[Air-L] FW: [ciresearchers] JoCI: Community Informatics and National ICT Policies/Programmes

michael gurstein gurstein at gmail.com
Sun Sep 30 13:16:02 PDT 2007


(This invitation may be of interest here as well...

MG

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

I've been noticing an interesting trend recently which is the increasing
inclusion of bottom up, often community or telecentre (and by inference
Community Informatics (CI)) based strategies and approaches being included
as part of national ICT policies.  

In many cases these are part of an overall inclusion of ICT for Development
(ICT4D) elements in the respective national policies while in other cases
they are linked to national commitments concerning
e-government/e-participation or local economic development or other special
thematic areas.

Among the countries where such developments seem to be occurring are Brazil,
India, Hungary, Jordan, New Zealand, Nepal, South Africa, and I'm sure there
are many many others.

In this context the Journal of Community Informatics http://ci-journal.net
has received interesting papers documenting CI developments in several of
these countries.  

My thought is that it would be very useful to have a wider collection of
this information compiled in one place as for example, in a special issue of
JoCI. 

So what I'm looking for at the moment are indications of interest in
preparing papers for publication in JoCI looking at the implementation of
Community Informatics or Community Informatics friendly national
policies/programmes or alternatively assessments of national
programs/policies from a CI perspective.  As well if there are specific
documents or reports that deal with these issues (hopefully not more than
one or two years old) perhaps it would be possible to link to these along
with commentaries from CI folks with experience in those countries. 

Also, critiques of national programmes/policies from a CI perspective would
be useful in this context (anyone in Australia, Canada or the US want to do
a paper talking about the retreat from community friendly national ICT
support programmes or anyone want to do CI based critiques of any of the top
down national ICT4D strategies that the "e-readiness movement" has spawned)?

I'm seeing that the papers could be formally academic ones (for peer
review) or structured as more practice oriented Notes from the Field or even
Points of View.  Since JoCI is an electronic journal there is no length or
number restriction, so the more the merrier. 

Let me know privately off list if this is of interest to you and feel free
to pass this along as well.

Best,

MG

Michael Gurstein, Ph.D.
Editor in Chief: Journal of Community Informatics
http://ci-journal.net   







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