...in one study in rural Africa it was being found that the costs of mobile communications were absorbing up to 54% of the total net income of certain farmers
I am delighted and honoured as editor of the Journal of Community Informatics to publish a special double issue on The Internet and Community Informatics in Brazil. The issue itself is a very strong one and I think it both represents and solidifies the very strong Community Informatics range of activities and traditions in Brazil while pointing to certain characteristics of Community Informatics in Brazil that are potentially of interest and importance for the rest of the world.
Almost since the very beginning of Telecentres/public access centres the nagging from funders – mostly governments but major NGO’s as well – has been directed towards making sure that these would somehow/sometime become financially self-sustaining i.e. “sustainable”.
The interest in Telecentres has ebbed and flowed within the broad technology stream. In Developed countries the various programs which supported the development of telecentres (called by various names in different jurisdictions) have been in considerable retreat in recent years as the initial need for access to low cost Internet access and computers has been to a very considerable extent overtaken by commercial Internet service providers and the continuing reduction in the cost of computer hardware and the availability of low cost or free software.
The suggestion that officials and others in Japan are looking for ideas and strategies had the effect of making me think a lot about the emergency post-earthquake post-tsunami intra-nuclear situation in Japan from the perspective of community based ICTs.
In this, I think that the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have access to skills and resources which were unavailable to earlier movements that is—the Internet, social networking, mobile telephony and perhaps most important, the experience and knowledge of how to use these in support of collective social ends.
It was perhaps inevitable, that the Ben Ali government’s investments to present a modern face to the outside world through the technical proficiency of its young people should come back to bite it through the use of that very proficiency as a significant means to challenge and ultimately undermine and remove the government which had chosen this as its priority.
In an important article in the current issue of the Journal of Community Informatics , Hungarian Sociologists Csótó Mihály and Szilárd Molnár examine the development of the “Information Society” in Hungary from the perspective of those who are being left behind in its development and the impact that this is having on innovation and development in Hungary as whole. Their analysis and observations have relevance far beyond Hungary or even Europe and link quite directly into a similarly important newspaper article on the recurring Digital Divide among Afro-Americans and Hispanics in the US, by Jeffrey Washington of Associated Press and reprinted in USA Today and the Washington Post among other places.
Issues of gender are at the very heart of community informatics just as they are at the very heart of community and communities. Gender-based differences in opportunities for access, differences in required uses, differences in strategies for appropriation are all central to an understanding of how ICT can enable communities.
Gurstein's Community Informatics 
November 16, 2013
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