Nearly one billion are online worldwide, current Internet demographics are available here.

Also, there will be many interesting and related presentations at the Rural Telecommunications Conference, Oct. 11-13,

Community Internet Empowerment is very much a global issue and ideally we can all learn from each other. Below is the link to all the papers submitted for an upcoming International conference referenced below - if you'd like to see rich resources and ideas on the theme of sustainable community networking. While these academic papers are outstanding in their own right, I believe AFCN has a unique role in defining practical applications in a way that laypersons can understand the potential and become directly engaged. If you have practical contributions toward this end, please know you're invited to share them at www.afcn.org

But first, I'd like to thank Ben Jacobs for sharing the following resources and community innovations. Please post YOUR sites here for other AFCN members to review!

Ben Writes:
I encourage you to visit this site to learn more about some of the pressing economic problems in the Lumbee communities. www.povertyeast.org/jobs

I encourage you to visit the following websites to find additional information on our efforts to assist community networking in Lumbee communities and to help rural areas to make better use of the internet.

www.lumbee.org
www.lumbeetribe.com
www.lumbeebibliography.net
www.ncimed.com
www.pembrokenc.com
www.pembrokechamber.com
www.ncindian.com
www.uncp.edu
www.ncai.org
www.indianz.com
www.robescountyoed.org

Ben Jacobs bjacobs28377 at yahoo
www.lumbee.org
910-521-8602

Full listing of Global Community Networking papers:
www.cireasearch.net
(Select "All" from the right side of the horizontal alphabet bar)

From: "Michael Gurstein"
Subject: [DDN] "Sustainability and Community Technology"--CIRN Prato

I'd like to call everyone's attention to the remarkable set of resources concerning "Sustainability and Community Technology" that is now available at www.ciresearch.net.
These are the papers and other presentations that will be offered at the Community Informatics Research Network meeting in Prato next week.
You are welcome to browse through the papers and offer comments to individual authors or to the group. With this note, I'd like to invite all of you who won't be able to join us in person to contribute to the discussion electronically. Below are some notes for the talk that I will be giving in Prato. Feel free to comment, criticize, ignore these and make your own observation including referring to some of the other papers that will be presented in Prato or elsewhere.
This note is also being copied to all those presenting papers at Prato so comments concerning specific papers will hopefully, be addressed by individual authors.
In replying to this note and contributing to this discussion, could I ask that we focus the discussion on the CIResearchers e-list... For those of you not currently subscribed to that list and who would like to participate in the discussion please send an email.

To: sympa@vancouvercommunity.net
Message: subscribe ciresearchers
Archive: ciresearchers

Michael Gurstein
School of Management: New Jersey Institute of Technology

Michael's Discussion Starters:
As a kick-off to the discussion I'd like to suggest "Sustainability" for Community Technology is at a minimum concerned with the entire range of elements required to support

1. Carriage facilities - How to sustain/maintain the telecommunications service infrastructure in place to support the application being undertaken e.g. the volumes and capacities of bandwidth to be provided by broadband, dial-up, WiFi, satellite or other networked telecommunications services?

2. Input/output devices - How to sustain/maintain/replace the devices used in the application? Are they for example computers for information processing, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) for mobile information accesss, printers for text production?

3. Tools and supports - How to sustain/replace/train for/develop/elaborate the software, physical supports, protocols, service supports being used/available? For example, databases for keeping track of large volumes of environmental data will be needed by environmental management groups, while physical textbooks may be a requirement for effective use by teachers of the support facilities of Internet enabled educational systems.

4. Content services - How to sustain/enhance/develop the specifically designed content needed for the particular application areas? What are the usability and locally contextual requirements for this content - language, design, literacy level, localization of references, links and so on. Effective use implies content which is designed to be specifically "effective" - usable, trustworthy, and designed for particular types of end users in the appropriate language formats. The issue here is to go beyond access to develop applications of interest and benefit and usability to identified end users.

5. Service access/provision - How to sustain/maintain/enhance/replace the social and organizational infrastructure, links to local social networks, para-professionals, training facilities available to support the facility/access/application e.g. the enabling social, as well as technological, infrastructure.

6. Social facilitation - How to sustain the local regional authorities/resources, community and environmental infrastructure, training, animation which have been developed locally to enable the desired application or use? The effective use of an ICT enabled service will frequently require supporting facilitation since the service likely will not be effectively implemented spontaneously. There will be the need for coordinated planning and design, for training at all levels and for animation of the supporting structures to make the service usable. Overall of course, there will be the need for local leadership.

7. Governance - How to sustain/modify/replace/enhance the current financing, regulatory or policy regime, either for governance of the application or to enable the implementation of the application within the broader national legal or regulatory systems?

And overall, how to sustain/modify/replace/enhance the social/economic/developmental goals which the Community Technology is being directed toward. Such goals change and evolve over time as some are achieved and others are replaced as obsolete. What mechanisms are in place to continuously assess and re-assess and modify those goals and to sustain the enthusiasm and interest of the community members who have taken on the responsibilty of pursuing these through the use of ICTs.