Doug SchulerDigital Cities and Digital Citizens
The Evergreen State College
2700 Evergreen Parkway NW
Olympia, WA 98505-0002
The Public Sphere Project
Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility
P.O. Box 717
Palo Alto, CA 94302
douglas@scn.org
Cities are providing the physical environment for an increasing number of the world's citizens. They are also becoming the locus for a variety of "virtual", networked digitally-based economic, political, and cultural activities. Digital cities represent a new manifestation of this phenomenon. Digital cities, like their physical analogies, geographical or "real" cities, are only so much infrastructure unless animated with human social presence. This paper focuses on this social presence, particularly the type of social presence typified by the idea of "citizen," for it is primarily through the work of this social entity that social problems get addressed and social "progress" is furthered. Several socio-technical innovations such as community networks are explored as are possible roles for the computer professional.
1. The Digital City
The world is becoming increasingly urbanized (or de-ruralized) and digitized. More people both absolutely and in relative terms live in cities than ever before; more than half of the world's population now, for the first time, live in cities. At the same time, digital communications are shrinking the globe, connecting people and institutions with terabytes of information every day. Thus the idea of a "digital city" naturally becomes significant.
A digital city has at least two plausible meanings: (1) a city that is being transformed or re-oriented through digital technology and (2) a digital representation or reflection of some aspects of an actual or imagined city. In the first case, that of the city becoming more digitally-oriented, the physical and non-physical attributes of the city itself are changing [1]. It is true that the physical nature of the city is undergoing change: miles of fiber optic cable snake under the city's streets and up into its dwellings and workplaces; vast server farms transfer massive amounts of information from computer to computer while voraciously consuming electricity; and spidery antennas service millions of cellular telephonic conversations and exchange information with satellites circling the earth. The more profound changes, however, are in the non-physical realm. The fields of media, telecommunications, finance, among others, are increasingly dominant in the new world and they rely on digital information and digital communication and they are generally city-centric.
In this essay we will look at the second meaning of "digital city." We will concentrate on digital representations and manifestations of cities. Instead, however, of focusing on the presentation of the city's superstructure (its buildings, streets, and topography) or on the services that can be found there (bus schedules, maps, and restaurant reviews) this essay will discuss the possible and actual roles of people in these virtual venues, particularly in their role of citizens, citizens of virtual cities as well as actual cities. Here the two seemingly distinct types of digital cities overlap and blur -- what happens in one realm affects the other; the types of technology, for example, conceived in the non-virtual digital city create a finite number of digital (virtual) cities from the infinite number of potential digital cities, the online interactions and conversations of digital citizens in turn will shape the tone and tenor of the emerging digital (geographical) city. This essay sets out to explore civic-oriented options for the new digital cities, electronic spaces that are connected in a real sense to actual cities. It is possible that we can create opportunity spaces that make it easier for the creativity and the concerns of people from all over the world to be made more prominent and vital.
The Internet is new, the web even newer, and the virtual migration of large numbers of non-technical and non-academic people into cyberspace newer still. What we are seeing in the new medium at this time may prove to be quite fleeting; many of the digital venues currently popular may ultimately be only transitional. The openness of the Internet protocols, and the fluidity of digital representation of information of all sorts are currently promoting experimentation in many areas, thus possibly setting the stage for a very fertile period of alternative communication and information socio-technical innovation. On the other hand, it is, of course, possible, that the period of development prior to standardization -- both in technical and social terms -- for the new medium is largely over and the various forms we're seeing now (search engines, electronic brochures, periodicals online, streaming audio, individual web pages, weblogging, etc.) may be the basic forms that we will live with for a long time to come.
As socio-technological innovation has progressed thus far, it appears that any organization, process, community, or interest, is, at least for the time being, fit grist for the new electronic mill. The idea of a city, of course, has not escaped this imperative. Hence "digital cities" of various forms, and for various reasons, have been established on the Internet. Thus far, these fall into a handful of categories which I label as commercial, governmental, community network, and representational. These categories are intended to illustrate the broad characteristics and most digital cities are probably hybrids that manifest features of more than one type. The Digital City (http://www.dds.nl) in Amsterdam, for example [2], started life as a "community network" and is now apparently in the process of becoming commercial. Also, particularly in the area of representational types there is currently a lot of effort (including much academic research [3] so this particular form may be more dynamic and likely to change over time.
The commercial digital city, as its name suggests, concentrates on commercial information and has the ultimate purpose of making money for its owners. These systems function largely as an information bank or "yellow pages" containing restaurant reviews, retail store hours, tourist destinations and other information of interest to consumers. Although there are a variety of small business ventures dedicated to representing a single city or town (http://www.glasgow-ky.com/ or http://www.weippe.com), many of the more prominent ventures employ a "chain store" approach. The basic model is intended to be replicable so that economies of scale can work in favor of profitability. These systems include Digitalcity.com, Citysearch and, until it was recently sold to citysearch, Microsoft's Sidewalk. Needless to say, local digital cities developed along these lines are not "locally owned and operated." The "chain store" model, interestingly enough has not proved to be particularly competitive. It is not clear that these "chain" digital cities have driven other efforts out of existance.
Governments, also, have some claims on cities and information about cities, and are making a great deal of relevant services available online. These generally contain static information about government functions, but some governments are beginning to develop new ways for citizens to obtain licenses, pay fees, file for permits, etc. A few are exploring new participatory venues for gathering citizen input. Many city government sites have links to non-governmental, though "establishment" sites, such as chambers of commerce or tourist bureaus. The two somewhat contradictory impulses, that of government as publisher of information and that of government as listener and facilitator of public conversations, are both in evidence, although the latter is quite rare. Also, as has been pointed out elsewhere [4], when governments focus more on electronic forms of information they may be inadvertently widening the "digital divide", people without access to those capabilities (the "information-poor") are likely to become even more isolated.
The third form of digital city is the "community network." Community networks are descendants of Free-Nets originally pioneered and championed by Tom Grundner at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The Cleveland Free-Net, the world's first Free-Net, was soon emulated by an estimated 100-200 other Free-Nets in providing the first community- and civic-oriented public access to the internet [4]. Community networks (like their predecessors) gathered a large number of information and communication resources related to their community and organized them in a consistent way for relatively easy "one-stop shopping." The early Free-Nets also promoted community-oriented discussion forums. Community networks, at least in the US, are generally organized as non-profit organizations. More will be said about this particular form later in this essay but, for now, it will suffice to say that community networks are still in existence in the developed world and are viewed by many as an important civic and community resource that should be increasingly supported in the developing world. Community networks are, in general, financially struggling, living off user donations and some government and foundation support. Thus far the search for financial "sustainability" has not yet yielded the reliable funding model that community network proponents are hoping to find.
The fourth type of digital city is "representational" in which some physical aspects of the geographical city are emulated in ways that preserve or carry over information more directly. The early Free-Nets through their use of the building metaphor ("schoolhouse" for educational information, "townhall" for government, etc.) suggested this as did Amsterdam's Digital City with its numerous Pleins (or squares in English; including environment, death, sports, books, tourism, social activism, government and administration, and others). These metaphors were employed for grouping information, however, not for linking the virtual space directly to actual physical aspects of the city they were representing. Toru Ishida in his Digital City Kyoto work [5] has developed "2 1/2-D" fly-through models of Kyoto while Risto Linturi has done similar work based on the city of Helsinki [6]. While technically proficient and compelling on many levels the diversity of possible citizen uses of the systems that take advantage of this fidelity to the physicality of the city has not been thoroughly explored either conceptually or empirically via software prototypes. One use of representational digital cities would be in helping people make civic decisions related to existing and proposed built structure (building a new museum or shopping mall, or tearing down a highway, for example). This use could focus on the consideration of various options through open-ended community deliberation aided by the digital representations. This idea could be used with static representations but could readily be extended to include dynamic simulations and interactions in the digital space. This is similar to the UrbanSim system Paul Waddell and his colleagues [7] have developed (under the GNU Open Public License) to facilitate urban transportation planning. This, of course, reminds us of the opportunities and limitations of the idea of connections between the (virtual) physicality of the city representations and the geographical city it represents. Communication, a critical capability within a city's systems, is generally not visible on a physical level. One such method of communication on a physical level in a geographical city is via billboards and some version of billboards could be adapted for digital city use.
A hybrid of all of these types is likely to evolve as work proceeds in all of these areas. Whether this new hybrid will be collaborative, multicultural, and multi-purposeful, as geographic cities are, is unknown. Perhaps the new digital city will simply be the union of all the digital services and web sites that correspond to a specific city. This open-ended view, however, doesn't seem to preserve the integrity of a "city." Instead it seems more like a random collection of web pages and networked applications with little except their shared referent in common. Questions of authenticity and ownership also come into the picture. There is only one physical "Seattle" yet there can be several "virtual Seattles" coexisting in the potentially infinite dimensions of cyberspace. Each one, however, must be associated in some way with the real one. Cyberspace can be dynamic, interactive, malleable, collective and collaborative, making the digital media much more easily manipulated than the bricks, mortar, and steel that go into the construction of actual cities. Thus a digital city, in theory, can be as lively, multicultural, and multi-purposed as the "real thing." But will this occur "naturally?"
2 Digital Citizens in the Digital City
The concept of a digital city is of recent vintage. Consequently it has an ambiguous and, possibly, transient meaning. A digital city, nevertheless, that has any right to the name must have certain characteristics. These characteristics must reflect those found in the "real" city, the non-virtual one. A "real" city is host to a wide range of people and activities -- public and private, commercial and non-profit, individual and collective -- and, therefore, must be a combination of at least the first three of the four forms discussed above. A digital city can't be, any more than a "real" city, devoted to single purpose or be under the guardianship of a single, all-powerful ruler, either individual or corporate. That there must be a role for "digital citizens" is probably the defining characteristic of a genuine digital city. If the citizen can not "enter" the city and then, once there, go from place to place freely, engaging with other citizens to influence policy and take part in governance, possibly, even establishing a residence or business there, then it is difficult to conceive it as a city, digital or otherwise, any more than a photograph of a house can be considered a house, or a map of a country to be a country.
2.1 New Opportunities
Although many observers have shown that digital networking has helped consolidate and extend the reach and influence of the institutions who presently wield power [8,9] few dispute the idea that the Internet and digital networking in general provide a number of provocative opportunities for those presently without power or voice, opportunities which may have a quite finite window. This section discusses some of the opportunities that digital cities may provide and some of the services and capabilities that digital citizens could use.
As discussed above, digital cities need to help promote digital citizenship. This is not recommended solely because it is the "right thing" to do. It is recommended because society relies on the creative collective intelligence of its citizens to develop appropriate ideas, machinations, and institutions for meeting individual and social needs and for addressing civic problems. Robert Putnam points out [10] that in the early Twentieth Century social entrepreneurs in America devised a great number of innovative institutions and organizations to help alleviate social problems then. Putnam believes that a similar period of crisis is now before us and renewed social entrepreneurism is required. Digital cities can be established to consciously promote social entrepreneurism. Although explicit policy and technological infrastructure is important, the most important precondition to this objective is the conscious acceptance of this objective. Accepting this objective means necessarily embracing an open-ended experimental phase where multiple and competing ideas are encouraged in the evolving digital world.
In the next section, the "community network" model, as exemplified by the Seattle community Network (SCN) is examined as a suitable platform for cultivating new types of digital citizenship. In the section following that, a number of other socio-technical ideas for realizing that goal (including non-commercial search engines, deliberation systems and open CSCW protocols) are discussed.
2.2 New Responsibilities
Who and why and how "responsibility" is assigned is, of course, an eternal question. It can't be answered here, nor, probably, will it ever be answered with definitude. We can, however, note that new circumstances lead to increased responsibilities at the same time they lead to increased opportunities. Why? Part of the answer comes, ironically, from the fact that we have more information available to us. It's impossible to help rectify a problem situation if you don't know it exists. Also, many would argue that knowledge of another person's plight is incentive enough to move us to action. But beyond just learning that a problem exists, the type of knowledge that we are now learning informs us greatly about the world's situation and the roles of various individuals, communities, organizations, interest groups, and nations.
For one thing, there is a growing recognition of the interconnectedness of life on earth. Part of this, of course, is the result of the growing influence of ecology and environmentalism which, after an extremely brief historical period, is now truly a worldwide phenomenon [8,11,12]. Now, thanks to humankind's swelling population and our ability (and seeming dedication) to seriously degrade our shared ecosystem and fight with one another, we are faced with enormous global problems.
Our social systems, too, have globalized: trade is globalized and globalizing, consumption in one area of the world (say, of beef in the US) can change the environment elsewhere (in, say, Costa Rica); financial systems, music and other cultural products circulate faster and faster, while tourism and migration for jobs or to escape war reach new unprecedented levels [13]. For these reasons and others, the links between "us" and "them" are entirely palpable although often indiscernible.
The unpleasant truth, at least for those who live in the U.S. or in other developed countries, is that in some cases, their problems are caused or exacerbated by our practices. The U.S., as is widely known has 5% of the world's population yet owns 32% of the world's cars. The average American uses 168 times more energy than a Bangladeshi The fact that many resources used "came with the territory" which was seized or purchased does little to counter the sad truth that the accelerated patterns of consumption are non-sustainable, cannot be emulated by other countries, and may help usher in catastrophes in the not-too-distant future. [14], for example, has presented clear evidence for the case that conflicts over renewable resources often result in wars and other major struggles.) Besides, as Thomas Jefferson made clear, "Trade between master and slave is despotism." Under desperate situations people may be forced to sell things they'd be unwilling to sell under more comfortable situations including, increasingly, their own body for purposes of prostitution in Thailand and many other countries. [15] In other cases, resources are sold by those with little right to them to those who are little concerned with the niceties of legitimacy. And, the "free market" imperative, in spite of litanies and homilies by its high (and low) priests is not necessarily a moral one: In nearly all the cases of major famines, the people who starved to death did so due to a shortage of money, not food. The food existed, the money necessary to purchase food, did not. It is also cold comfort that the people in other nations apparently aspire to a similarly unsustainable level of consumption and that individual Americans are not necessarily greedy and mean-spirited (many environmentally-friendly innovations and ideas, in fact, come from the U.S.). Predominant systemic forces in the world (epitomized by American capitalism) are contributing in many cases to the social and environmental ills confronting the planet. The fact that these forces affect not only others but also ourselves as well as all future generations seems to suggest a need for increased responsibility, no matter which particular version of responsibility a person might adopt.
2.3 New Challenges
By making it easier and less expensive to find and share information, new ICT systems are creating new opportunities for community and civic engagement. That these opportunities, however, may be alarmingly short-lived is suggested by other historic trends. The "media monopolies" that Ben Bagdikian has written about [16], although focused on pre-Internet communication and information systems, are rapidly integrating Internet-based systems into their electronic empires. Time-Warner now controls a vast amount of Internet content and traffic while commercial web sites, forbidden on the Internet less than a decade ago, now account for over 90% of all web content. Fighting at a public policy and education level for the conceptual and actual "space" on the Internet and other network systems for engaged and responsible digital cities is an important task.
At the same time, the apparently infinitely vast repository of information now available can lead us to assume that all the information civil society would need is or will be available. The increasing glut of commercially sponsored and oriented information unfortunately serves to diminish the relative amount of non-commercial information. This makes non-commercial information harder to find, while simultaneously helping to "brand" the new medium as a commercial one, without civic purpose. We know that knowledge creation through the gathering, describing, editing, and presenting of information requires time and effort and, of course, money. The late media critic Herbert Schiller in an insightful (but depressing) indictment of American information policy and practices [17] relates how ideological forces have helped purge an enormous amount of information from the public domain. Long-term rigorous collection of, say, health related data is likely to be very costly to create and maintain; for that reason, it's not a cost-effective or profitable endeavor for a commercial concern. National governments or coalitions of national governments are therefore the only entities who are capable organizationally and financially of managing such an enterprise -- but digital cities -- and networks of digital cities -- can promote the creation, archiving, and distribution of such information.
Information and communication are usually means to an end as opposed to ends in themselves. (Although supporting policy and institutionalization of public information and communication systems such as libraries, schools, open meetings and freedom of information, freedom of expression, etc., etc., are indispensable in a free society.) A danger, then, at least theoretically, exists that people will focus on information rather than on action based on information. If the discussion is entirely "virtual" or, indeed, if no genuine discussion actually occurs the impact will be minimal.
Digital cities need not be merely reflective of activities and attributes in geographical cities, insofar as they are "spaces" in their own right they can develop attributes independent of their own geographical referent. These attributes, for example, include virtual "lights" in virtual "buildings" to indicate presence of people in, say, a chat room associated with that building. On a deeper level, it will probably involve the governance of the digital city itself. This potential independence from their referent (the geographical city) has some problematical implications from the point of view of promoting citizenship and a democratic culture; namely that the enterprise would ultimately divorce itself entirely from the realm in which it was supposed to be intimately involved becoming, in effect, a digital city "game."
When the digital city strives to become as multifaceted as a geographical city, particularly in terms of conversational venues and opportunities for genuine engagement and involvement, several issues arise. Digital cities could unwittingly be widening the "digital divide," for example, if economic or other barriers keep people from citizenship in the digital city. Digital cities can, in general, manifest any of the characteristics, for good or ill, of geographical cities. Thus balancing "globalism" and "localism" is an issue that faces citizens in geographical and digital cities alike, as does the issue of who, why, what, and how the civic work is accomplished.
3 Socio-Technical Systems That Promote Citizenship
How can digital cities and related socio-technical innovations help in a transformation of our democracy? Certainly new algorithms, new architectures, faster processors, and more recently, more financial transactions on the web can not be expected on their own to help address deficiencies of democracy. With few exceptions these advances are not sufficiently linked to the realities of civic and community life to be of widespread benefit.
3.1 Community Networks
Community networks [4] offer a plausible technological and philosophical platform for this work. Developed and maintained by civic and community activists all over the world, community networks are intended to be a new type of public institution similar in spirit to the traditional public library, but built upon more recent modes of communication. These new modes are generally digital and, unlike the public library's focus on consuming, extend the idea of access to include producing. Moreover, like public libraries, community networks are non-commercial. Well before Hotmail offered free e-mail and Geocities offered free web page hosting, community networks were providing these services with little or no cost as a public service to anybody who requested them.
The Seattle Community Network (SCN) may be considered typical insofar as any community network can be labeled. SCN was launched in 1992 as a project of the Seattle chapter of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. SCN is an all-volunteer effort to develop and maintain a public network system that focuses on, but is not limited to, the Pacific Northwest region in Washington State. In the U. S., SCN's "Statement of Principles" (below) reflects the ideals its founded hope to promote. SCN has thirteen categories ("Activism," "Arts," "Civil," "Earth," "Education," "Health," "Marketplace," "Neighborhoods," "News," "People," "Recreation," "Sci-Tech," and "Spiritual") on its web site, each of which is maintained by a volunteer editor.
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Seattle Community Network was not conceived as a profit-making enterprise, a source of entertainment, or as a digital billboard for commercial messages. The original developers of the Seattle Community Network hoped to build a new arena for social discourse, an arena in which all citizens -- not just those drawing salaries from big corporations or the government -- can be active players in the continuing unfolding of the future. Providing a space for connecting people without power with those that may have too much is SCN's implicit goal.
3.2 Other Ideas
While a community network represents a plausible way in which community and civic use of ICT can be institutionalized as a coherent entity, the community network as a model doesn't appear to be the public access model for ICT as, say, the public library is said to provide the public access model for access to the printed word. Therefore the following suggestions for future services might not ultimately be hosted on community networks. Hopefully, however, they'll ultimately find expression in some form in tomorrow's digital cities.
There is large body of relevant work in the realm of computer-supported cooperative work or CSCW. This work, though historically associated with research labs, has been incorporated into commercial product such as Lotus Notes which is now used in thousands of offices. In general CSCW supports cooperation in three ways: process-based, structured-information-based or common-space-based. In the first case the computer helps to ensure that a number of procedural steps are correctly followed, in, say, the processing of insurance claims. In the second case, people cooperate through the use of shared structured information (work orders or schedules, for example). In the third case, software helps to promote a "shared space" (for example, through video conferencing or desktop sharing) in which people can communicate. Mixtures of the three types are, of course, possible.
Historically neither the research labs nor the commercial "groupware" purveyors have focused their attention to the "real world" outside of networked white collar workers. This is largely due to historical (and economic) circumstances (which still largely persist) in which only a privileged few had access to the Internet. Also "cooperative work" particularly the sort that computers could assist was implicitly perceived as white collar work either academic (writing for journals, for example) or commercial (processing a purchase order, for example). While we've seen in recent years, a vast increase of "regular people" populating cyberspace as well as the amount of people engaged in civil society and community work there has not been a corresponding amount of CSCW research in those areas [18].
The development and deployment of public CSCW systems is one recommendation that comes easily to mind. These systems should make it easier for citizens to schedule meetings and work on projects of shared interest. A student of mine, Jakob Kaivo, suggested that the development of a public protocol for exchanging the full range of collaborative work information would provide a useful foundation for a great variety of tools and systems. (See http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Groupware/Open_Source/ for links to a variety of open source groupware tools and projects.) Another idea, unexplored to a large degree, is that of deliberative systems, since deliberation may be the most important process underlying civic and community work. Robert's Rules of Order [19], for example, which is in everyday use in thousands of assemblies both large and small throughout the world, appears to be a reasonable model to use as a starting point. Promoting effective deliberation on the web, at least in theory, vastly increases opportunities for developing advocacy networks which connect people who are physically removed from each other. On the other hand, connecting (and further empowering) people who are already "wired" to some degree, can lead to situations with "winners" (those with access to ICT) and "losers" (with no or poor access). People in rural areas, for example, are often poor, isolated and unconnected. Clearly, public policy and education that promotes access to these spaces must keep apace with any development in public CSCW.
The development of a public classification system (or systems) could also be expected to provide a foundation and impetus for various projects. Currently most web users rely on commercial search engines which employ their own proprietary schemes for storing and retrieving information. Search engines are known to have many drawbacks including the fact the people can pay to have their site placed higher in the list of sites than the search engine itself would have placed it according to its own criteria [20]. The existence of a public scheme, perhaps on the order of the Dewey Decimal System (itself not public, but freely licensable), would enable people to provide classification information in their own pages (via, say, a meta tag), build local digital libraries, and, even, create search engines that were not subject to the same deficiencies that commercial search engines are. Search engine purveyors generally want to keep their ranking algorithms secret to prevent clever web page developers from artificially elevating the "importance" ranking of their pages (and hence, position, among the links retrieved) thus raising, at least, the specter of abuse with public schemes [21].
Working with community organizations and non-technical people over a sustained period of time is the best way to design and implement systems that meet the needs of a democratic society. We need to ask whether all people -- including those at the economic and other margins of society -- are getting the information they need. Do the existing communication channels work for them? How could these systems be improved? Do they promote economic development, neighborhood awareness or community collaborative work? CSCW tools, for example, perhaps customized in some way, may prove to be very useful for marginalized communities [22]. But they9ve rarely, if ever, field-tested under those circumstances. The assumption, usually implicit, is that these tools are supposed to ultimately find their way to users with fewer resources. But CSCW professionals know that the context is of critical importance to the success or failure of a CSCW application [23] and contexts vary considerably. There is little reason to assume that low-income or other marginalized communities will play any role in a participatory design process of a CSCW application for their community without a concerted outreach effort.
4 Computer Scientists, Digital Citizens, and Digital Cities
Computer professionals are usually specialists; it is their job to understand, maintain, and advance the world's digital infrastructure. What role should computer professionals play in the consideration of our broadest affairs when their focus is so specific and arguably narrow? They are likely, certainly, to be cast in the role of what Gramsci calls an "organic intellectual" [24] whose agenda has been determined by others. Does this mean that computer professionals can't or shouldn't participate in broad civic issues and initatives? Not at all. I believe that their understanding of these critical technologies compels them to accept greater responsibility and their engagement with the world -- not as "organic intellectuals" but as engaged citizens with important specialized knowledge to contribute.
How might this transformation take place? It will be necessary to take a hard look at the activities of computer professionals and how they conceptualize their work. Is their discipline construed narrowly as a purely technical, instrumental discipline or is it a practice that, although intimately connected with digital technology, is an embedded practice that necessarily relates to and interacts with the rest of society. Part of this entails bringing the "real world," including the vast majority of the world's population who have never used a computer, into a more central position their consideration. Another part of this is entails more strongly engaging with the rest of the research and scholarly community, especially the social sciences, but also, the humanities community. Professional organizations such as the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) or Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) can certainly help promote this transformation of a disembodied practice into an embedded one; funding agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and non-governmental foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and others can also help. Computer professionals by themselves can also reprioritize their professional and personal lives to some degree. They can choose to work on collaborative community teams, on policy or social work, or on developing new democratic technology.
Computer professionals can assume a stronger role working with community networks or with other digital city projects. At The Evergreen State College where I teach Randy Groves and I worked with 50 undergraduate students who built web applications for 12 community groups over a nine-month period (http://www.scn.org/edu/tesc-ds/2001-2002/). For one thing, community networks provide an ongoing and ready-made test-bed for "real-world" applications. I propose that Computer Science department (or Information and Library Science or Public Policy or other academic departments) become long-term "partners" in community networking and other digital city projects. In this way, students would have the opportunity to experience first-hand technology development projects that were designed for actual users. Students (and faculty) would play a role in the shaping of public applications and would come to appreciate the importance as well as the challenges of supporting a democratic culture with technology. For their part, the community network practitioners would -- ideally -- become exposed to innovative ideas, skilled partners, and invigorating enthusiasm.
Only through involvement at several levels at once can computer professionals realize their historical possibilities. Working with community activists, researchers, independent media producers, policy makers, and librarians are all good places to start. Other intriguing possibilities include working with activists in the Free Software Movement to develop CSCW technology that could be used by people in low income communities who can't afford the advanced CSCW technology employed in today's businesses. The operative expression in all of the cases above is "working with;" the design process itself should be democratic and participatory [25]. Technologists and researchers should also forge partnerships with local government and the citizenry. The city of Seattle9s groundbreaking "Indicators of a Health Technology City" [26] project is a good example of this. This project has worked with Seattle region citizens to develop a set of "indicators" that, when measured over time, will reveal important trends about the uses and effects of communication technology in the region. These indicators include several types of indicators (access; literacy; business and economic development; community building; civic participation; human relationships to information technology; and partnerships and resource mobilization) and are intended to explore negative as well as positive implications about technology. As a matter of fact, one of the guidelines in the developmental phase was to think about these from a citizen point-of-view that overlaps but is not completely coincidental with points-of-view of government or business. Clearly a project such as this helps to build a civic culture by helping to surface the issues and concerns that people have in relation to computer and communication use in an era of rapid change. Projects like this can serve as both motivator and evaluative yardstick for computer professionals who are interested in long-term development of democratic technology.
If computer professionals are exclusively organic intellectuals destined for academia or industry who see themselves as practitioners of a purely technical discipline, their ability to be a proactive and progressive force in society will be insignificant. It must be mentioned, however, that there are countless examples of computer professionals who are actively working to create new institutions, bridge the "digital divide," educate the public, and build new technologies specifically for marginalized communities. The evidence of this involvement is overwhelming and largely unprecedented. Witness the outpouring of papers for the "Shaping the Network Society" Symposium, May 2000 [27] and the resulting "Seattle Statement" [28] calling for a "new public sphere." In spite of these hopeful signs, I would sound the caution, that this type of work is still the exception and moving it more into the mainstream is an important but daunting task.
5 Actions for the Future
Global forces -- economic, political and technological -- are extending their influence on people and institutions everywhere. As a result, people may feel like they9re isolated and alone or part of an undifferentiated crowd. In either case, people -- especially those with fewer economic resources -- often feel that they have little control over their future. The consequences of this sense of powerlessness, real or perceived, transcend the individual; society as a whole suffers for it is deprived of social intelligence and energy which could be used to address strengthen polity and social and environmental problems. History has shown that it has been people -- not government or business -- who first raised this last century's most pressing issues -- the environment, women's issues, sexual freedom, and others [29]. It is likely that tomorrow's social entrepreneurs will use the socio-technical systems that we build today.
Digital cities can help promote social meliorism while simultaneously cooperating with and fighting against policies and practices of business and government and by building bridges between the powerful and the powerless. If civil society is successful in this work, the tensions between cultures, critical environmental stresses, capitalistic demands for more markets, resources, labor, etc. can -- we hope -- be softened. If as Immanuel Wallerstein believes [30], humankind is at a historic threshold, the information and communication resources and services offered by tomorrow's next digital cities might help humankind enter this next phase in our development with less turmoil. Digital cities can play a positive role in rebuilding community by strengthening its core values. Whether these aims are realized will depend on citizens from all walks of life. Truly democratic systems can only be developed through broad participation. This endeavor must not be a charitable good-works project of elites, or a rebellion of the underclasses. It should be open to citizens of all races, economic classes, ethnic origins, religions, genders, ages, and sexual preferences. It must be global in nature, because a confluence of perspectives, experiences, and skills is needed in order to succeed.
Why should people care about digital cities outside of their own region? The answer is that the cities and people of the world are bound to each other; the world is shrinking, and globalism -- with positive and negative connotations -- is becoming the defining characteristic of our era. We all share the planet; national citizens are also planetary citizens. No society can rely solely on large institutions -- either commercial or government -- to provide all of its information and communication needs. People are developing digital cities that reflect their cultural values. That is how it should be. On the other hand, all of us are human, and we are more similar to each other than we are different. Clearly virtual networks are needed to connect digital cities and digital citizens. Robert Putnam [10] explains the importance of "bridging" social capital (which provides effective connections across communities) in addition to "bonding" social capital (which connects people within communities).
The rapid computerization of the world and the immense attention it's receiving represents an unprecedented opportunity for computer professionals. Computer professionals can seize this historic opportunity and engage in interdisciplinary and collaborative work involving other researchers as well as practitioners in education, development, social services, social activism, and the government to help build (and, in some cases, rebuild) a civic culture. Additionally, computer professionals and other digital city developers must also be aware of the numerous barriers -- conceptual, structural, economic -- to this work. For one thing there is a disquieting lack of critical analysis of the immense economic and other forces that are shaping our world. These forces tend to crowd out efforts that don't fit within the dominant ideological framework. Some authors [31] for example, have suggested that tragedies such as the World Trade Center attacks may become increasingly more prevalent as conditions in the "global south" become increasingly desperate. Yet ideas such as these, however critical to our understanding of the complex interrelatedness of our world and our work, are often pushed aside and banished from public consideration. For that reason and many others, working to develop information and communications technology and systems that foster deep democracy will face many obstacles.
This article was finished two weeks after the tragic attack on New York City and Washington, DC several days after president George Bush's announcement regarding America's military and other response. The global dream of collective intelligence and harmony and peace is, once again, severely called into question. Far from being its death knell, recent events have demonstrated the indispensability of a shared vision for our survival. Digital cities insofar as they help develop a truly inclusive "public sphere" [32]. Through engaged information and communication technology, could be a part of that vision.
Some of this article, particularly paragraphs related to the role of the computer scientist, was published before in Communications of the ACM, January, 2001; Computer Professionals and the Next Culture of Democracy.
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, 0002547.
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