Full Circle Associates

From early October's CCNR Conference...Prato wiki - The Big Questions. This is the emerging Community Informatics community.

The next question is what will they do with these questions?

Maybe I'll borrow a few and play with them here.

A couple of my favorites:

How has technology been used in different countries to empower communities to develop more strategic lobbying methods? Mary O'Flynn

How can productive collaborations best be managed at great distances? Graeme Johanson

What ways can we measure the health benefits of engaging community? We know people enjoy the involvement/experience, but can we measure this feeling quantitatively within a qualitative research project? Helen Klaebe
How do we get community to continue to use the technology - e.g. community portal after the facilitators have gone - to build on their own community? Helen Klaebe
Technology needs to be relevant to the community. Should build on what they have rather than what they lack.
How can refugee and immigrant communities use ICTs to stay connected to landscapes and experiences that have formed their cultural identities? Barbara Craig
How do we design for community rather than individual use of technologies? Supriya Singh
How do issues of privacy and security differ at the individual and community levels? Supriya Singh
How can we develop tools that really work and get used? Stefanie Kethers
What are the design considerations for helping a community to use new (Web 2.0) technologies? author: ?
How do you catch people's imagination or change people's mindset that they can use new technologies in their community? ?
What are useful community lifecycle models? What purposes can they serve in describing, analyzing and improving community operations? What are good, archetypical examples of successful community evolution processes? Aldo de Moor
What can digital storytelling achieve that written text cannot? Barbara Craig
How will social networking technology tools enable social interactions? Where are they being deployed today? Stephen Musgrave
Potential of Web 2.0 technologies for community development? Stories, examples, case studies Patricia Arnold
It's difficult to talk about failures, but it's really important Mark Gaved
How to facilitate and accommodate multiple perspectives including dissonant ones and enable them to emerge as multiple sustainable memories. Also question of sustainability of memory - because of ephemeral nature of some web sites. Kirsty Williamson
Ethics of community communication?

6 Comments:

Tony Karrer said...: Nancy - I've asked for the same kind of list in the world of eLearning (or learning) but have not seen that much interest. I wonder why that is? Do people find these lists of questions helpful? Especially if they are higher level like this?

I personally believe that the lack of questions is hurting us tremendously because we don't know what the real challenges are, but I'm also not sure if having a laundry list like this helps. Any thoughts?; 7:11 AM
Bev Trayner said...: Oh!

Better go sign the questions I wrote! You'll recognise them, because your influence is all over my formulation of them!

* What are the design considerations for helping a community to use new (Web 2.0) technologies?

* How do you catch people's imagination or change people's mindset that they can use new technologies in their community?; 2:04 PM
Bev Trayner said...: Tony .. those questions came at the beginning of a conference where we had to write our questions for the conference on pieces of paper and stick them on boards at the front.

I think the context for asking the questions might influence getting a list (or not).; 2:06 PM
Nancy White said...: Bev, I did suspect you had a hand in some of those questions! ;-)

Tony, a laundry list is overwhelming, for sure. But what I find limits me is taking the time to SLOW DOWN and actually consider the questions. I have come to the conclusion that my speed and multitasking is starting to take a toll in this very area.

So maybe we have to question our practices of living, at a fundamental level, before we can realistically expect that we'll thoughtfully ask and try to explore these sorts of questions.

Dunno.; 6:02 PM
Mark Gaved said...: Hi Nancy

thanks for picking up on the Prato 2006 "Big Questions". We're really keen for as many people as possible to contribute with their thoughts, musings, maybe even some answers :-)

If this sounds good, drop me a line, and I'll give you the editing password - Mark. m.b.gaved -.at.- open.ac.uk

Please pass the password round to all your friends, alas we've just found that putting up open wikis or the passwords online ends up with too much wikispam...; 12:59 PM
Tony Karrer said...: For some reason, coComment just notified me that there were other comments on this. Timely, I'm guessing.

In any case, I would be curious to hear the reaction of people who can directly relate to the subject matter of these questions to see if they are really helpful. Are they at a level of specificity that allows someone to contribute answers?

As Nancy knows, we've been trying a slightly different approach with "The Big Question" on LCB. It seems to have done pretty well to spark discussion, but I feel like there has to be better ways to do this across large domains and large audiences.; 2:16 PM