Community informatics as innovation in sociotechnical infrastructures

Abstract

One trajectory for community informatics is sociotechnical innovation: integrated innovations in the information and technology infrastructures of communities that enable innovation in communities themselves as social systems. We describe community informatics research emphasizing technology affordances of mobility and hyperlocality, aggregation and suprathresholding, information analytics, local digital currencies, reputation management systems, and crowd-based coordination. We present an envisionment scenario for a community innovation infrastructure incorporating and leveraging these technologies.