Midterm

Question: What is "community informatics"? What does it hope to accomplish?

Answer: As Ann Peterson Bishop says in her article "Community Informatics: Integrating Action, Research and Learning" (p. 6), community informatics is "an emerging field of interdisciplinary scholarship and practice devoted to enabling communities with information and communications technologies (ITCs)." It has also been described by Keeble and Loader as a "multidisciplinary field for the investigation and development of the social and cultural factors shaping the development and diffusion of new ITCs and its effects upon community development, regeneration, and sustainability." In short, community informatics hopes to technologically update all communities internationally, bringing together places from inner city neighborhoods to institutions and improve any of the problems they might encounter.