Community informatics : building learning communities from the inside out

Abstract

Community Informatics is an emerging area which examines issues related to the education of the community about the use of Internet technologies for social and economic development. As such, community informatics projects are examples of lifelong education. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the emerging literature on community informatics as a basis for our model of community informatics. We start by presenting the major themes in the research to date. The review is intended to highlight the variables that have been outlined by previous research as determinants of successful or unsuccessful diffusion of information technologies in organisations. We conclude this discussion by outlining the variables from the diffusion literature that can be used as the building blocks for a theoretical model of community informatics. We end the paper with an outline of the major directions for future research emanating from our model