Vice versa, many researchers and practitioners who are mainly interested in human-centered social constructs choose to ignore the to them often alienating world of technical systems design.

subtle knowledge constructs, modeling languages, elicitation, and validation processes

human-centered aspects that predominate in community informatics, like ethics, legitimacy, empowerment, and socio-technical design

Creating a community network ontology is therefore about much more than just knowledge representation. It also requires us to think about how this conceptual knowledge model affects real-world knowledge creation and application processes, in our case concerning participatory community network mapping. Its participatory nature means that we need to think hard about how to explicitly involve the community in the construction, evolution, and use of the ontology.

Ontologies are inseparable from the communities in which they are being created and used [25].

One complicating issue when trying to make sense across multiple communities is that not only do different communities have different cultures and practices, but also different epistemologies: different languages to describe their community and the soci(et)al context it operates in, with often different meanings attached to the terminologies used.

an ongoing, complex process of aligning resources, practices, and initiatives of multiple communities [20].

how to make sense across their boundaries in order to explore and expand their common ground? How can they do so to scale up their collaboration for collective impact?

As we saw, communities have traditionally been defined as striving towards the mutual benefit of their own members.

When opening up the definition of community in terms of community networks, with their broader, overlapping contexts, what is that mutual benefit? Of course, the communities making up the network focus on their own purposes, interests, and needs first. Still, through their intersecting socio-technical contexts, those purposes, interests, and needs partially connect the communities. This means that larger, overarching, common good constructs may become focal points of interest around which inter-communal joint purposes, interests, and needs can emerge, be more explicitly defined, linked more closely, and strengthened.

socio-technical

Still, what does it mean to become such a federation? What does it mean to connect communities into federated networks that can achieve impact on wicked problems? Graham sees the distributed governance structures and processes of community networks as scaling fractally, society being a fractal composite of communities. Communities, in his view, are complex adaptive systems, adjusting situational individual responses to emergent experiences, such that the system stays in balance with the context that defines it.

federation of locals

scaling fractally

relational epistemology

community norms, values, goals, and ethics

Such scaled-up communication and collaboration processes would also require meta-design principles to collaboratively construct the required design rationale, media and environments [23].

time-centric, topic-centric, question-centric, debate-centric, and argument centric deliberation technologies

Etzioni astutely observed that all communities have a serious defect: they exclude. To prevent communities from over-excluding, they should be able to maintain some limitations on membership, yet at the same time greatly restrict the criteria that communities may use to enforce such exclusivity. He therefore proposed the idea of “megalogues”: society-wide dialogues that link many community dialogues into one, often nation-wide conversation [7].

Such boundary objects play a brokering role involving translation, coordination, and alignment among the perspectives of different communities coming together in a kind of meta-community [26], which is the case in our fractalized community networks.

boundary objects

The CommunitySensor community network ontology can be positioned somewhere in the middle of this spectrum: community network representatives are totally free to come up with their own terms for element and connection types in their own ontologies. However, these terms are organized in a deep structure with community-specific element and connection types being classified by higher-order element and connection type (sub)categories described in the CommunitySensor community network conceptual model.

This is in line with systems practice, which defines purpose in terms of longer term and more abstract aspirational states—“guiding stars”—and shorter term, more concrete desired outcomes—“near stars” (https://docs.kumu.io/content/Workbook-012617.pdf). We have come across two main sub-categories of purpose elements: ‘Themes’ and ‘Topics’ (guiding stars) and ‘Goals’ and ‘Plans’ (near stars).

“networked societies” rather than “information societies”

online deliberation, sensemaking, argumentation and discussion-mapping, community ideation and idea management systems, collective decision making, group memory, participatory sensor networks, early warning systems, collective awareness, and crowdsourcing

Community informatics (CI) is the application of information and communications technology (ICT) to enable and empower community processes [11].

Communities are groups of people sharing social ties and interactions for mutual benefit—which can be a shared purpose, interest, or need—in a common space [8,9,10].

This line of thinking has been solidified in the Community Informatics Declaration, which states that a just and equitable Internet provides recognition that the local is a fundamental building block of all information and communications and the “global” is a “federation of locals” [14]

CI4CG

CI

ICT