+),
Andrew Reddick,Mary Milliken, Michael Fleming, Kerri Gibson

National Research Council Canada, Institute for Information Technology

(Refereed Stream)

TThe Community Intermediaries Research Project (CIRP) investigated the social challenges and needs addressed by Canadian non-profit community-based organizations, the social and community contexts in which they operate, and the information and services they provide to citizens.

Ellen M. Knutson (University of Illinois), John R. Dedrick (Kettering Foundation)

(refereed stream)

From 2000 to 2002 the authors facilitated a workshop for the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio that taught qualitative research methods to community based practitioners who were working to address problems in their respective communities. Citizen research, as we called it, makes a contribution to addressing the problems of public life by potentially affecting the decisions that communities make about what to do and what not to do. We emphasize the word citizen in the phrase citizen researcher, and start with the democratic tradition that emphasizes the centrality of a broad mix of people working together to address the challenges that confront their communities, nation and the world. We use the term citizen not in it legal sense, but rather to indicate that people are actors, decision makers and producers. They get together, give voice, make determinations about what needs to be done to realize the public’s interest, and they work to make things that are of value to the public.

Johanson, Graeme, Kirsty Williamson, Don Schauder, Shannon Faulkhead

Monash University.

(Refereed Stream)

The inter-relationships between researchers and the Indigenous community in the state of Victoria, Australia, are analysed in this chapter. In order to gain an understanding of the expectations of Indigenous Victorians of a planned process for the capture and preservation of their oral knowledge, researchers undertook an analysis of Indigenous views. Views were elicited by means of 72 interviews about what Indigenous communities needed by way of a trusted system to help to create, collate, and maintain stories in an online repository of their oral memory.

Helen Klaebe Public Historian;

Marcus Foth, QUT

(Refereed Stream)

The Kelvin Grove Urban Village is a heterogeneous inner-city master-planned community in Brisbane, Australia, which provides a unique chance to research the intersection of new media opportunities (e.g., web-based systems, public displays and mobile phone applications) and the challenges of combining histiographical, oral, individual and community memory into accessible stories.

Hewitson, Judith Cicada.net.au

(Practitioner Paper)

A documentary filmmaking model, Guerilla TV has been applied to info-communication technology to enhance learning, empowerment and social change. This practice is called Online Documentary Training (ODT), an online, real-time interaction between fictitious and real characters. ODT is one way to construct authentic personal and social memory as a tool for creating change within developing and indigenous communities.ODT promotes the subjects' ownership and directorship of both the technology and content.