Position Paper
Synergistic development of CN applications
Linda Tetzlaff, PhD
IBM, TJ Watson Research Center
Yorktown Hts, NY 10598
Framed in a context of general decline of social capital in the United States [1], a fear is voiced that the sociology of the Web alienates people from their physical neighbors, as they lose the constraints of geography in interpersonal interaction. Social capital refers to features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit. However, it is our contention that computer applications can be developed that actually enrich geographic communities and engage their citizenry both on and off the Web. People who live in the same place have both implicit and explicit communities of interest, perhaps more than they often acknowledge.
During 1997, we explored at length the services and content of Internet Web sites in support of geographic communities. We found many sites with extensive read-only, community-oriented information, primitive form processing, discussion technology and a smattering of interactive applications. We presented our findings to Public Technologies Inc. (PTI), the nonprofit technology organization of the National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties and the International City/County Management Association, chartered to bring technology to local governments. Following PTI's enthusiastic reception, we decided to further explore the interest in such applications in an exemplar community.
We spent a week in a rural Midwest community talking to representatives of a wide range of community interests. We talked to members of city and county governments, the Chamber of Commerce, the Realty Board, the public schools, the university, the local hospital, the arts council, the airport authority and to a radio station owner, a banker, a minister and a group of lawyers. We discussed their openness to Web as a productive medium and explored the ways in which they felt Web applications might be able to substantively meet their parochial needs and their needs in the community. Once again the concept of a focused, interactive community Web met with considerable excitement, and the week elicited an outpouring of ideas.
We have continued to present an evolving proposal to people deeply involved with or considering adoption of Web support for their community, including directors of such well established sites such as Charlotte's Web and the Blacksburg Village. In virtually every case, the proposal has been enthusiastically received and partnership sought by the community represented.
The purpose of the integrated community is to facilitate the interactions among people where they live, concretely enhancing their communities, promoting cooperation and inclusion, while respecting and fostering individual initiative, expression and security. The intent is to enable the distributed, synergistic development of a suite of applications to support a wide range of important needs within a geographically meaningful area, such as a neighborhood, town, city or region. We hope to evolve an environment that will span interactions among citizens, groups, schools, businesses and government services as they come together in the community.
Two initial application areas have been identified. The first is support for community groups such as scouts, recreational groups, churches or civic groups. The second is a suite of applications in support of electronic democracy. Underlying these applications would be supporting services such as a calendar, user registry, resource pool and domain taxonomy.
Until recently there has been no instance of a site which integrated serious, interactive support for government, citizens, business and civic groups or that provided a coherent framework in which such integration could be achieved, although we are now looking into the work initiate by New Generation Cities. We intend to forge or participate in the development of such a framework, and install an exemplar application which will engage a number of groups in the community, enhancing the interaction among them.
While many of the needs of the greater community have been alluded to or identified in the open literature there is still no system which integrates them. Among these are the needs for repositories for shared information such as community resources, calendars and directories, and an open architecture to enable common access and synergistic development of complementary, domain specific applications.
The following illustrate some of the activities which might be integrated by such a suite of applications:
Coordinating a community event
Identifying coordinators
Registering participants
Engaging ancillary support such as caterers, cleanup and ambulance
Resource scheduling
Civic decision making, facilitated by
Structured discussion
Aggregation of opinion using questionnaires, polling or knowledge extraction techniques
Guaranteed voter identity/uniqueness
Supporting parents of school-age children
Immunization records made directly available to the school district
Online teacher conferences
Enrollment in after-school activities, coordinating carpooling and parent participation
Determining where to live or open a business in the community, considering
Commuting
Zoning
Housing valuation and availability
Safety
Availability of shops and services
Our development commitment is to applications which foster interaction among groups and individuals, built to encourage rapid, facile and meaningful engagement across community institutions.
[1] Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. Journal of Democracy 6:1, Jan 1995, 65-78.