Publication

From First Monday v11n9. CIC seminar participants should be prepared to discuss this on Friday. This article presents findings from the 2006 Public Libraries and the Internet study and other research that demonstrate the impact of public Internet access in public libraries on the communities and individuals that the libraries serve.

Some excerpts from the review, which you can read in the article Planners vs. Searchers by Roger Bate on Tech Central station's "TCS Daily"

The White Man's Burden is a rare book. Its author, William Easterly distills all of his considerable knowledge and experience about foreign aid into it, and never pulls punches in a subject noted for star-studded platitudes and uncritical thinking....

I came across this literature review of community informatics research and studies. It's a 74 pp overview of work to date summarizing both interviews and field work in the area. See http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/findings/socialpolicy/584.asp

June Holley writes this about the economic development work that she and Valdis Krebs have been doing in Ohio. For more background on their methods, see the paper at http://www.orgnet.com/BuildingNetworks.pdf

For the last 20 years, I helped co-create economic networks (see www.acenetworks.org) in Appalachian Ohio, an area with deep and chronic poverty and amazingly little business activity. Since 1982, I was also reading research on transformation in complex systems and trying to apply what I was learning.

What we found was the critical factor leading to transformation--as opposed to viral spreading of ideas--was collaborative projects--or rather a densely woven, ever changing ecosystem of people figuring out what they and their community needed and finding others to join them in doing something about that.