Ann Peterson Bishop GSLIS, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign CITES Brown Bag Series, March 30, 2005 Acknowledgements: NSF, IMLS Making Software as Community Inquiry: UIUC

Presentation Overview iLabs in context: Community Informatics Initiative at GSLIS CI: Study and practice of enabling communities with information and communications technologies (ICTs) Research, service-learning, public engagement In the creation of community information systems Through creating and nurturing collaborative inquiry/learning communities iLabs as community inquiry Participatory “design through use” strategy Across wide range of settings

CII: Hub for Community Informatics Enabling communities with ICTs SONIC

Community Inquiry  Collaborative activity around creating knowledge that is connected to people's values, history, and lived experiences  Open-ended, democratic, participatory engagement  Bringing theory and action together in an experimental and critical manner

How should we live together? “…the desire to make the entire social organism democratic, to extend democracy beyond its political expression.” --Jane Addams

How do we learn together? ”It is the democratic faith that [intelligence] is sufficiently general so that each individual has something to contribute, and the value of each contribution can be assessed only as it entered into the final pooled intelligence constituted by the contributions of all." --John Dewey

The CII Challenge How do communities work to address their problems in actual practice? What theory adequately accounts for the complexity and diversity of (distributed) collective practice? What tools are needed to mediate work on concrete tasks within communities? What is the most effective process for developing shared capacity in the form of knowledge, skills, & tools?

iLabs System Design Design through use aims to respond to human needs by democratic processes. Through creation of content, contributions to interactive elements, and incorporation into practice, users are not merely recipients of technology, but participate actively in its ongoing development. “Every individual must be consulted in such a way, actively not passively, that he himself becomes a part of the process of authority.” --John Dewey, Democracy & Education

Community Inquiry Labs (iLabs) Version 2 Version 3

 Suite of open source software applications freely available (BB, blog, document center, syllabus, etc.) for people to create own interactive websites  350 site visits a day; 50 iLab sessions a day  6 GB of data transfer a month  302 iLabs created since Nov  Serving groups ranging in size from an individual to 68 members

iLabs in Action Paseo Boricua Community Library Project Ethnography of the University BeeSpace LIS course Finnish iLabs Community Informatics Initiative

Paseo Boricua Community Library Project Puerto Rican Cultural Center PBCL Project

Ethnography of the University Cross Campus initiative TU Customization and heavy use of “Inquiry Units” t&xmlfile=u13991.xml

BeeSpace BeeSpace bricks

LIS 491: Literacy in the Information Age Course website

Finnish iLabs Active Citizenship groups Sami Serola’s Collaborative Authoring Tools

Community Informatics Initiative

Summary Participate! Use iLabs at will Open source and freely available Weekly meetings on Mondays, noon-2:00 in LIS 52, 501 E. Daniel (1:00-2:00 is open lab time) Discussion Design through use: Chaos and control Institutionalization: How incorporate into UIUC support structures?