Full Circle Associates

Via Howard on Smart Mobs - Ars Electronica: Digital Communities: Award Winners. Wikipedia and The World Starts With Me are the winners! Bravo!

Digital Communities are about emergent collective action, citizen empowerment, social as well as economic entrepreneurship, the ingenuity of the users of technology and their power to actively shape their media, the future evolution of new tools and social forms, the improvement of culture and alleviation of suffering, the humanization of technology, openness and inclusiveness, and the sheer fun of making things together. Digital Communities can save lives, bridge differences and the Digital Divide, multiply knowledge, enable markets, revitalize democracy and provoke civic engagement ­ but only if people seize the power that technology provides and wield it thoughtfully.

Although sociologists Barry Wellman and Keith Hampton provide a more formal definition of "community" as "networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging and social identity," we further define "community" for the purpose of this competition as "a web of relationships, sustained over time, among people who care about each other," and we define "digital community" as "a web of relationships that is enabled, enhanced, or extended by digital tools."

Wikipedia and The World Starts With Me, the two winners of the first Golden Nicas awarded for the new Digital Communities category, exemplify the complementary aspects of virtual discourse and face-to-face action implied by the name of the category. The "digital" part of the definition does not imply that technology alone can create community — only people can form social groups, although alphabets and Internets can enable those people to act in ways that weren't possible before. And the "community" part can include many different kinds of groups who have fun, organize political or civic action, create art, engage in commerce, provide peer support in medical or family crises, learn and teach, start businesses, and fall in love.

We hope that the two winning examples, one existing almost wholly in cyberspace with the aim of creating public knowledge, the other one using digital media in Uganda for serious health education in the physical realm, establish an example of how broad the term "digital community" can be. Wikipedians created something that would not be possible without Internet-based communications, and The World Starts With Me uses digital media to improve a vital task in the face-to-face world that can be done without sophisticated technology but might be done more effectively with appropriate digital tools.