Editorial: Welcome to the Journal of Community Informatics

Welcome to the Journal of Community Informatic

Scholarly Impact: a Bibliometric and Altmetric study of the Journal of Community Informatics

Demonstrating scholarly impact is a matter of growing importance. This paper reports on a bibliometric and altmetric analysis conducted on the Journal of Community Informatics (JOCI). Besides the bibliometric analysis the study also looked into JOCI article-level metrics by comparing usage metrics (article views), alternative metrics (Mendeley readership), and traditional citation metrics (Google Scholar citations). The main contribution is to provide more insight into the metrics that could influence the citation impact in Community Informatics research. Furthermore, the study used article-level metrics data to identify, compare and rank the most impactful papers published in JOCI over a 12-year period

Data visualization from a feminist perspective - Interview with Catherine D´Ignazio

Catherine D’Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer and software developer who focuses on data literacy, feminist technology and civic art. She has run breastpump hackathons, created award-winning water quality sculptures that talk and tweet, and led walking data visualizations to envision the future of sea level rise. Her research at the intersection of gender, technology and the humanities has been published in the Journal of Peer Production, the Journal of Community Informatics, and the proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI). D’Ignazio is an Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Data Visualization at Emerson College, a faculty director of the Engagement Lab and a research affiliate at the MIT Center for Civic Media

Community in Tension (CiT)

The development and availability of Information Communication Technology (ICT) impacts many sectors yet a digital divide is still present amongst citizens in communities. Not only is there a digital divide evident but also many other factors that causes tension in communities. This paper defines a Community in Tension (CiT) as a community where the wellbeing of its citizens is being threatened. This provides an opportunity to use these available ICTs in communities and have it locally appropriated to empower the citizens and stabilise these communities

Community Informatics: A bibliometric study of scholarly influence

Community Informatics is both a study and a practice that seeks to facilitate socioeconomic empowerment through the use of Information and Communication Technologies, such as the Internet. As a developing area of interdisciplinary scholarship, Community Informatics has not yet been defined in academic terms. Using a bibliometric method, the intention of this study is to reveal the scholarly influences for this emerging area of academic scholarship. In order to examine the foundations of this scholarly community, this study evaluated citation patterns from the first year of publication of The Journal of Community Informatics, the sole and seminal peerreviewed serial publication in this research area. The results of this study make an important and necessary contribution that will help to more accurately characterize the intellectual home for Community Informatics

Participatory, Visible and Sustainable. Designing a Community Website for a Minority Group

This paper tackles three aspects of community-based technological initiatives aimed to support minority groups’ public expression and communication: participation, visibility and sustainability. Participation requires\ud the active involvement of the community members in various project phases (from design to evaluation), sharing decisional power with project leaders. Visibility\ud refers to the capacity of community messages to reach a relevant audience outside the boundaries of the community itself. Sustainability indicates the capacity of a project to continue, under the control and management of the local community, beyond its “supported” lifetime. The mutual influence of these three dimensions is examined in general and also in the light of a specific case study: an initiative involving a Romani community in rural Romania, having as main outcome the development of a community website (www.romanivoices.com/podoleni)

Creating an Understanding of Data Literacy for a Data-driven Society

Society has become increasingly reliant on data, making it necessary to ensure that all citizens are equipped with the skills needed to be data literate. We argue that the foundations for a data literate society begin by acquiring key data literacy competences in school. However, as yet there is no clear definition of what these should be. This paper explores the different perspectives currently offered on both data and statistical literacy and then critically examines to what extent these address the data literacy needs of citizens in today’s society. We survey existing approaches to teaching data literacy in schools, to identify how data literacy is interpreted in practice. Based on these analyses, we propose a definition of data literacy that is focused on employing an inquiry-based approach to using data to understand real world phenomena. The contribution of this paper is the creation of a common foundation for teaching and learning data literacy skills

Urban Data in the primary classroom: bringing data literacy to the UK curriculum

As data becomes established as part of everyday life, the ability for the average citizen to have some level of data literacy is increasingly important. This paper describes an approach to teaching data skills in schools using real life, complex, urban data sets collected as part of a smart city project. The approach is founded on the premise that young learners have the ability to work with complex data sets if they are supported in the right way and if the tasks are grounded in a real life context. Narrative principles are used to frame the task, to assist interpretation and tell stories from data and to structure queries of datasets. An inquiry-based methodology organises the activities. This paper describes the initial trial in a UK primary school in which twelve students aged 9-10 years learnt about home energy consumption and the generation of solar energy from home solar PV, by interpreting existing visualisations of smart meter data and data obtained from aerial survey. Additional trials are scheduled with older learners which will evaluate learners on more challenging data handling tasks. The trials are informing the development of the Urban Data School, a web-based platform designed to support teaching data skills in schools in order to improve data literacy among school leavers

What Do Mobile-Connected Cambodians Do Online?

Considering recent developments related to government monitoring of the internet in Cambodia and a renewed push in civil society to improve access to information for Cambodian citizens, we wondered: what do Cambodian owners of smartphones do on the internet?  This article reports how respondents use the Internet, smartphone use, perceive benefits of the Internet, and social media use. A survey was developed iteratively by the research team, with ongoing support from members of the in-country team located in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. A planned missing data design was utilized. The survey was disseminated to 35,000 Cambodia smart phone users. 429 responses were gathered on questions focusing on the personal, political, social media activities on the internet. This study adds to the growing body of knowledge on how various societies are getting access to the internet and what they do when they are on the internet

Participatory Collaboration Mapping in Malawi: Making Mike’s Community Informatics Idea(l)s Work

In this tribute to Michael Gurstein, we first summarize three of his key concepts: Community Informatics, Effective Use, and Community Innovation. We then apply his ideas to a case on participatory collaboration mapping in Malawi. We end the tribute with a reflection and re-iterating Mike'ss call for Community Informatics research and action to keep meeting