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.

Julie Roberts, Monash University
(refereed stream)

How do geographically isolated communities, with a high population turnover build a sense of place and preserve their memories? Are the new technologies of the internet, with its ease of communication via email and chat-rooms, together with mobile phone capabilities such as sms, undermining community creation – or at least communities built on shared physical spaces? Does the increasing ease with which one can maintain relationships over vast geographical distances, enhance, inhibit or have no impact upon community building in a physically shared space.

Yeslam Al-Saggaf, Charles Sturt University
(refereed stream)

The aim of the study discussed in this paper was to explore an online media's ability (Al Arabiya site) to foster a public sphere for the Arabs and preserve a record of it in its memory. The study relied on thematic content analysis of 10% of the total site content devoted to one topic: the 2003 war in Iraq. Two hundred and seventy two articles about this topic, posted to the site by its staff, and the readers' comments on those articles, were analysed from a pool of 2720 articles. Al Arabiya site (www.alarabiya.net), which is the official website of the popular TV station Al Arabiya, was selected because of its exceptional and exceeding popularity among Arabs.

Memory, conflict, communities in postwar Italy

Sergio Bologna, Giovanni Contini and Leopoldina Fortunati

Chairs: Ron Day, Steve Wright

Memory and conflict have long been central elements in the constitution
and reconstitution of community networks. The past sixty years in Italy
have seen numerous battles over the memory and 'memorialising' of past
events, entwined both with popular upsurges and the efforts of elites to

Toyama, Shigeki
Kochi University, Japan

(Refereed Stream)

A Web-GIS system can be a strong tool for community building. By using a Web-GIS system as a community database, people can share experiences and memories with visualized geographical information, cultivating a sense of belongingness to the place where they live. In the case of the Web-GIS system called 'Chizu Navi Tai' (meaning Map Navigation Corps) launched in 2003 by the city of Nishinomiya, we can expect some positive effects for sharing community memories.

Singh, Supriya

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

(Refereed Stream)

It is accepted in principle that social and the cultural factors are important for the study of the individual, family and community use of technologies. The tussle in community informatics, as with human-computer interaction, lies in communicating the importance of the social and cross-cultural factors to technologists, designers, businesses and policy makers. This is because of four reasons. First, there are the difficulties of interdisciplinary communication. Secondly, the primacy of quantitative research in technology, business and policy marginalizes the value of the qualitative research that yields important sociological insights. Third, sociologists and cultural studies scholars have seen design and technology applications as secondary to theoretical contributions to knowledge. Hence sociologists seldom appear in any numbers in policy and design discussions of the social and cultural factors in technology use. And lastly there is a paucity of rigorous empirical studies in the use of technologies in Asia and Africa, increasing the tendency to universalise the Western experience of use.

Peterson, Abby
Goteborg University

(Refereed Stream)

On October 30th 1998 an act of arson took the lives of 63 young people and injured several hundred in the flames that engulfed a Halloween party in a rented locale in Gothenburg, Sweden. The victims of this tragedy mirrored contemporary multiethnic Sweden. The disaster united family and friends of the victims in a community of fate including a wide range of ethnic minorities, together with victims from Sweden's ethnic majority.

Sue McKemmish, Monash University

The Memories, Communities, Technologies research network brings together people from academia, memory institutions and "communities of memory" to explore the rich interplay between memories, communities and technologies at the nexus between the humanities, sciences and information technology. A Search Conference is being held in Prato, 4-6 October 2006 to develop a research agenda and collaborative project proposals relating to the central theme of the formation and transformation of memory, and to the key supporting themes of how E-Research, the changing roles of memory institutions, and research governance impact on the formation and transformation of 'communities of memory.

Mlitwa, Nhlanhla
Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa.

(Refereed Stream)
That a network between the individual, the community, the civil society, the business, and the government is the soul of an information society was broadly discussed in the Community Informatics Research Network (CIRN2005) Conference in Cape Town, South Africa in 2005. How community technologies can be appropriated in a manner that effectively empowers communities? Sentiments that we do not do to but with people: in terms of identifying and finding solutions to the information society challenges - were unanimously accepted.

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.