Social networks and ICT: Stenghtening Communities

SUSANA FINQUELIEVICH

Seattle

Simposio; A Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Symposium; 2000

University of Washington HUB

1.         Community computer science, strategy and it disciplines       In Argentina, 2000 is the year of the Internet explosion. Argentine users have risen to 1.086.000, and Internet connections have grown 58% in the last 13 months. The most evident areas are finances, commerce, and education, but that is not everything. An urgent need is emerging in all the sectors of the society, to find the means to use the opportunities that are present in Information Society Technologies (IST). IT has the potential to facilitate and enlarge the capacities of the individuals in the context of the institutions, companies, organizations and governments.       Community electronic networks, or civic networks supported by information and communication technologies (ICTs), are a new type of urban experience. They consist on on-line computer systems that enlarge the reach and the potentialities of the existent community organizations and they collaborate to the creation of new organizations. These systems are conceived to promote and to stimulate the communication, the cooperation, the participation and the exchange of information, experiences, goods and services between the citizens and the public and private actors of a community (ONGs, government institutions and private companies), while they open the local community to the communication in net with the global community.             ICTs are used to support to the community organizations in its efforts toward the social and economic development of its population-objective. This, in turn, gives place to community informatics (CI): a technological strategy that gathers the efforts in pro of a community economic and social development with the emergent opportunities in areas like the electronic trade, the telecentros and civic nets, the electronic democracy and the on-line public participation, besides communities centered around the self-help, the mental health, cultural, environmental activities and others. CI, in synthesis, consists on the study from the applications of TIC to the actions of the community organizations for the achievement of its social, economic, political or cultural goals (Gurstein, 1999). CI focuses on the needs and goals of communities and social groups, to design the technologies, instruments and applications that reinforce and promote answers to those necessities and objectives. It includes concerns at the same time for the technology TSI and for the users and the uses; it is so concerned by the processes of the community, the accessibility of the users to the TSI and the technology utility like for the analysis of the systems, the hardware and the software. CI considers the social system in which the technology is applied, as much as the technological system.