Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

A global crisis in human development and prosperity exists. Its constituents include extreme poverty, illiteracy, gender imbalances, and armed conflict. One response has been the creation of the Millennium Development Goals. The recent United Nations World Summit on the Information Society affirmed support for linking the further development of the global information society to these goals. This paper argues that community informatics has a specific role to play in contributing to the realization of the Millennium Development goals and the improvement of human development in general.

The gap between those who understand the complexities of community requirements and the information technologists who can build the technologies represents a central focus of concern with Community Informatics (CI) research. This paper explores how different assumptions about the utility of information during this innovation process leads to poor communication between researchers and practitioners. Braman’s four-part hierarchy is a useful vehicle to investigate this as she seeks to include a range of actors such as policy makers, technologists and community members. A number of case study examples are explored to illustrate the value of Braman’s work for CI.

The Semantic Web mission is to enable a better organization of the Web content to improve the searching, navigation and integration of the available information. Although the Semantic Web is intended for machines, the process of creating and maintaining it is a social one: only people, for example, have necessary skills to create and maintain ontologies. While most existing ontologies are designed by single individuals or small groups of experts, actual ontology users are not involved in the development process. Such an individual approach in creating ontologies, lead to a weak community grounding. On the other hand, Social Software is becoming increasingly popular among web users, giving opportunities to exploit the potential of collaboration within a community. Tools like wikis and folksonomies allow users to easily create new content and share contributions over a social network. Social Software tools can go beyond their current limits, by exploiting the power provided by semantic technologies. Conversely, Semantic Web tools can benefit from the ability of Social Software in fostering collaboration among users, by lowering entry barriers. In this paper we propose a new approach for ontology evolution, considering collaborative tagging systems as an opportunity to complement classic approaches used in maintaining ontologies.

The recent success of social networking sites like mySpace, Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn, Ecademy and openBC indicates that extending one’s social network through a virtual medium is a popular proposition.  The social networking paradigm can be integrated with the knowledge management field, in which sharing knowledge with others is a central issue. This paper investigates how the social networking concept can be applied to support knowledge sharing between people. Together with common features in the architecture of social networking systems, a number of platform independent usage patterns are discussed that can support knowledge sharing between members. Finally, we present the open source KnoSoS system, which integrates the discussed architecture and usage patterns.

In this paper we give a brief overview of different metadata mechanisms (like ontologies and folksonomies) and how they relate to each other. We identify major strengths and weaknesses of these mechanisms. We claim that these mechanisms can be classified from restricted (e.g., ontology) to free (e.g., free text tagging). In our view, these mechanisms should not be used in isolation, but rather as complementary solutions, in a continuous process wherein the strong points of one increase the semantic depth of the other. We give an overview of early active research already going on in this direction and propose that methodologies to support this process be developed. We demonstrate a possible approach, in which we mix tagging, taxonomy and ontology.

The paper will present the results of an empirical research dealing with the concept of virtual individual networks. This is a special case of social computing, in what it focuses on the concept of networking but from the point of view of an individual who is engaged in social relations (i.e., networking, indeed). The emphasis is also more on the social needs of individuals while networking and not so much on the technology , although, of course, the identification of the individual social needs while networking will be used to define the requirements of the technology that might be used to this end.

Crisis response organizations can be supported effectively by means of agent communities where agents represent human actors or organizational roles. An agent community can be organized in several ways. The paper defines requirements on agent community architecture and coordination structure from the point of view of crisis response, and proposes an architectural solution. Particular attention is given to the distribution of information.

In this work we present a prototype system aimed at extracting contents from online communities discussions and publishing them through aggregated RSS feeds.

The major foreseeable impact of this project to the Community Informatics field will be helping people to manage the complexity intrinsic in dealing with the huge amount of dynamic information produced by communities, in particular, keeping up with the evolution of several simultaneous discussions/information sources.

A special version of the Dynamo system, which is described here, was deployed to endow RSS channels to the forum of the Milan Community Network (RCM).

Legitimacy, defined as fairness plus public good, is a proposed necessary online and physical community requirement. As Fukuyama notes, legitimate societies tend to prosper, while others ignore legitimacy at their peril. Online communities are social-technical systems (STS), built upon social requirements as well as technical ones like bandwidth. As technical problems are increasingly solved, social problems like spam rise in relevance. If software can do almost anything in cyberspace, there is still the challenge of what should it do? Guidelines are needed. We suggest that online communities could decide information rights as communities decide physical action rights, by a legitimacy analysis. This requires a framework to specify social rights in information terms. To bridge the social-technical gap, between what communities want and technology does, rights must be translated into information terms. Our framework has four elements: information actors (people, groups, agents), information objects (persona, containers, items, comments, mail, votes), information methods (create, delete, edit, view, move, display, transfer and delegate), and the information context. The conclusions apply to any social-technical community, and we apply the framework to the case of Wikipedia.

Requirements determination is arguably the most important phase of any system development project. This is due to the fact that the entire project is shaped according to the perceived or real requirements obtained in this phase. Although there is a wide body of literature on requirements engineering for IS development projects, there have been only a few attempts lately to theorize requirements determination for community informatics development. This article attempts to analyze the requirements determination efforts for a proposed community informatics project in Turkey by Activity Theory.