The Journal of Community Informatics

Technology Transfer as a Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction Among the Coastal Cities of Asia-Pacific

Farhan Latif — 2022-03-31

Technology-driven solutions that could identify and address the interrelated complexities of climate change and disasters provide coastal cities with an opportunity to achieve and safeguard sustainable development. However, depending on the technology cooperation approach between the technology haves and not haves, the growing use of global technologies for local disaster risk reduction (DRR) could exacerbate multifaceted socio-economic disparities. This paper examines Jakarta's technology-driven disaster risk reduction efforts to underscore the need to distinguish between technology transfer and technology-driven development through global assistance. Avoiding potential mismatch between the necessary actions to improve local disaster resilience and the ambitious technology-driven development projects in Jakarta requires effectively interlinking the concepts of DRR and technological possibilities.

The Digital Equity Leadership Lab (DELL)

Colin Rhinesmith — 2022-03-31

This paper presents the Digital Equity Leadership Lab in Baltimore, Maryland as a case study of community leadership development to promote digital equity and justice. While several studies of community leadership development exist, few are focused on its role in promoting digital equity and justice. This case study attempts to address this gap in the scholarly literature through the following research question: How might DELL serve as a community-based leadership training model to develop the next wave of digital equity leaders? Through our analysis of interviews with community leaders, outside experts, and community foundation staff, we discovered the following three main findings: (1) bringing national policymakers and advocates together with community leaders is powerful and transformative; (2) digital inequality is a social, not a technological problem; and (3) community leaders need access to a shared platform and to each other to create change. These findings suggest that community leaders can benefit from seeing their work within a digital equity ecosystems framework, which calls attention to the importance the interactions that exist among individuals, populations, communities, and their broader sociotechnical environments that all shape the work to promote more equitable access to technology and social and racial justice. This case study report concludes with recommendations for community leaders, including community foundations, working to uncover systemic discrimination shaping digital inequality today to advance digital equity and justice.

Lessons Learned: The Multifaceted Field of (Digital) Neighborhood Development

Madeleine Renyi — 2022-03-31

In a cross-national project, 14 neighborhoods from Germany, Austria and Switzerland were accompanied on their way to digitally supported neighborhood work. This paper discusses general requirements, choosing a suitable digital tool, the implementation process as well as the challenges faced by the various stakeholders. The following factors have been found to play a major role in sustainable neighborhood work: good fit with overall development strategy, interplay between online neighborhood work and physical interactions, strong existing neighborhood management structures, strategic planning of digitalization activities, start-up funding for innovation activities, and above all, the presence of a committed person or team as well as interesting content to attract users. Depending on the neighborhood, self-managed and individualistic solutions are preferred to generic and/or commercial solutions. There is no ‘fit-for-all’ path to sustainable digitally supported neighborhoods.

The impact of the pandemic on communication between local government and citizens in a small village in Tuscany

Manuela Farinosi — 2022-03-31

The COVID-19 pandemic has fostered the increasing use of digitally-mediated communication, which has substituted a large part of the face-to-face encounters, work, political, social, and leisure activities, made impossible during the long period of lockdown. What did this entail in small villages, in respect to both citizens and local government, where face-to-face communication has been more resistant to digital mediation? This study aimed to explore the changes seen in institutional communication, and more generally, in the everyday life of citizens and their relationship with local administrators during the first lockdown in Italy. The context explored was the small-scale local community of Peccioli (Tuscany), a village where face-to face communication usually played a pivotal role in the interaction between local government and citizens. This small village represents a good point of observation to understand whether, in contexts such as this, there has been a change in the balance between different modes of communication similar to that seen in more urban environments.

More specifically, the paper presents the main findings emerging from a study exploring on the one hand, the attitudes and opinions of local administrators regarding institutional communication, and, on the other, the evaluations by citizens of the initiatives and the communication by local government and an analysis of their information behaviors. In the first case, a qualitative approach was used, based on 10 semi-structured interviews with local administrators; in the second case, a quantitative approach was adopted based on a survey conducted with a representative sample of Peccioli’s citizens. The main finding of the study revealed the crucial role of word of mouth, thus indicating that, contrary to what is generally believed, not all communication has become automatically digital during COVID-19.

Surfacing Human Service Organizations’ Data Use Practices: Toward a Critical Performance Measurement Framework

Alexander Fink — 2022-03-31

Community-level data systems, often called collective impact, increasingly define the landscape of human service data creation. Collective impact strategies develop shared performance measurement metrics across numerous human service organizations (HSOs) in a geographic region to move the needle on specific social problems. Such systems encourage funders to support the development of client tracking and data sharing infrastructure, meaning more HSOs have more information about any given client. However, while many HSOs are using more data than ever, questions remain: how is this data being read, understood, and utilized in HSOs? What differences can we discern in organizational operation and service provision?

This study builds on three years of participant observation as program evaluators in youth-serving organizations (a subtype of HSOs) around the world. It also included a national study of youth-serving organizations with a strong focus on data use. Finally, it includes interviews with program staff in youth-serving organizations and focus group data with young people. Situating this data between the literature on performance measurement in HSOs and critical data studies, we surface emerging tensions in the ways youth-serving organizations are creating and using data, drawing to the fore salient questions for those invested in supporting the just use of data and technology for our communities.

Constructing Household Routines with the Internet

Michel Mersereau — 2022-03-31

Despite an abundance of literature highlighting the necessity of achieving digital parity in low-income communities, a concrete characterization of the internet as essential household infrastructure remains elusive. The original research presented in this paper uses Social Systems Theory as a framework for investigating how social housing residents use at-home internet to support their household activities and domestic routines. The findings illustrate how internet use within the household can increase the efficiency and breadth of routine activities, and become normalized within the household as a result. The results also highlight the motivations for internet adoption in older adult households, as well as the implications for household labour and finances associated with internet service termination in family households. These findings are relevant for scholars interested in domestic internet use in elderly and family households, and for policymakers hoping to alleviate digital inequity in low-income communities.