Overdue posting of October 17th Meeting Minutes

Lisa and I met for an hour and hour on Friday, October 18th to discuss a number of community informatics topics: 1) the seminar, 2) the student group, and 3) the specialization.

Seminar & Student Group

Some students have mentioned that they would like more time for discussion about the many speakers who come. There's not enough time to fit discussion into the seminar schedule, but one of the roles of the student group is to be an outlet for discussion. The student group needs to step up and take the initiative to organize these discussion sections. The happy hour event was well attended and we had some good discussion about the speakers. We need to make these discussion opportunities more regular.

We should follow-up on instructions for the SI-575 Tweme and then teach others how to use it.

Specialization & Student Group

What are skills that community informatics professionals need? How are these skills different from those of the other SI specializations? Is community informatics an affinity group or are there unique professional skills required? Lisa and I think it's more than an affinity group. There are professional skills we can offer. (We also acknowledge that we're both dual degree students so we're building additional skills in other departments.) Some of the soft and hard skills that we think we can and/or should be able to offer as CI students:

* Facilitating communication

* Knowledge management 

* Ethnographic research

* Innovation (social entrepreneurship?)

* Promoting and coordinating openness and transparency

Kathleen suggested a CIC alumni chat about what skills their coursework and CIC experience prepared them for their field, what skills/courses would have been useful, etc.

Specialization

Kathleen suggested SI 670: Information in Organizations as a good class for CI since knowledge management is a growing area in public and non-profit organizations. Lisa mentioned SI 508: Networks: Theory and Application since social networks are important in developing professional and funding partnerships. Kathleen would like to see a class or seminar devoted to ICT4D instead of an article here and there in various classes.