As both an academic (and research) discipline and a community (and policy) practice, Community Informatics links a variety of communities and many with a widely varying degree of resources and opportunities.
As a research and academic (teaching) discipline CI draws extensively from the creativity and generosity of communities in sharing their experiences and knowledge as a basis for undertaking research and for providing learners with the opportunity to gain directly from the knowledge and experience of those working directly in and with communities and ICTs.
The relationship is however, often or most generally not an equal one. University teachers and researchers have access to income levels, research supports and infrastructures which are well beyond those available to those working in and with communities. Communities of course, gain from having access to the results of research, being able to draw on the skills of academics and senior students, particularly graduate students who are often able to bridge communities into technologies and resource environments which would otherwise be denied to them. However, their participation and contribution to CI research efforts often represent a considerable drain on already over-strained resources to the point where a number of communities have basically said that they no longer wish to cooperate with outside researchers.
The difficulty also is that research resources and particularly research funding generally is restricted to direct use by researchers (senior or junior) and cannot be used for example, to pay for time on the part of community members who may be participating as “partners” alongside paid researchers or academics who are conducting research as part of their normal academic responsibilities (and compensation schemes). These are significant challenges both for communities and for researchers who with the best of intentions may end up once the research is completed leaving little behind and rendering the communities little better or even worse off than previously or in other instances failing to even acknowledge or contribute to the local communities in ways which are available to them.
Perhaps the worst circumstance is when researchers build up expectations within communities as part of their research efforts and then for whatever reason (often because the funding runs out or because personal research priorities/interests change); and the communities and particularly those most identified with the projects are left high and dry with expectations and often even personal responsibilities within the communities which they have no means of satisfying. This kind of situation can be extremely disruptive and even damaging to communities since they involve the reputations and standing of individuals within their communities.
Since many of those undertaking research within communities are graduate students who may have little experience in these areas, it is incumbent on more senior researchers to be aware of these possibilities and of their ethical responsibilities to their community counterparts and partners including to ensure that they are fully aware of the limitations of the research, that wherever possible they are appropriately compensated (in means meaningful within the community and not simply through, for example academic “acknowledgment”) for their participation and overall that these senior researchers recognize the asymmetry in their relationship with communities and make adjustments to their behaviours accordingly.
Addendum: 13.3.2011 I should have included a pointer to the extremely valuable and comprehensive presentation of ethical issues for CI researchers in Averweg, U. and O’Donnell, S. (2007) “Code of Ethics for Community Informatics Researchers” Special Issue: Community Informatics and System Design, Journal of Community Informatics, Vol 3 No 1
Anil Kumar
March 11, 2011
There is much greater challenge in multiethnic and religious communities in terms of collecting and collating information in the public/community domain. Linguistic issues are another. There are so many interpretations available even for simple information. Researchers have to be extremely cautious on this aspect to avoid information converted to misinformation or false information. It can create a lot of confusion and may even threaten further knowledge intervention at the community level.
Michael Gurstein
March 13, 2011
Excellent point Anil. I think some of these issues are covered in Averweg, U. and O’Donnell, S. (2007) “Code of Ethics for Community Informatics Researchers” Special Issue: Community Informatics and System Design, Journal of Community Informatics, Vol 3 No 1 http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/441/3
Pamela McLean
March 12, 2011
Thank you Mike for saying this.
The dreaded hit-and-run researcher syndrome. Exactly so.
Ref “The relationship is however, often or most generally not an equal one.” Perhaps one day we will get a chance to work together to show how things could be if the basis for research was genuine participation, equality and collaboration – true win-win.
Dadamac would certainly be more than willing to help – see Dadamac – the Internet-enabled alternative to top-down development http://dadamac.posterous.com/dadamac-the-internet-enabled-alternative-to-t
Maybe an interesting first step (both academic and practical) would be to explore the stumbling blocks to doing such a piece of genuinely collaborative research.
I could get on my soap box about this – but probably best for now that I simply express my appreciation to you, and encourage you to continue the good work.
Marsha Woodbury
March 12, 2011
The article was a bit too general for me. I would have found examples useful–I am not in this field, so everything seemed vague. Maybe you might have used a village or club or whatever you are referring to to describe the problem a bit more specifically.
Michael Gurstein
March 13, 2011
Good point Marsha… Perhaps other of the readers of this blogpost might chime in with some specific examples… Needless to say, specific examples are often quite sensitive to those involved or perhaps you could take a look at my earlier blogpost on the app for water in Kibera (the Kenyan informal community) and the comments on it http://wp.me/pJQl5-5P.
practicalradical
March 13, 2011
Thanks for this post. Funny enough, as a community activist/NGO type originally, this is exactly why I went into academia – to try and stop or at least raise awareness in the research community about the (blind? willful?) practices that go on. I have seen too many of our partners, many of whom we courted to become involved in research projects, get burned for exactly the reasons you listed – well financed researchers, noble yet time limited agendas, leaving partners high and dry, etc.
The context which I have seen this in is in regards to those who profess to use participatory action research, or participatory research, or whatever mix of the terms people choose to use. Though again, the goals are noble, there is little analysis of the power imbalances, nor attempt to address them. There is often an assumption of equality between the partners; I believe partnerships should be started with an assumption of equity, where there is a recognition that all is not equal, and that equality, though a goal, must not be assumed.
Anyways, great post. It would be great to discuss these issues more in this forum.
Doug
ps. I will be re-posting this to my blog as well – http://365tomythesis.com/ – where i have discussed this topic in more detail.
Pamela McLean
March 13, 2011
Hi Doug
Good to meet you. I checked your blog and am very interested to know of your connection with East Africa. It seems we may have some overlapping interests.
Ref – “The context which I have seen this in is in regards to those who profess to use participatory action research, or participatory research, or whatever mix of the terms people choose to use…. little analysis of the power imbalances, nor attempt to address them.”
When I first hear those terms I thought the academics using them meant genuinely equal participation. I subsequently came to believe it was more likely to be about as participative as inviting a child to arrange the candles on his/her birthday cake – without asking what kind of birthday cake (sh)he wants – or checking if (s)he wants a birthday cake – or even a birthday party – in the first place.
Yes please – let’s have some discussion on this.
Garth Graham
March 14, 2011
If you changed the title to, “The Ethical Responsibility of Researchers in Community-based Social Science,” would it change the content of this statement? There doesn’t seem to be anything in it that’s particular to the qualifier of community informatics? But I suspect that unpacking the concept of community informatics renders the separation of academic research as “discipline” and community as a “practice” unsustainable, and therefore alters the nature of ethical relationship.
For example, I’d note that the definition of community inherent in community informatics is, or ought to be, different from a pre-Internet definition where the individual is somehow absorbed or taken up (Transubstantiated) into a larger whole. As complex adaptive systems, communities cannot be built. They cannot be other-defined by postulated absolutes that are not internal to their self-organization. Rather they emerge and evolve. And, in the face of attempted external intervention, they learn and evolve more rapidly, or they die.
A researcher attempting to narrate the story of change in a complex adaptive system cannot assume a separation of themselves from the system they are learning their way into. Either they are in community or they are not. Any level of participation involves them in the community’s interdependences in some manner. Their presence changes community and community changes them. Any attempt to sustain an external position as objective removes them from the possibility of learning and evolving in dynamic relationship. The more objective they render themselves the less capacity they have to tell the story they intend to tell.
Only connect. The implications of the “subject-centered perspective” mentioned in Averweg and O’Donnell goes farther than they anticipated …because the name for the ethical responsibility of someone who is a member of a complex adaptive system is human experience.
Leigh Blackall
March 14, 2011
An excellent articulation of the problem. As was Ivan Illich’s speech, To Hell With Good Intentions
Leigh Blackall
March 14, 2011
Added your post to the links and resources section of an open space meeting we’re having here in Canberra, on the questions around how an institution can engage constructively with community initiatives.
Peter Day
March 18, 2011
Hi Mike
Hope all is well. Thought you might like to know that I’ve added an RSS feed into the community media/project student learning spaces I run here in Brighton using Plone
Best
Peter
Michael Gurstein
March 18, 2011
Tks Peter, I’ll look forward to getting comments and feedback from the students (and you :))
Mike
Garth Graham
March 20, 2011
Further to my comment, March 14th, on how the definition of community affects the possibility of separation inherent in a statement of researchers’ ethical responsibility, and also to Leigh Blackall’s reference, March 14th, to Ivan Illich’s speech, To Hell With Good Intentions …
By coincidence, I happen to be reading James Clifford’s critiques of changing practices in ethnography. And in James Clifford., “Spatial practices: fieldwork, travel and the disciplining of anthropology,” a chapter in: Routes: travel and translation in the late twentieth century, Harvard University Press, 1997, p59, I encountered the following quote:
“There are no natural or intrinsic disciplines. All knowledge is interdisciplinary. Thus, disciplines define and redefine themselves interactively and competitively. They do this by inventing traditions and cannons, by consecrating methodological norms and research practices, by appropriating, translating, silencing and holding at bay adjacent perspectives. Active processes of disciplining operate at various levels, defining “hot” and “cold” domains of the disciplinary culture, certain areas that change rapidly and others that are relatively invariant. They articulate, in tactically shifting ways, the solid core and negotiable edge of a recognizable domain of knowledge and research practice. Institutionalization channels and slows but cannot stop these processes of redefinition, except at peril of sclerosis.”
Michael Gurstein
March 21, 2011
Interesting quote and comment Garth. I don’t disagree with the quote at all but I think that there is a further fundamental distinction to be drawn between a “discipline” (e.g. Sociology) and a “practice” (e.g. Nursing, Law). I see CI as rather more of a “practice” than a “discipline “(in practice) but for practical purposes operating (being forced to operate) in certain contexts (certain universities, research funders etc.) rather as a form of “discipline”.