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@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.