I wrote a paper that I'm presenting at the AoIR conference in October that addresses specifically this topic. It's a working paper but I'd be happy to send it to you (or anyone else) who may be interested. The abstract of the paper, "Merging Theory with Practice: Toward an Evaluation Framework for Community Informatics" is below. "Community informatics is defined as a strategy or discipline that focuses on the use of information and communication technologies by territorial communities. This paper analyzes the emerging evaluation literature on community informatics to develop an understanding of the indicators used to gauge project impacts in community networks and community technology centers. This study finds that community informatics evaluations fall into five key areas: 1) enhancing strong democracy; 2) increasing social capital; 3) empowering individuals; 4) revitalizing sense of community; and 5) providing economic development oppotunities. This paper aims to develop an understanding or model of community informatics research that synthesizes diverse theoretical perspectives in two ways: first, by presenting a taxonomy of more than 30 evaluation studies based on common methodological and explanatory dimensions; and second, by drawing from this taxonomy to construct an evaluation framework of appropriate indicators and methods for community informatics evaluation research." If you're interested in a copy of the paper, please let me know and I'll forward it to you. Thanks- Dara At 12:01 PM -0400 7/18/01, air-l-request@aoir.org wrote:
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 11:12:36 -0500 To: air-l@aoir.org From: rglentz@mail.utexas.edu Subject: [Air-l] Information/research request Reply-To: air-l@aoir.org
Dear colleagues,
I'm looking for citations (with urls if available) of any/all meta evaluations done on community networks and community technology centers in the U.S. I'm aware of CTCnet's site and publications, NTIA's, etc. etc., but just curious if any of you have been able to find a source where these have been researched and cited in academic literature in total? Also, I am eager to know about the nuanced differences between CTCs and CNs - is there a working definition? Thank you!
RG Lentz UT Austin --
*********************************************************************** Dara V. O'Neil Research Associate II, Georgia Tech Research Institute; & Doctoral student, Information and Telecommunications Policy School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology; 151 Sixth St., 038 O'Keefe Building, Atlanta, GA 30332-0837 Tel: 404.894.8445, Fax: 404.894.2184, Email: dara.oneil@gtri.gatech.edu ***********************************************************************