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Reconfiguring Community Networks: The Case of PrairieKNOW

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Digital Cities (Digital Cities 1999)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1765))

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Abstract

The advent of the Web has renewed interest in the use of information and communication technologies to support not only virtual communities but also traditional communities. This paper observes that the majority of successful applications to date tend to use technologies to substitute for and/or enlarge existing community interactions and transactions. We argue that this trend, unfortunately, deepens the digital divide between those who have social and knowledge capital and those who don’t. In order to improve the conditions of low-income residents, there is a need to deploy tools that help to reconfigure rather than simply substitute or enlarge existing community interactions. This paper describes the methodology of asset mapping and the development and deployment of a tool called PrairieKNOW (Prairie Knowledge Networks On the Web) in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois’ Prairienet community network. While Champaign-Urbana was ranked by Newsweek magazine as one of the ten most wired cities in the world, it also has a substantial low-income population that has traditionally been under-represented in their use of Prairienet.

The conceptual development of IKNOW (Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web), of which PrairieKNOW is a derivative, was conducted as part of a research project funded by the National Science Foundation (ECS-9422730). PrairieKNOW’s development and integration with Prairienet is also supported through the Community Networking Initiative (CNI), funded by the Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program (TIIAP) in the U.S. Department of Commerce and by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. CNI is a joint effort of Prairienet, the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, and the Urban League of Champaign County. Karen Fletcher and Pamela Salela were especially valuable in developing the asset mapping concept for Prairienet. Prairienet’s pilot asset mapping database was implemented by Andrea Ingram, with assistance from Denise DeBrock The database was implemented in PrairieKNOW by Dan Zink, Dana Serb, and Peter Taylor.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Speech Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 244 Lincoln Hall 702 South Wright Street, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Noshir Contractor

  2. Graduate School of Library & Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 203 LIS Building 501 East Daniel Street, Champaign, IL, 61820, USA

    Ann Peterson Bishop

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  1. Noshir Contractor
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University, Yoshida-honmachi, Sakyo-ku, 606-8501, Kyoto, Japan

    Toru Ishida

  2. Netsage Corporation, 3001 19th Street, 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA, 94110, USA

    Katherine Isbister

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Contractor, N., Bishop, A.P. (2000). Reconfiguring Community Networks: The Case of PrairieKNOW. In: Ishida, T., Isbister, K. (eds) Digital Cities. Digital Cities 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1765. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46422-0_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46422-0_13

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67265-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46422-8

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