[Air-l] summary of responses about community-networks

[Mete Yildiz]

Hi,

I would like to thank everyone who responded to my inquiry about community
networks. I would like to share the summary of the responses with the
group so that future inquirers about the subject might use the archive as
AIR-L's collective memory.

Some of these e-mails were personal correspondance. I hope it is Ok to
share the information portion with the group. I edited the e-mails
slightly. I hope others will benefit from them as I did.

Cheers,

Mete

---------------------------------------------									
Mete Yildiz

Ph.D. Student, Public Affairs
School of Public and Environmental Affairs
Indiana University Bloomington

---------------------------------------------

Original Question:

All kinds of resources about (online) community networks.

Responses:

1. from Sergey Veselovsky

You may want to look at some surveys like the following and search "online
communities" at amazon.com. Probably it's worth to subscribe for a
discussion group of online community professionals at
http://www.e-mint.org.uk

- Barry Wellman et al,"Does the Internet Increase, Decrease or
 Supplement Social Capital? Social Networks,
 Participation and Community Commitment"
 Revised Version American Behavioral
 Scientist, 45, 3 (November 2001), pp. 437-56.
available via
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/index.html

- Pew Internet & American Life Project, "Online Communities: Networks that
nurture
long-distance relationships and local ties",
http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=47

- UCLA, "Surveying the Digital Future",
http://www.ccp.ucla.edu/pages/internet-report.asp

2. From Christina Courtright

There's Michael Gurstein's mailing list on community informatics:
write to
        Majordomo at vcn.bc.ca
and in the body write
        subscribe communityinformatics
Or you can visit the Web site that hosts the list
        http://www.vcn.bc.ca/groups/

3. From Valdis Krebs

IMHO, the most advanced thinking in community networking is done by June
Holley
and her organization: Appalachian Center for Economic Networks in Athens,
OH --
http://www.acenetworks.org

They have even mapped out the small business/resource networks in the SE
Ohio
area [> 200 organizations and individuals] and are keeping network metrics
as
the networks evolve and change.  They are concentrating on three specific
relationships/networks:
1) Collaboration -- who works with whom
2) Expertise -- who seeks out whom for expert advice and mentoring
3) Innovation -- who gets ideas from whom, and who do they, in turn, share
them
with

4. From Kim Gregson

virtual communities annotated bibliography:
http://php.indiana.edu/~kgregson/virtual_communities.html

community networking annotated bib:
http://php.indiana.edu/~kgregson/main_menu.html

bibliography and online links for a papr i did with another SLIS grad
student (Charlotte Ford) on evaluating community nets
http://php.indiana.edu/~kgregson/eval_bib.html

I think there's a new book or a new version of his classic, by Howard
Rheingold on community networks

5. From Nick Jankowski


See the following URL for information on a upcoming conference concerning,
in part, community networks: http://baserv.uci.kun.nl/~jankow/Euricom

6. From David Silver


Thorsten Lohbeck compiled a massive bibliography focusing on community
networks.  It can be found here:

  http://orgwis.gmd.de/%7emambrey/cn_bibliogr.html

7. From Tomoaki Watanabe

The definite book on the subject is (still) Doug Schler's "New Community
Networks: Wired for change" ACM Press, 1996. 

"Cyberdemocracy: Technology, cities, and civic networks" Eds. by
Rosa Tsagarousianou, Damian Tambini and Cathy Bryan. Routledge, 1998.
This book includes interesting chapters on e-government, participatory
democracy side of comnets.

Journal articles:
check
php.indiana.edu/~twatanab/citations.rtf

Some good conferences:
I would recommend to check out TPRC's archive section, too.
www.tprc.org -> archive
in 2001 and 2000, at least, they had some papers on community networks.
Maybe other years as well.

INET in the last year had a session on community networks, too. The papers
were interesting.

http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/inet/01/

Other famous conferences include DIAC (organized by Doug Shuler, the
authoer of the definite book I mentioned first), and Global Community
Networking (GCN). 

Web sites:

Blacksburg Electronic Village's web site has some usage analysis and other
reports. This and Canada's National Capital Net, Amsterdam's Digital City
are the most well-documented case studies. These are
published both online and on paper - some are only on paper. 

U Michigan's school of information has a good project called Community
Connector. 

Benton Foundation, a non-profit telecom-policy watchdog, has a page on
community networking, as well. Their home page is www.benton.org. They are
more interested in digital divide issue.