Ann Peterson Bishop (abishop@uiuc.edu)

GSLIS, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

CITES Brown Bag Series, March 30, 2005

Acknowledgements: NSF, IMLS

Making Softwareas Community Inquiry:

iLabs @ 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 notmerely 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 2http://inquiry.uiuc.edu/ilabs

Version 3http://ilabs.inquiry.uiuc.edu

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. 2003

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 BoricuaCommunity Library Project

Puerto Rican Cultural Center

http://www.prcc-chgo.org

PBCL Project

http://ilabs.inquiry.uiuc.edu/ilab/pbcl

Ethnography of the University

Cross Campus initiative

http://www.eotu.uiuc.edu/http://inquiry.uiuc.edu/cil/index.php?category=12#EOTU

Customization and heavy use of “Inquiry Units”http://www.inquiry.uiuc.edu/bin/unit_update.cgi?command=select&xmlfile=u13991.xml

BeeSpace

BeeSpace bricks

http://ilabs.inquiry.uiuc.edu/ilab/beespacebricks

LIS 491:Literacy in the Information Age

Course website

http://www.inquiry.uiuc.edu/ilabs/out.php?cilid=822

Finnish iLabs

Active Citizenship groups

http://www.ilab.fi/

Sami Serola’s Collaborative Authoring Tools

http://ilabs.inquiry.uiuc.edu/ilab/cats/

Community Informatics Initiative

http://ilabs.inquiry.uiuc.edu/ilab/cii

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?