Bibliography of the Community Information Corps
Version 1.01 August 2003 – Initial author: Paul Resnick
Version 1.02 August 2004 – Latest revision: Peter Keller-Transburg/Paul Resnick

There are a handful of fundamental concepts about community and the public good that we study in the Community Information Corps (CIC) Seminar at the School of Information (SI). These key concepts give students a conceptual lens for reflecting on the details of project activity and policy developments that they observe and encounter. They also create a point of common knowledge and a lingua franca with which students can interact and share ideas.

CIC Fundamental Concepts:
- Public Goods and Common Pool Resources
- Social Capital
- Inequality, Diversity, Identity and Power
- Citizenship and Democracy
- Non-profit Sector and Philanthropy

The same fundamental concepts are covered each year, but the Seminar facilitator and readings changes each semester. As such, students are encouraged to enroll in the CIC Seminar each semester while they are at SI. Each of the major concepts is discussed briefly below and is followed by a dynamic list of corresponding readings.

Public Goods and Common Pool Resources
The first big idea is the notion of public goods. Economists define public goods as goods that, once produced, benefit everyone in a group, even people who did not contribute to the production of the goods. More formally, a public good is non-excludable, so that everyone has access to it, and non-rival, so that use by some people does not reduce the value of the good to others. Classic examples are clean air and national security. Public goods tend to be under-produced because people do not take into account the value to everyone else that is created from producing the good. A closely related idea is that of common pool resources, which are freely accessible to all, but where each person's use depletes the resource for others. These goods suffer from over-consumption, the so-called tragedy of the commons.

The notions of public goods and common pool resources are critical to community informationists for two reasons. First, information itself is sometimes thought of as a public good, since it is relatively inexpensive to distribute once it is created. Thus, it may serve public purposes to encourage the production and free distribution of certain information goods even if individuals are unwilling to pay the costs of production. Some of the public information goods that community informationists may be involved in creating include cultural heritage materials, software, and documentation of best practices for non-profit organizations.

Second, many of the solutions to problems of underproduction of public goods and overconsumption of common pool resources involve organizing information flows. By reducing certain production and transaction costs or making people’s contributions more visible, people may be induced to produce more public goods. Similarly, by making people’s consumption of common pool resources more visible, accountability may be created and overconsumption may be reduced.

Readings
· Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. New York: Cambridge University Press 1990.
· Ledyard, John. “Public goods: A survey of experimental research” The handbook of experimental economics. Eds. J. H. Kagel & A. Roth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1995. (pp. 111-194).

Social Capital
Social capital is one important kind of public good. Social capital is an umbrella term that refers to all kinds of productive resources that inhere in social relations. A group of people that trusts each other can accomplish more than one that does not. Similarly, a shared identity, a common vocabulary, norms of reciprocity, or merely dense networks of personal connections can be productive resources. Typically, social capital builds in communities. For individuals, participation in communities leads to social ties, learning of norms, and a sense of belonging. For the community as a whole, successful collective action both depends on pre-existing social capital and creates more of it. Because social capitalsocial capital for the future. An awareness of the power of social capital and how it develops is important to anyone who will be doing community or public interest work. is a by-product of other activity, and because it is a public good, there is a natural tendency to underproduce it: it is often tempting to “get the job done efficiently” rather than getting it done in a slower way that involves more people and creates more

Robert Putnam, in his book “Bowling Alone”, traced a decline in various measures of social capital over the past four decades in the United States, including trust in people and institutions and participation in community life. He showed that these measures are correlated with important social outcomes including health, education, and public safety. Information and communication technologies have the capacity to support or erode old ways of building and maintaining social capital.

Readings
· Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2000. (chapters 1, 16, and 21)
· “Better Together”, the report of the Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America. (www.bettertogether.org).
· Resnick, Paul. “Beyond Bowling Together: SocioTechnical Capital” HCI in the New Millenium, Ed. John M. Carroll. Addison-Wesley. 2002. (pp. 247-272). (http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/stk/index.html)

Inequality, Diversity, Identity and Power
Severe inequality in society harms everyone, even those who are privileged, either because of moral and spiritual effects, or because of the need for increased expenditures on security measures such as locks, security guards and prisons. Thus, it seems to be in the public interest to reduce inequalities. When one digs a little deeper into this argument, however, it turns out that there are many notions of inequality, beginning with the distinction between unequal opportunities and unequal outcomes and going on from there.

The “digital divide” is a term that has been used to refer to inequalities in ability to make effective use of those technologies. Increasingly, access to economic, political, and social rewards in society depend on technology access and skills. Thus, the digital divide is indeed a problem of public concern. in access to information and communication technologies, and sometimes to efforts to bridge the digital divide often involve professionals or other privileged members of society working in communities where people are predominantly of a different race or class. Complex phenomena of identity and power play out in these relationships, and it is valuable for professionals to have some tools for reflecting on their roles.

Readings
· Stone, Deborah. Policy Paradox and Political Reason, Harper Collins Publisher. 1996. (pp. 30-48, handout).
· Delpit, Lisa, "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children," Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race, and Gender in United States Schools, Ed. Lois Weis and Michelle Fine. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993.
· Senyak, Josh, “Thinking About Community Technology and the Digital Divide: Why computer access is an important topic”. (http://www.techsoup.org/articlepage.cfm?topicid=12&articleid=164), (archived at http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/cic/readings/SenyakFongDigDiv.htm)
· Besser, Howard, “The Next Digital Divides” (http://www.tcla.gseis.ucla.edu/divide/politics/besser.html), (archived at http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/cic/readings/BesserDigDiv.htm)
· Minow, Martha. Not Only for Myself: Identity Politics and the Law. The New Press. 1997. (pp. 9-58)

Citizenship and Democracy
‘Citizens should govern themselves’ is the lofty ideal of democracy. Here, the term ‘citizen’ refers not to the people carrying passports of a particular country but more broadly to anyone exercising their proper role in self-governance. But there are many conceptions of the proper roles of citizens. In one view, the ideal role of citizens is to choose privately, by voting, among representatives or directly among policy alternatives placed on a ballot. In another, the ideal role of citizens is to deliberate publicly about policy alternatives. A third conception places citizens in production roles, especially producing public goods. A fourth conception values voluntary membership in associations that can make moral claims on members but have limited means of enforcing those claims.

All but the first of these conceptions of democracy allows for a transformative effect of participation in public life. People do more than form useful connections and create resources that others can use. They actually grow and cause others to grow: they change their minds about their positions on issues and even about their underlying values, and people develop allegiances to other individuals and groups.

Readings
· Walzer, M. “The Idea of Civil Society: A Path to Social Reconstruction” Community Works: The Revival of Civil Society in America. Ed. E. J. Dionne. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. 1998. (pp. 123-143).
· Boyte, H. C. and N. N. Kari. Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1996. (pp.1-32,164-178).
· Resnick, Paul. “A Preliminary Classification Scheme for Public Information Work”. 1999. (http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/civicextension/PublicInformationWorkClassification.doc) (Inspired by p. 164-178 of Boyte and Kari).

The Non-Profit Sector and Philanthropy
The non-profit sector is sometimes called the independent, voluntary, civil society or third sector (after the business and government sectors). It creates an arena for privately chosen action that claims to be for the common good. In some countries it is stronger than others, either for cultural reasons or because of public policies that either encourage or repress the sector. For example, in the United States, tax laws reduce the cost of operating an organization if it is incorporated as “not-for-profit” and those organizations that qualify as “charitable” can receive donations that donors can write off as tax deductions. Tax laws have also encouraged the formation of philanthropic foundations in the U.S. Due to shifting cultural norms and public policies, this sector faces continual pressures to evolve, and it is useful for community informationists to understand both the history and the current trends.

Readings
· Light, Paul. Making Nonprofits Work: A Report on the Tides of Nonprofit Management Reform. Washington, D.C.: The Aspen Institute, Brookings Institution Press, 2000. (full online text available at http://brookings.nap.edu/books/0815752458/html/index.html).
· Dobkin Hall, Peter. “Philanthropy, the Welfare State, and the Transformation of American Public and Private Institutions, 1945-2000”. Hauser Center Working Paper No. 5. (November 2000). (http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/cic/readings/DobkinHall.pdf)