Methodological and Theoretical Frameworks for the Design of Community Information Systems

Abstract

Noting that communication technologies are built by human beings rather than constituting naturally occurring features of the environment, we argue that social researchers should become involved in the process of design and adopt an orientation toward inquiry based on the concept of phronesis. Phronesis focuses on questions of ethics and deliberation over values for the purpose of determining how to act in the future. We illustrate how such inquiry might take place in the context of designing a community information system. More specifically, we discuss two theoretical positions consistent with a phronetic approach that have guided our work and the way that they have effected changes in our understanding of purpose, users, system specifications, and our own service commitments and educational practices.

A clustering‐based semi‐automated technique to build cultural ontologies

“…These methods have demonstrated significant resonance when placed in contrast to systems that solely engage collaborative filtering agents or standard corpus-generated keywords (Srinivasan, 2005(Srinivasan, /2007. These "fluid" techniques, drawing from principles of participatory design (Gregory, 2003;Crabtree, 1998;Harrison and Zappen, 2004;Srinivasan and Shilton, 2006), engage communities to not just author content for localized ICTs but also serve as the information architects of their systems. These 'cultural ontology' findings continue to be meaningfully applied in ongoing efforts related to cultural tagging in digital museums (e.g.…”

Starter Ecologies

“…Although they can be tightly controlled-such as a closed content-management system that functions as an internal knowledge base for an organization-they can also be opened, becoming community sites to which a much broader array of users can contribute. Professional communicators have taken advantage of these capabilities, generating community sites with various scopes and missions (Grabill, 2003;Harrison & Zappen, 2003;Spinuzzi, 2007a;Spinuzzi, Bowie, Rogers, & Li, 2003;Zappen, Adali, & Harrison, 2006;Zappen, Harrison, & Watson, 2008). Instructors are using contentmanagement systems, not just for running Web sites but also for developing complex case simulations (Fisher, 2007).…”

The Library-Community Convergence Framework for Community Action: Libraries as Catalysts of Social Change

“…Similarly, in the Village Voice project, Srinivasan (2004) observed the possibility of the system to allow community members to present themselves cohesively to outside governmental and educational institutions. This approach toward the use of "fluid ontologies" (Srinivasan and Huang, 2005) presented a method of community engagement that allowed members to build their own locally and culturally-specific structure for an information system, thereby incorporating an evolving participatory process in the representation of the information they authored (Crabtree, past research that has tried to engage marginalized publics to participate in the process, and influence the design of systems and technologies which otherwise would have been largely impositional (Puri and Sahay, 2003;Harrison and Zappen, 2003;Kanungo, 2004). Such an approach towards supporting communicative action (Habermas, 1984) in the design of information services/initiatives, as articulated by Hirscheim and Klein (1994), values open communication between community members and researchers.…”