Where is the 'Community' in Community Networking …...technologies today, Mosco suggests that continuity rests in the utopist democratic visions people engage around the advent of

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Where is the 'Community' in Community Networking Initiatives?

Stories From the 'Third Spaces' of Connecting Canadians

Kenneth C. Werbin Concordia University

February 2006

CRACIN Working Paper No. 11

www.cracin.ca

Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN)

Alliance canadienne de recherche pour le réseautage etl'innovation communautaires


About CRACIN

The Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN) is a four-year partnership between community informatics researchers, community networking practitioners and federal government policy specialists, funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). CRACIN brings together researchers and practitioners from across Canada, and internationally, to undertake case studies and thematic research on the enabling uses of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) by communities, and to investigate Canada’s national programs and policies for promoting the development and public accessibility of digital networks, applications and services.

CRACIN Working Paper Series Editor: Graham Longford, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto

Suggested citation:

Werbin, Kenneth C. (2006). "Where is the 'Community' in Community Networking Initiatives? Stories From the 'Third Spaces' of Connecting Canadians," CRACIN Working Paper No. 11, Toronto: Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking.

For further information or to order hard copies of CRACIN materials, contact: Project Administrator Faculty of Information Studies University of Toronto 140 St. George Street, Rm 652 Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G6 Phone: (416) 978-4662 Fax: (416) 971-1399 Email: [email protected] Web: www.cracin.ca

Werbin: Where is the ‘Community’ in Community Networking?

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Introduction

What is a community-based initiative? Despite the fact that the term community is used in common agreement in everyday life, it clearly means very different things to different people, particularly with respect to government supported community-networking and informatics initiatives. This research concerns itself with the technologies, practices and discourses that constitute ‘community-based initiatives’, at two urban community centres in Canada, one on the West Coast in Vancouver, British Columbia and the other on the East Coast in Toronto, Ontario. This research aims to unpack how community values and relations are represented and supported in the negotiation, development and maintenance of ‘community-based initiatives’, with particular emphasis on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) initiatives at these sites. Questions explored include: What kinds of access do community-networking initiatives provide to community members? What kinds of community values are represented in these initiatives? What kinds of community relations do they foster? What discourses of community are enabled through ICT initiatives? How can community values be better represented and supported in community-based initiatives in the future.

While the term 'community-based initiative' is one that is bandied about liberally by community practitioners, academics, corporations and government, it is clearly a highly contested term enabling a wide variety of interests, agendas and discourses1. For the Federal Government of Canada ‘community-based initiative’ is often used synonymously to describe a broad range of ICT initiatives, a discourse that tends to be about national agendas, social economics, the value of access to the information scoiety, employment, and streamlining citizen-user services; for corporations, despite the best of benevolent intentions, it is about business opportunities generated through commercial appropriations of communities; for academics it is a theoretical construct that enables funded research from bodies such as SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada) under their ‘Initiative on the New Economy’; and finally, for community practitioners and constituents, they simply live it, in all its complexity, in this intimidating landscape of vastly competing interests, agendas and discourses.

This research, funded by the Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN), involved interviewing 16 community practitioners on their experiences with community-based initiatives at urban community centres on the West and East Coast of Canada. Some practitioners were specifically involved with the Federal Government’s CAP program (Community Access Program) while others had experience with other kinds of community-based initiatives. Community practitioners held a wide range of roles in their respective organizations including: Community center directors and administrators, CAP coordinators and administrators, social workers, adult-literacy program directors, seniors program directors, women’s housing coordinators, and new immigrant community organizers.

1 Discourse is derived here from Foucault; as a mutually constituted cultural phenomenon involving how people do social practices and what they see through such modes of operating—the possibilities and limitations social and cultural practices and visions open and close (Foucault 1995; Foucault 2000; Foucault and Faubion 2000a; Foucault and Faubion 2000b; Foucault and Gordon 1980).


The interviews, held in small groups and one-on-one, began with a simple set of questions pertaining to community-based initiatives involving ICT:

• What kinds of community values are represented in such initiatives?

• What kinds of community relations do they enable?

• How can community values be better represented in such initiatives in the future?

It is our hope that the results of this research will help to unpack the term ‘community-networking initiative’ in all its complexity, providing community practitioners, government and academics with a more nuanced language to talk through and negotiate community interests, agendas and initiatives in the future. Exploring discourses that operate in and through community-networking initiatives, this research targets questions of what constitutes ‘community access’, ultimately suggesting, as Clark (2003) and Sandvig (2003) argue, that access to valuable physical ‘third-spaces’, where site users have the chance to meet others and develop social networks, plays a far greater role in fostering a sense of community than mere technological access and training alone. This research strongly suggests that the funding of such emergent, in-person, locally defined, social spaces—third-spaces—is crucial to future endeavors and funding aimed at bridging the digital divide and ‘Connecting Canadians’. Additionally, this research makes suggestions as to the skills, training and education required to ensure that community practitioners are equipped to negotiate this powerful and intimidating terrain in the future. Ultimately, in unpacking how people do ‘community-networking’ and interrogating the possibilities and limitations they see through such social practice, this research hopes to contribute to clearer distinctions between ICT initiatives that genuinely foster communal life, from those that merely imagine such impacts, from those that may operate as tools of subjugation and domination.

Community in Theory, Practice and Myth

In their review of community informatics initiatives in the UK, Netherlands and the U.S., Loader and Keeble (2004) caution that too often the term ‘community’ in community-based initiatives is used to denote homogenous groups of people, digitally-divided between info-haves and info-have-nots. Loader and Keeble suggest that government-sponsored community-based initiatives are often understood as projects of ‘social regeneration’—the exclusive realm of the marginalized and poor—ethnic minorities, immigrants, the homeless…disadvantaged communities. Loader and Keeble ask:

Why is it that the term is seldom used to describe wealthier, middle-class social relations? Looking at the research on community informatics one is certainly struck by the fact that these initiatives do indeed seem to take place primarily in disadvantaged localities or with excluded groups. So what do we make of this characteristic of community informatics? What does it tell us about the nature of these projects? (p.36)

Delving into a Department of Canadian Heritage paper entitled ‘Social Capital and Community Networking: Ethno-cultural Use of Community Networking Initiatives in Canada’ (Doody 2004), we clearly see that the trend that Loader and Keeble describe in the UK with respect to limiting definitions of community to the disadvantaged is quite evident in Canada too. The paper states from the outset that “…the rise in the development of Community Networking (CN) initiatives in Canada ‘aims to increase social cohesion, inclusion and integration, especially with reference to disadvantaged groups, such as immigrants, the unemployed and single-parent


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families’” (p.2). This exclusive focus on community networking initiatives as the domain of ‘immigrants, the disadvantaged, and ethno-cultural groups’ is telling of a pervasive regularity in government policy, a discourse Loader and Keeble (2004) characterize as communities fit for the information poor, wherein the imagined cantilever to being-in-the-know is technology and the internet, and merely providing such access will lead one down a path to an ideal way of life, rewarded in the form of employment. But Loader and Keeble (2004) caution that:

… the optimistic notion of community life as an embodiment of the ideal way to live may not itself be shared by all citizens. Whilst many champion the positive benefits of strong communities, far fewer, it seems, express concerns over how community relations may act as a means of domination…the new ICTs may be technologies of empowerment for community groups and members but also the means of their subjugation. Community can be a means of social control as much as a wellspring for social capital. Community activists and development workers need to be aware of this ambiguity in their negotiations and deliberations with community members, public institutions, sponsors and the like.

Indeed, deterministically suggesting that mere technological access and training will bridge the digital divide plays into enduringly facile libratory myths and discourses about ICT as a whole, from perceptions surrounding dramatic increases in civic participation to the creation of ideal careers and employment (Mosco 2004; Putnam 2000). And yet this discourse continues to pervade government supported community-networking initiatives. Despite being at odds over the impacts of community-networking initiatives, one element that tends to hold together research into community relations, civic participation and ICTs in the last decade (Kavanaugh, Cohill, and Patterson 2000; Schuler 1996; Wellman 1999; Boase, Horrigan, Wellman and Rainie 2006) is an emphasis on human agency and activity (Loader and Keeble 2004). This research trend belies shared foundations in anthropological and ethnomethodological strategies of privileging, probing and describing human action and technological forms, which too often means neglecting the myths and discourses operating in and through such community-networking initiatives.

And it is therefore not surprising that many researchers in the fields of Community Informatics and internet research in general, tend to focus in on and describe what is there; what is happening; what actions are observable and materializable:

Much of what has been written about computer communication, the internet, or cyberspace focuses with one eye on what we might call its material characteristics. These describe the major technologies that produce cyberspace, the political rules of government, and the economic rules of the market that go a long way toward organizing it. This singular focus is understandable: cyberspace is somewhat new, and so the technologies and rules that govern its use are in a formative stage and warrant close scrutiny. Nevertheless, we would benefit from considering what the other eye sees: the cultural or mythic character of what computer communication creates. Cyberspace is indeed technological and political, but it also a mythic space—perhaps even a sacred space...Seeing vigilantly with both eyes means recognizing that computer communication makes up and is made up by technological and political practices as well as by mythic and cultural ones...We must comprehend the culture of cyberspace if we are to deepen what we know about its more material qualities. In essence, culture, particularly myth, is our starting or entry point…(Mosco 2004, p.10-11)

For Mosco (2004), technologies embody and drive the utopian myths of their times. Whether the myths are about the telegraph, radio, television, or community-networking


technologies today, Mosco suggests that continuity rests in the utopist democratic visions people engage around the advent of new technologies, the fantastic stories they tell about them, and how through their use people will “…experience an epochal transformation in human experience that [will] transcend time (the end of history), space (the end of geography), and power (the end of politics)” (p.2-3). Mosco suggests that ‘myth is congealed common sense’, that although the taken-for-granted is “…continually transforming itself, enriching itself with scientific ideas and with philosophical opinions that have entered ordinary life” (p.29), there are nonetheless ‘powerful philosophical currents’ that leave behind ‘sedimented common sense’, establishing ‘folklore of the future’. For Mosco the ‘real’ power of new technologies, beyond their myths, is only revealed when they exhaust their mythic capital; when they withdraw into the social woodwork and become a part of the banality of everyday life.

And indeed, community-networking and ICTS are increasingly withdrawing into the social woodwork of community centres across Canada, emerging as a large part of the banality of everyday life. On the ground at these sites, it is clear that such myths and discourses have been shattered; funding for CAP has now ceased, once cutting-edge technologies are breaking down and/or becoming obsolete, original program objectives and expectations have not been met, and frustrations amongst administrators, community practitioners and members are increasing. And yet these myths abound outside of the community centers, in the realm of funding; that access to ICTs and the internet generates increased engagement with the information society and ultimately employment; that ‘Connecting Canadians’ equals better lives for disadvantaged communities; that with such ‘unparalleled access’ civic participation flourishes. What role do such myths about community networking play at community centres? How do they at once open possibilities and at the same time limit vision?

Taking up Mosco’s challenge, this research de-emphasizes the materialities of community—meaning technological forms and practices—in favor of the mythical—meaning the discourses of community operating through community-networking initiatives. Rather than focusing on ‘what is there’ or ‘what is happening’ in terms of community networking technologies and practices, this research seeks to probe how discourses related to community operate through community-networking initiatives and the implications of this for community learning and civic participation. What stories do people tell about community-networking initiatives? What myths about technologies, communities and society underlie these stories? How do community-networking practices open and limit possibilities for communal action? How do they play into communal relations?

If we are to better understand how community-networking can act as a catalyst of local, regional, national and international learning and civic participation, then probing the myths and discourses that constitute ‘community’ and ‘access’ and how they operate through ‘community-networking initiatives’ would seem to be a crucial point of interrogation.

Consumers or Citizens? On Technological and Communal Access

Feenberg and Bakardkjieva (2004) characterize our current understanding of digital networked communities as a bifurcation of two streams of thought; describing the landscape as marked by a schism between ‘consumer’ and ‘community’ models of social networking. For Feenberg and Bakardkjieva, the consumption model is clearly privileged in everyday society, in


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the news and popular culture. The idea of ‘free, active consumers viewing, picking and clicking their way to goods’, services, employment and civic participation pervades contemporary discourses of online community. But for Feenberg and Bakardkjieva, and those who imagine social networks beyond individual acts of searching and retrieving information, community is

…the scene in which a large share of human development occurs, [and] is a fundamental human value…’communities are social entities that have two elements. One, a web of affect-laden relationships among a group of individuals, relationships that often crisscross and reinforce one another…The other a commitment to a set of shared values, norms and meanings, and a shared history and identity’… (p.2).

Indeed, such a definition of community leaves little room for notions of consumption. Community is not something that is viewed, picked and/or clicked, but rather hinges on ‘affect-laden relationships’ between people, who are committed to a shared set of values and a shared sense of history and identity. In this way, community is not something that can be purchased or measured or tracked quantifiably, nor does it fit neatly into neoliberal justifications of return-on-investment. As Feenberg and Bakardkjieva argue, “Unlike the consumption model of the internet, the success or failure of online community has no easy measure, no dollars and cents return and there is no NASDAQ quote to still doubts and settle debates" (p.2). And it is precisely here, with the insistence on such quantifiable measures, scaffolded on the desires of funders to tuck community networking initiatives into a neoliberal procrustean bed, where tensions and contradictions arise. Menzies (1989; 1996; 2005) among others have extensively probed how the pervasive use of ICTs in society has resulted in measures of individual and communal life, success, and prosperity increasingly reduced to quantifiable, measurable phenomenon, such as demographics, employment, wage and return on investment. For many such thinkers, quantifiably reductive measures of ‘quality of life’ only further obfuscate the affective dimensions of community, the aura of warmth and companionship implicit in human physical association.

In a society that increasingly understands civic participation, growth and evolution as bottom-line questions of dollars and cents, the consumer discourse of community is easily and unwaveringly privileged. Indeed, a consumer discourse of community-networking—where community centers are understood as business units, community members as their clients, and employment and jobs are the bottom-line—allows decision-makers in government to make ‘sound investments’ in community where return-on-investment can easily be measured over short and long periods of time. In such a funding landscape, where statistics are not only engaged to justify social investment and define social capital, but are also increasingly required to protect the jobs of decision-makers, there is little room or interest in understanding the affective dimensions of community-networking initiatives, those that can only be understood through the stories and narratives people tell about such projects.

Indeed, one of the key themes that emerges in the interviews and stories that follow is how the sense of community fostered at CAP sites has little to do with what can be measured through activity on online networks or jobs that are acquired. Contrary to widely held assumptions in government and the private sector, the sense of community reported here has little to do with access to ICTs, training and the internet, and everything to do with what Clark (2003) and Sandvig (2003) have characterized as access to valuable physical, in-person, ‘third spaces’ where site users have the chance to meet others and develop social networks. And while such ‘third spaces’ are difficult, if not impossible, to capture with quantifiable measures, the


interviews that follow clearly suggest that the contribution of ‘third spaces’ to social capital development and integration, particularly with respect to seniors, new immigrant communities, and especially foreign-trained professionals, far exceeds any assumed benefits of mere technological access alone.

Strategy and Methodology

In and around their respective work locales, 16 community practitioners at an East Coast and a West Coast community centre were interviewed on their experiences with community-based initiatives. Some practitioners were specifically involved with the Canadian Federal Government’s CAP program (Community Access Program) and ‘Connecting Canadians’ endeavors while others had experience with other kinds of community-based initiatives. Community practitioners held a wide range of roles in their respective organizations including: Community center directors and administrators, CAP coordinators and administrators, social workers, adult-literacy program directors, seniors program directors, women’s housing coordinators, and new immigrant community organizers. The interviews, some held in small groups, some one-on-one, began with a simple set of questions pertaining to community-based initiatives involving information and communication technologies (ICTs):

• What kinds of community values are represented in such initiatives?

• What kinds of community relations do they enable?

• How can community values be better represented in such initiatives in the future?

From these points of entry, discussion was solicited in a free-flowing manner, followed up by questions including: How do you feel ICTs have served your communities? Whose agendas do you feel they serve? What role does the government play in setting the agenda of ICT initiatives? What role do community practitioners play? How is the community consulted about these initiatives? What kinds of needs assessment are conducted? What pressures do you feel from the corporate world around these initiatives? What pressures do you feel from the government? How do community practitioners represent the values and desires of the community in negotiating these powerful competing agendas? Do you feel community practitioners are currently equipped to do this? If not, what kinds of skills, training and education do you feel they are lacking?

Contrary to ethnographic traditions involving coding qualitative materials and data, including interviews, Silverman (2000) emphasizes that

…in some qualitative research texts and documents may be analyzed for a very different purpose. The aim is to understand the participants’ categories and to see how these are used in concrete activities…The theoretical orientation of these qualitative researchers makes them more concerned with the processes through which texts depict ‘reality’ than with whether such texts contain true or false statements (p.826).

For Gubrium and Holstein (1998) interviews are treated as storytelling, a practical means of production through which members of society attempt to establish coherence across accounts of practice and life. In analyzing the results of interviews, Gubrium and Holstein (2000) suggest a methodological turn they call ‘analytic bracketing’, wherein the researcher probes ‘interpretive practice’ by alternately focusing on questions of how people do—the realm of social process and practices—and what people see—the realm of discourse—recognizing their mutual constitution


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and interplay, but oscillating indifference to the other in an attempt to “…assemble both a contextually scenic and contextually constructive picture of everyday language-in-use” (Gubrium and Holstein 2000, p.500).

Integrative Framework

The research presented here follows such traditions, oscillating analysis of discourses of community networking between how people do community-networking initiatives and what they see through such technologies and practices (Foucault 1995; Foucault 2000; Foucault and Faubion 2000a; Foucault and Faubion 2000b; Foucault and Gordon 1980). The results of the research interviews are structured around a series of propositions identified by the Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN) pertaining to Community Networking and Civic Participation.

Civic participation refers to individuals’ active engagement with and involvement in their communities. Common forms of civic participation include, among other things: donating time and/or money to charitable organizations; belonging to and/or participating in community groups; being informed about and engaged by local issues; attending public meetings; voting in elections; attending religious services; and maintaining social networks with friends, neighbors and co-workers. Civic participation is a key determinant of both individual and community development and well-being; it serves to educate and inform citizens, foster informed collective decision-making, build trust among citizens and between citizens and public institutions, promote the development of social capital, and reinforce a sense of belonging on the part of community members. In other words, it is through civic participation that democratic communities are nurtured and reproduced. (Longford / CRACIN Integrative Framework document, p.3)

Through a collective effort of probing research and anecdotal evidence related to community networking, CRACIN has identified numerous propositions associated with how people do community-networks and the possibilities and limitations such practice reveals to people for civic participation. Indeed, this research argues that the propositions CRACIN has identified with respect to how community networks foster civic participation encapsulate key discourses surrounding community-networking initiatives; how people do such initiatives and what they see through them, the possibilities and limitations opened and closed through discourses of community-networking.

CRACIN has proposed that community networks foster civic participation in the following ways:

• providing access to ICT equipment and training, particularly for marginalized populations, allows for broader participation in the information society (Industry Canada 2004; Rideout and Reddick 2005; Schon, Sanyal, and Mitchell 1999);

• fostering the development of local social networks and social capital (Hampton 2003;

Kavanaugh and Patterson 2002; Wellman and Hampton 1999);

• affording access for site users to valuable physical “third spaces” in which to meet others and develop social networks (Clark, 2003; Sandvig, 2003);


• promoting local information sharing and community engagement (Kavanaugh and Patterson 2002; Pinkett 2003);

• developing and affording access to and participation in the local public sphere, both

on and offline; developing and maintaining local electronic public space (Finquelievich 2004; Lovink and Riemens 2004);

• providing opportunities for community involvement in volunteer activities associated

with the community network, including network development and governance, training and technical support, and content development; and,

• promoting local awareness of community networking issues and challenges, and

mobilizing community members around issues of access and communication rights more broadly at the local, national and international levels (Clement, Moll, and Shade 2001; Moll and Shade 2004).

This research focuses on three of these propositions/discourses. Probing how people do community networking and what they see through such initiatives, the results of the interviews with the 16 community practitioners and their stories are structured around the following discourses of how community networking opens and limits the possibilities for civic participation.

• Providing access to ICT equipment and training, particularly for marginalized populations, allows for broader participation in the information society.

Here the discourse centers on access to technology and learning, that by doing technology and having access to it marginalized people will participate more broadly in society, and perhaps most importantly to funders, see all of the ‘employment’ possibilities that are open to them through such technological access;

• Affording technological access through community-networks provides site users with valuable physical “third spaces” in which to meet others and develop social networks.

Here the discourse moves away from technologies, practices and the ether of cyberspace, suggesting that the human physical proximity involved in people doing ICT in community centres—the affect laden relationships they establish face-to-face—allow people to see opportunities and possibilities for civic participation that do not manifest in the digital realm;

• Fostering the development of local social capital and networks; promoting local information sharing and community engagement; providing opportunities for community involvement in volunteer activities.

This discourse represents a collapsing of three of the propositions related to community networking and civic participation identified by CRACIN. Here the discourse centers on efficiency and effectiveness, strongly suggesting that doing community networking promotes people more clearly seeing the possibilities for local social capital development, sharing and engaging with local sources of information and the possibilities for volunteering in local communities. Key themes that emerge here revolve around needs assessment and reporting.


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• The results section concludes with a discussion of the discourses associated with funding community-networking initiatives.

Results and Discussion

Providing access to ICT equipment and training, particularly for marginalized populations, allows for broader participation in the information society.

Overwhelmingly, when asked what communal values underlie the growth and evolution of community-networking initiatives such as the CAP program in Canada, community practitioners at both the East and West coast community centres responded that perhaps the only underlying value of these initiatives revolved around providing people, particularly marginalized populations, with access to technology and the internet; and for most practitioners, this was very troubling. Clearly, one of the most pervasive discourses associated with community networking initiatives revolves around discourses of access to internet-based technologies and the broader social and civic participation such access is said to foster.

The libratory and facile myth of access to technology and the internet being a key enabler of increased civic participation described by Mosco (2004) clearly lives and breathes in the realm of community networking initiatives in Canada, particularly with respect to the federally funded ‘Connecting Canadians’ and CAP programs. As a discourse, access to technology is deterministically understood as fostering increased civic and social participation, and federal funding is closely tied to such quantitative measures of use and the potential employment opportunities such practice generates. However, unanimously, community practitioners see such measures of access and employment as providing an extremely limited understanding of the role and evolution of community-networks in fostering a sense of community, and more troubling, as possibly hindering such vision and growth. One CAP coordinator suggested that “The value of access to technology came from the top down [government] even though other social issues of access like literacy are equally present but are not addressed with funds.”

Some of the most salient examples of the tensions inherent in the discourse of ‘providing access to ICT equipment and training, particularly for marginalized populations, allowing for broader participation in the information society’ come from two stories recounted by practitioners.

The first involved the development and implementation of a seniors’ web-based portal funded by the Federal Government of Canada. The seniors’ program coordinator reported that the community was never consulted on whether or not they felt a portal was of use, nor were they asked what they would want in such a portal. After years of being online, the coordinator reported that the portal is hardly used and most seniors in the community have no idea it is even there. Indeed, when it has been used, practitioners reported that seniors tended to stand around in a group in the community centre, collectively discussing what they were looking at on the screen and which links they would follow. Surfing was extremely slow as seniors were less concerned with what information they were viewing, and far more interested in the in-person discussions the content generated. Consistent with results discussed in the next section, practitioners reported that the sense of community engendered through access to ICT and the internet for seniors has little to do with access to technology, and everything to do with in-person, physical, affective dimensions of being involved in a group discussion; the ‘third-space’ enabled by community networks discussed in depth in the following section.


The second story that gets at the ‘access myth’ involves a single mother’s housing society that was started 20 years ago. Based on the underlying feminist value that ‘the personal is political’, a single mother’s action committee was organized to ensure that the community would define its own problems and address its own needs with respect to housing. The community coordinator described a bottom up consultative process wherein the group created their own needs assessment tools to identify the most critical housing needs of the community. Sub-groups were subsequently defined by what mattered most to individuals and 5 years later the housing project was successfully completed. The coordinator went on to describe the impossibility of engaging such a grassroots endeavor today. Faced with the challenges of competing with ‘credible professional contractors’, she emphasized that developing and operating low-income women’s housing in our current climate requires credibility and professional status that is impossible for a grassroots organization to achieve. As a result, 20 years later this group’s struggle for survival entails obtaining funds any way it can, including acquiring funding for community-networking and web-based projects, which the coordinator reported are increasingly the only funds available.

Now representing a near-invisible population of older low-income women in search of housing, the group secured funds earmarked to create a community network revolving around ‘affordable housing for low-income women’, the underlying assumption being that providing access to the information society in the form of a web portal for this marginalized population would allow them to more efficiently and effectively find housing. But unfortunately, where this ground-up, in-person, physical community once had so much success building, providing and maintaining housing and support for low-income women, the coordinator reported that while the web portal does serve some populations (higher income house searchers), it does not serve older low-income women, who view access to the site as a source of stress; another job that they must learn and complete that seemingly offers little to no payback. The practitioner reported that low-income older women who call the center want the information over the phone; they want the comfort of accessing a real-life human being, not a computer network.

For these women, the practice of accessing the community-network for housing information does not seem to open the possibilities for a better life and livelihood through increased participation in the information society; rather it appears to limit such vision and imagining. For the coordinator the loss of human physical interaction inherent in community networking initiatives can be very problematic, resulting in resistance to such projects. Likening the frustrations experienced by users interacting with community web-based portals to automated telephone answering services, the practitioner strongly suggested a need to develop links between online realms and human interaction, balancing and recognizing the significance of human interaction in the communal equation. “The government needs to spend more time on conversations like this…they need to take the time to listen to these stories…money is thrown around and it must be all used, but no one cares to understand what is happening with it.

One of the most striking similarities and disturbing trends across these ‘access’ stories is a lack of consultation with and understanding of the populations in question when deciding to fund such community-networking initiatives.

In reality people don’t know what their goals are with technologies, we have to sit down and build the community a collaborative website, pull people into the process by telling them what they want…we’ve had no success whatsoever with Community Learning Network tools, no one is using the tools at all…after years they start to see it, but by then it is irrelevant. The window might be more open now but communities are too transient for doing needs assessment in [our


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area]; we couldn’t find communities to work with, and community organizers say ‘ahhh you’re going to come in, you’re going to organize us, no way!’ There’s a lot of resistance to that kind of thing…they say, ‘you don’t know what our mission is and you don’t know how we do things around here’…and we’re just flinging technology around. No one has time to answer and they answer poorly.

Indeed, community practitioners are often baffled as to whom programs like ‘Connecting Canadians’ and CAP are really intended to serve. In a funding environment where access to technology comes first, little has been done on the part of the government to understand or target relevant populations and fund the human support required to get people connected to their communities.

‘Connecting Canadians’ is about some homogenous notion of Canadians who don’t have access to the information society getting it. There is no such thing as a Canadian as they see it, that average Canadian doesn’t exist. The so-called community that can learn ICT and go get a job, you can’t find them! They [the government] must think there is some college educated white guy out there who wants to pick himself up by the bootstraps, learn networking, the internet and become a success. But the middle-class people who come in, they usually have OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder], or some issue that makes it difficult for them. Access to digital technology is not going to get these people jobs. So when we say ‘Connecting Canadians’ what we get are new immigrants using ICT who use it in a completely different way then the government thinks. We also get a lot of the marginalized populations who have a ton of issues outside digital divide, so teaching literacy has to be packaged in this, it needs to be approached holistically, otherwise it’s just no use introducing technology to these populations. These are two very different populations, who don’t mix well together, and it’s a juggling act for the government, who want success stories; but they are giving [us] money to address digital divide issues with new immigrants, and there is nothing to address there. It’s funny how we have to negotiate…

Despite these stories that shatter the discourse of technological access leading to increased social and civic participation, there are clearly examples where increased access for marginalized populations does in fact foster greater social and civic participation.

One such story involves a legal website project designed for immigrant newcomers that is available in 9 languages. Although there was no consultation or needs assessment conducted with the targeted population, the web portal is used extensively by immigrant newcomers, who according to the administrator, appreciate access to knowledge about laws and a society that is very different from their own. Indeed, practitioners at the other community centre indicated a very similar trend with their new immigrant populations, suggesting that unlike other marginalized populations, immigrant newcomers place a high value on access to the information society. But, as described in further detail in the next section, access to the information society is often something that most immigrant newcomers, particularly foreign-trained professionals (FTP) already have in their homes, in the form of ICT and the internet, and they are often trained specialists in this area. Indeed, the access they really seem to value is access to in-person, physical communities that develop around initiatives like CAP sites, where work experience opportunities surface, and learning to be a part of Canadian society is achieved face-to-face. These results are consistent with other CRACIN research, specifically Dechief (2005) who characterizes the emergence of such ‘third-spaces’ as an ‘alternate civic core’ in which new immigrant communities engage CAP sites as places to gather valuable Canadian work experience.


Affording technological access provides site users with valuable physical “third spaces” in which to meet others and develop social networks

In terms of ICT and bridging the digital divide what we’ve seen are immigrants who are here because Canada has responded to the panic created with the rise of the Reform party with respect to the kinds of people coming into the country. So they raised the standards of who can come in, education, training, etc…but in the end, it had nothing to do with jobs and their needing such qualifications; they still park cars and wash dishes, are hotel maids, and such. But they [government] wanted better looking, educated immigrants to reflect more the morality of everyday Canadians. So we had a lot more disciplined immigrants coming in, but much to their chagrin there were no jobs in their fields…I’m speaking from an inner-city bias, but what you get is a large population of immigrants with expertise who had to jump through all these hoops to get in, and they have a short window to get a CV together and get a job, before they have to take a job as salad prep, or dish washer…and that’s an incredible amount of shame they feel…really frustrated, like they’ve been betrayed by the Canadian government…all the jobs they were promised…and it’s because Canadian’s as a collective had a certain anxiety over immigrants coming in; that whole fear just swept across North America 15-20 years ago… and so you have a lot of smart immigrants with low-end jobs. And the consequence is that we benefit from having their expertise around the center!

This quote from a community center director not only reveals the dire, frustrating situation newcomers face in immigrating to Canada, but also gets at the misconceptions about how and what new immigrant communities and foreign trained professionals value in terms of access to a community and its resources; and further the unintended benefits available to community centers’ as a result of this landscape. Indeed, access for the new immigrant populations described above has little to do with technology and the internet in any way and everything to do with physically becoming a part of a new community, and productive Canadian citizens.

They don’t want to be in the corner programming, working on the computer, or surfing, they want to be talking, interacting, and learning to be comfortable in Canadian society, learning to speak better English. They want to pass on what they have learned and know, so a lot of them want to organize workshops, to practice their English and speaking in front of people...It’s like food is an excuse to get together with people, technology can also be an excuse to get together with people, for people to gather round, talk, learn…human support and funding is key to all of this…we should be getting money to foster a learning community-supported environment, not install technology…and community centers as sites makes sense; we attract a huge diversity of people here.

In this respect, where the discourse suggests that providing access to ICT equipment and training, particularly for marginalized populations, allows for broader participation in the information society, the reality of how and what kinds of access is valued by foreign trained professionals is far more nuanced and complex than such discourse suggests. Indeed, the anecdotal evidence generated from this research strongly suggests that foreign trained professionals place far more value on what Clark (2003) and Sandvig (2003) have described as physical ‘third-spaces’ in which to meet others and develop social networks. Here we have a discourse that pays little attention to technological practice and the ether of cyberspace, but places a high value on the human physical proximity involved in people doing ICT in community centers together and what they imagine community to be as a result of these relations. Overwhelmingly practitioners concurred that the affect-laden relationships established in such face-to-face encounters allow people to see opportunities and possibilities for social and civic


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participation that would never manifest in the digital realm. One social worker described the ‘third-space’ as such:

ICT have become a modern day basic need and the mechanism of lodging ICT in community organizations creates lots of unintended outcomes. What we’ve seen is the computer is not just a doorway into being able to more fully participating in the information society, it is also a great way build up social connections. I mean, in some cases people just need computers and access, but in most situations people benefit most from having a community around it, how they learn and live within a community.

Such anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that CAP sites have in fact been operating in a completely different way than was intended. Where the sites were designed to provide people with ICT access and training enabling the acquisition of key skills to increase the possibilities for employment, in fact most immigrant communities, consisting of foreign-trained professionals, already have these skills. What these populations are in fact using the CAP sites for is to acquire Canadian work experience for their resumes and CVs. As an unintended consequence of this, community centers housing CAP sites often have access to a vast array of skills and expertise for a short period of time while these newcomers attempt to gather Canadian work experience and find employment.

Practitioners report that the foreign-trained professionals who most profit from and influence the development of the CAP site don’t see themselves as in need of ICT access and training, rather they see themselves as people with specialized skills and experience that want to give something to their new communities and in return, hope to receive something they need; an opportunity to get connected with other people, the possibilities for valuable work experience and Canadian references, and a chance to maintain their skills and expertise while trying to find jobs in their specialized fields.

Therefore, in addition to funding technological access and training, community practitioners strongly advocate emphasizing funding around such ‘third spaces’ emerging around community networking initiatives. For example, giving dollars to community centres to specifically leverage the skills and expertise of foreign-trained professional newcomers. Benefits in such a funding landscape would see both foreign-trained professionals acquiring crucial Canadian work experience to get jobs in their fields, as well as the community centers benefiting from the tremendous skills and expertise that the Canadian government explicitly solicited from these populations.

We had a feeling people were curious about the internet in 1999, people wanted to become web administrators and designers, and we opened our doors and boom we had tons of people coming in. The best lesson I’ve learned [throughout CAP] is that computers in a really supportive learning environment really create great community. We have a workshop that has evolved on the history of Portugal from a group of people who were learning computers together, and that’s amazing! When it’s a public learning environment, and it’s community-based, the learning opportunities are boundless, but it’s all about people getting together, learning and not feeling intimidated… and that’s something the private internet cafes don’t get, it’s very individualized, you go there and do your own thing on the computer…

Indeed, the most successful community-networking initiatives that were described over the course of these interviews were the ones where technology did not come first. Successful community-networking initiatives were characterized by tremendous human presence and support around the rollouts. Successful community-networking initiatives tended to actively


encourage, support and maintain the ‘third spaces’ emerging around ICT in the community center. Therefore, numerous community practitioners at both the East and West coast sites were adamant that human presence and the establishment of a comfortable learning environment for participants are the keys to fostering a strong sense of community around ICT.

The CAP program is very, very important precisely because of the community access it provides…and this is not about access to the internet; it is about feeling like a part of a community. We have lots of homeless people, disadvantaged; they have no other place to go…I mean a good place, a positive community place. I can’t imagine what would happen to these people if we were not here, and it’s not about technological access, it’s about access to being a part of a community. [Our CAP site] is like an emotional shelter for these people, it gives them a sense of purpose, they end up helping other people and feeling good about themselves…and that’s community access. Access to community is more important than the service provided by the centre. Low income, refugees, homeless people learn computers; practice English, get working experience and then they find themselves a job. Foreign-trained-professionals, we develop them, they learn not only technology and skills but also how Canadian culture works, and this is very important, valuing being and becoming a part of this community. You can’t put a number on how much a person feels like they are a part of a community. [Our CAP site] is like a big family; you need help you come here; and if you can help you come here too! This is why [our CAP site] is different from internet cafes or commercial computer schools, it is a gateway to community and this is not just about skills and training, [our CAP site] allows people to feel like they are a part of something much bigger.

One seniors’ community coordinator described how she introduced computers and the internet to her constituents in 1994:

I am a very curious person and in 1994 I had a Mac and I discovered that you can chat over the internet, and so I introduced it to our Portuguese seniors community. They became very curious about it, and groups of them would come around to the computer, but a lot couldn’t type, only one person could, so she would type, and they couldn’t believe they were chatting with people in Portugal! One man in our group was once a soccer player there and the Portuguese people knew him, and it was so exciting for them. So they started asking for the activity, can we go chat with our friends?

Consistent with other anecdotal evidence suggesting that seniors tend to access ICTs and the internet in groups, establishing on-the-fly ‘third spaces’, this community coordinator has much experience engaging seniors and technology. Another program started by this coordinator for seniors began in 1992 when a group of Portuguese seniors were engaged in a group discussion about what was important in their lives. Marginalized by limited English, the majority of the group was native-Portuguese monolingual speakers and as a consequence they felt they suffered from a general lack of crucial everyday social knowledge. Participants began naming their problems, labeling them and developing strategies to reach out and educate other seniors around issues of concern.

Leveraging their own stories and overcoming language barriers, the group started creating body-language/mime only theatre about issues of concern to seniors and began taking the show on the road, involving other seniors in the discussion. The program gained even more momentum when the community centre applied for and received a private grant from an American university and ultimately developed a website. However, ICT was never a requirement of the research grant; the only requirement was to replicate content and reach out to more seniors.

None of the objectives were to use more technology, but rather to reach out to more seniors. The expected outcome was that seniors would be more informed. We originally proposed the idea of


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creating a website because the goal was to ‘replicate content’, making it accessible to other people. So we thought the internet would be a good way, instead of a video as usual. We saw the benefits of being able to update it on an ongoing basis and keep creating content for seniors. The funders were so impressed they gave us an additional $50,000. They got a lot more than they thought they would and the benefit of the internet was that we’re still working on it, it is an ongoing legacy. It is a good learning tool for health care professionals. Health Canada ended up funding ‘the visit to the doctor play’. And it’s so satisfying for the seniors and their families and grandchildren to see them online…I think community initiatives are something where participation happens at all levels, where people can define what they want to do. Seniors are involved with the whole process, they research the problems together and find the best possible solutions to act out, and what you see on the website are their stories. There is a lot of staff involvement, but they came up with the idea, they are the players, they come up with the stories, we just put it up…and when they use it, they look at in groups…it is not meant to be looked at alone, it is viewed by groups of seniors at different locations…They look at the website and talk about it together.

A crucial difference here from other community-networking initiatives described is that technology and the internet is a logical outcome that addressed the community’s needs, not a starting point. In this instance a website made sense as a means of replicating and sharing a bottom-up, locally defined seniors activity that had already achieved much success.

Funding tends to look at needs, but it must look at assets too. Sometimes it makes more sense to start from the assets rather than needs. Empower people on their assets before you address their needs. If you start from their assets, people more readily reveal their true needs down the line. People tend to talk better about their needs when they feel good about what they have. When you say, ‘if you are a victim of abuse come to this meeting’, no one comes! Who wants to define themselves as victims and needy first?

Fostering the development of local social capital and networks; promoting local information sharing and community engagement; providing opportunities for community involvement in volunteer activities.

Clearly there was an agenda through CAP and CLN [Community Learning Network] of increasing the capacity of the organization too. If the organization actually improves then the community capacity improves also. One of the impacts we were hoping to make was that staff would look for ways that ICT could enhance what they were already doing, and this is where we saw some success, more evident clearly in the CLN project.

There was overwhelming consensus amongst community practitioners that ‘fostering the development of local social networks and social capital and promoting local information sharing, community engagement and volunteering’ begins not with community members, but with the community organizations, practitioners and volunteers themselves; how they do community services and what they see in the communities they serve. Overwhelmingly when asked what the keys are to fostering the development of local social capital, information sharing, community engagement and volunteers; practitioners inevitably shared their thoughts on needs assessment. Many were troubled by the lack of needs assessment that has been conducted around community-networking initiatives; that by not doing needs assessment around community-networking initiatives, funders and practitioners are not adequately seeing the possibilities and limitations these initiatives open and close. Therefore, central to the discourse of how community networks foster the development of local social capital, networks, community


engagement and volunteering, are questions of how the needs of community organizations, practitioners and members are assessed, established and addressed.

It is imperative that community practitioners are trained in needs assessment. We need a systematic way of assessing the skills and training of our community members. I had to figure this out mostly on my own. I watched what the other people who work at the center do. Because our CAP site works out of a big community center I have lots of opportunity to learn from others, but more remote locations may not have such access.

Indeed, training on the ‘what’s’ and ‘how’s’ associated with conducting needs assessment is the funding community practitioners want most for their peers:

You are dealing with a lot of people who have limited learning experience, so you need practitioners who understand that and can deliver a wide variety of curricula to a wide variety of levels of experience. You need professional practitioners who are trained in education and specifically needs assessment.

Interestingly, other social programs that have been in existence for many years that address issues of adult literacy emphasize the crucial importance of needs assessment. Indeed, government funders who deal with questions of adult literacy, like the Department of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC), have funded projects in the past to investigate best practices for assessing community-learning needs. Yet surprisingly, the practice of conducting needs assessment to address questions of traditional literacy has not been translated into approaches to addressing digital literacy, specifically with respect to CAP. Clearly, the same kind of focus and research is required if we are to better understand who community-networking initiatives best serve, and how to best foster, develop and support constructive learning environments around them.

Federally with HRDC [HRSDC] we were chosen as one of two projects to create an assessment model for community-based adult literacy education support. This is a three-year project; we will have recommendations for what adult education in a community setting needs. The government is giving us an opportunity to present from our position; what are the best ways of supporting the learners who access our [adult literacy] programs? And the learners will have an opportunity to express their experience. It’s up to us to talk to our constituents and decide how to best do that, we’re in the process of coming up with what we feel will be the best way to do that. We want to make sure the learners have a meaningful voice. It becomes problematic if the government doesn’t have community consultation on the questions to be asked, without this the questions become very irrelevant. When there is community consultation on development of assessment tool then there is a better understanding at all levels.

The practitioner followed up with the following description of her adult literacy group’s practices related to needs assessment:

We always need to know what is out there in terms of needs assessment; what are the best ways of doing it, of evaluating. We need more opportunity to evaluate different kinds of models. We don’t need training on the specific questions to ask, we need training around the whole idea of doing needs assessment—the best ways to do it. What models of needs assessment are available and which are most appropriate given the unique goals of the community centre and its groups. We want to learn which situation warrants which model. We actively seek this out in terms of our knowledge base. This is definitely changing in our organization; we are definitely increasing our capacities and interest in gathering this type of information, and we want more funding to do it.


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In addition to discussing needs assessment when talking about community networks fostering the development of local social capital, information sharing, and community engagement, practitioners often expressed concerns with how basic skills training around ICT have been offloaded onto community groups and their volunteers by government through community-networking initiatives like CAP.

We have lots of volunteers that are willing to teach the basics, but it’s a real dilemma. What is the appropriate use of volunteers? When does it become exploitation? I think one of the values of a volunteer model is that it often allows it to be flexible and responsive to specific learning styles of individuals, whereas staff models tend to drift more to formalized models. Volunteers create a different kind of learning environment that people respond to differently. So it’s still troubling in terms of exploitation, but there’s lots of intrinsic value to it. There’s a lot of people in our community who do not see reciprocity coming from their work or are marginalized from traditional work environments, and they definitely see some benefit to the control involved in being a volunteer. Partly these are legacies of what it means to be poor or vulnerable. There are a lot of people who see the benefit of volunteering and we need to create ways of meaningfully doing that…

One possible way of meaningfully engaging volunteers was described as follows:

We want to maintain our technology to ensure that hardware stays up to date and is useful, but we also want to access training dollars because as new software programs come into the market we need to know how the products work to help people learn them for the professional markets. We need training dollars for our volunteers. It would be a good reciprocal agreement to train volunteers on new software, they get the training as a perk for volunteering, and then they train our community members on how to use the software. We depend on volunteers to train volunteers, and the program could be more bleeding edge and be a real benefit to the labor market if that training was professional and done properly. But the government funding is half-assed. Technology is not enough. We need to put money into human resources.

Indeed, once again the desire of community practitioners to have the ‘third spaces’ associated with community-networks adequately funded comes to the fore, here related to volunteers. Indeed, a lack of emphasis on ‘third spaces’, short-cycles of funding, and an emphasis on technology, access and business discourses are reflective of some of the deepest concerns held by community practitioners with respect to the future of community-networking initiatives. Practitioners spoke at length about the reporting processes involved with community-networking initiatives and how such practices limit the development of local social capital, information sharing and community engagement by not adequately capturing the full scene that manifests around community networking initiatives—all directly related to how such projects are funded.

Troubled by the government’s insistence in reporting on a business framework and language for community groups similar to those of small businesses, practitioners emphasized that while not-for-profits can perform like businesses and could be subjected to a business model; they have radically different end goals and reporting mechanisms need to reflect this different environment.

I don’t want to think we only have one paradigm to work with. The bottom line shouldn’t just be economic sustainability. My own personal politics is extremely resistant to this. I want numerous ways to talk about [CAP] that are legitimate.


Where government and business are concerned with bottom-line measures of efficiency and effectiveness, community practitioners are far more concerned with the affective dimensions of community, looking to foster and experiment with different forms and practices of citizenry that cannot be captured through quantitative bottom-line reports and measures that merely reflect technological access and employment opportunities.

The whole [CAP] reporting process is very poor. They don’t ask the right questions, they ask irrelevant questions. The reports are out of line with the activities that are happening. The success stories don’t capture the significance that interns are having. Their narratives are not captured well. The stories interns write are not informative, they are just a contract requirement, they write one paragraph, there’s no accounting for all the struggles and failures, only the successes.

So says one community coordinator:

The whole process is onerous; it’s a terrible internal state in government. The amount of government resources spent on reporting and accountability is unbalanced with the delivery of these programs. Too much time is spent on administration and reporting, and changes to reporting mechanisms themselves. There’s no question that we need a better combination of quantitative and narrative, and the legitimacy of narrative evaluation needs to be further examined and understood. Practitioners need to be taught how to provide more than just success stories; the government tends to want to hear success stories, but the failures are what we learn the most from.

When describing the CAP Youth Internship initiative, one practitioner described the following with respect to the reporting:

People who have been fearful and marginalized around technology need very special attention to gain access. As a result these are very special and challenging and daunting sites to put youth interns into; they have no specific training to deal with these populations who are often homeless, hooked on drugs or are suffering from AIDS. There’s little recognition and pay for the Youth Interns and it’s a high emotional investment. So you can imagine, it’s very hard to get across what has gone on at a site in one page. It’s difficult to get the experiences across, and they feel no one is going to read it anyways. Using snapshots to assess a whole experience is difficult especially if it is always a success story. This can be very exploitative of the experience. Overall community groups sometimes have a negative attitude towards technology, ‘what am I going to do with technology and an intern when I have welfare checks to hand out?’ Sometimes they don’t even call us back, they don’t see how any of this will make their lives better. It’s not like in the business world where they see the point of using technology.

On Discourses of Funding Community

Clearly, how community networking is funded and what funders see through community networking initiatives is crucial to the future success of such programs. All of these stories and anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that merely funding technological access and training provides absolutely no guarantee of increased participation in either the information society or overall broader social participation, nor the development of local social capital, information sharing, community engagement and volunteering. And further that the tendency of funding bodies to see community centers as business units, community members as clients and jobs as return-on-investment has severely limited the growth and evolution of community-networking


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initiatives at these community centers. Indeed, practitioners at both community centers were adamant that fostering community participation around ICT necessarily requires funding for the human resources that foster the emergent social spaces manifesting around sites like CAP, and continued long-term funding to maintain and support these ‘third-spaces’.

One of the greatest challenges reported by almost every community practitioner are the short-cycles of funding associated with community-networking initiatives. One community coordinator with extensive business formation described the funding landscape as such:

Everyone is on contract so they are always reacting, reacting, reacting and we have to maintain no overhead…so when we see some other way of getting funding we say ok we’ll change ourselves…we want to help people, but we keep shifting and changing, so even though we are not-for-profit, we have to struggle to find money, compete and survive. For us, success is getting projects funded. It’s ironic that in the business world it is about fulfilling goals and objectives and here it’s about money and survival. Celebration happens when the project begins, not when it ends and the goals are actually fulfilled. By the middle of the funding period we’re already struggling to secure future funding. We are always operating in survival mode.

When asked for suggestions on how funding could be improved, the coordinator had this to say:

Industry Canada needs one centralized body to get the funding from that then distributes it to community organizations to alleviate the huge bureaucratic burden, so it really becomes a public good that you can’t get rid of. If it were one big old contract you would have your job for years. We [CAP sites] render ourselves irrelevant alone. It’s funny, you find a situation where the not-for-profit world is money focused and not collaborative and the for profit world is goal oriented and certainly more collaborative now then they’ve ever been…and I’m thinking, what am I, in the world of the opposites?

Indeed, the concept of a central funding body for CAP sites was an idea that was brought up by practitioners in numerous interviews. One social worker suggested:

The hope would be that the central funder would be very high level, not interfering with how funds are spent. You would certainly want regional governments making decisions on the funding and aboriginal communities should have the ability to bypass a central funder. If the government is trying to create a more effective way of understanding the impact of the funding, the commitment has to be longer. The instability of not knowing whether the funding will be there next year is endemic to ICT programs. Every few months you are in the same position, and it creates an incredible de-stabilizing effect. Different momentums are generated and lost as uncertainty surfaces…I think the international development community has struck a better deal, they get 5 year funding blocks and it might be a model to explore. The procuring of funds is more intense, but if you meet the basic minimums you get it for 5 years, and this doesn’t compromise the effectiveness of competition.

When asked what kinds of pressures the CAP site faced from external forces to the community centre, one CAP coordinator responded:

First and foremost budget, almost every year we have the same problem with the budget: Will it exist next year? Will we get the funding? The budget just pays my salary, we still need money to run workshops, and support all the community activities that emerge around the CAP site. Securing the budget for the next year is the big pressure. Our CAP site is very important to the community, so the center will try to ensure that funds will be available even when the CAP program ends this year.


Clearly short-cycles of funding associated with these government sponsored ICT initiatives are a very real dilemma faced by these community centers. The entire process lacks efficiency and effectiveness as midway through funding (every 6 months for CAP), community centers, and specifically CAP site practitioners, are forced to place their efforts into securing funds for the coming year.

The funding cycle is a real short cycle. It takes time to build community engagement with a program and then the funding comes to an end. Evaluation and bringing in new ideas is very important, but it is frustrating to have to end a program and then restart a new one based on funding cycles.

Numerous practitioners reported that underlying the problem of short-cycles of funding is a lack of recognition of ICT access and training as a public good, unlike how libraries have been positioned. Industry Canada’s decision to not centralize the CAP program meant that community practitioners were almost always on a high state of alert with respect to their funding, knowing how easily such small dollar amounts can be pulled back from community centers with no public awareness.

…when the funding is so short-term, the skills end up going someplace else sooner than later. There is no continuity so it all falls by the wayside, and the burden goes onto the community program to keep it buoyant. We don’t want the projects to just drop. We’re coming to the end of CAP funding, and we don’t know what we will have for this in the future…and I don’t know what they are waiting for because it is clearly working. We’re a big organization so we can afford to keep someone on for a bit but if you are rural and a stand-alone CAP site, I don’t know what they would do. The government doesn’t have direct responsibility for us like a hospital or school board, so they manage to cut the purse strings, and then community organizations have to scramble. We fund our CAP site and they [the government] are only covering 15% of the cost and maybe we should say we can’t do it, but we are so afraid of losing it that we don’t stand up. Instead we get a whole lot of stuff offloaded onto us. That’s not to say that a volunteer-based program is not important to a community, but there needs to be a recognition of what the actual costs are of running these programs. Besides human maintenance and support, who pays for hydro, payroll, etc? CAP just funds one coordinator, but we feel the pressure to maintain these programs overall.

Another CAP coordinator had this to say:

There is a lot of competition between community groups for funds. CAP sites are not a uniform group; they have lots of different interests and stakes. Some CAP sites are very enthusiastic about socio-economic models…I heard a proposal that regional business development hubs would become the central sources of funding for CAP sites, $75,000 each, and they would decide who to fund. In the end that would just benefit small business. They’re not going to fund social services sites or human resources sites. It would be very shortsighted, and it doesn’t take into account a healthy social democracy.

Indeed, numerous community practitioners expressed concerns that business discourses are increasingly pervading decision-making and reported that they are disturbed with the increased reliance of government and corporations on reductive quantitative measures for funding community services. “I remember we had a meeting with a prominent bank to discuss financial programs and the meeting almost broke down immediately because they kept referring


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to markets, and not communities.” For these community practitioners such business discourses force them to do community services like business providers and see their constituents as clients in need of jobs. Such a discourse of being and seeing their roles and the communities they serve deeply troubles and concerns many community practitioners and they have thought and struggled long and hard through this economist sensibility.

Terms like profit and return on investment could be understood as a social agenda. There is a way of socializing the business agenda. It’s not so much that community workers don’t know the language of business they don’t know how language works, and that you can take terms that you think are alien or enemy and re-work them with your own interpretation. Right now social economy is on the table, and it’s up to us and the voluntary sector to make a strong push as to what this is. If a lot of the groups can get together and define social economy in a way where investments are less tied to corporate agendas and more tied to revitalizing communities that would be great. If there was less business language it would be a good thing too, but it’s not what social workers need training in; they need an education on cultural media studies—the way the media and marketing plays a role. Cultural negotiation is a very political process and we need to know how to intervene, social workers need to be political in that way. We are now about clients and service delivery, this is a very neo-conservative agenda and a lot of the terminology has a distinct business echo to it. You effectively measure your program by the numbers, by access, by how many people have gotten jobs. It’s much like what universities are turning into; it becomes a corporate terrain and training ground, making it instrumental to one end; jobs! We are really struggling now, and the struggle is over learning. HRDC [HRSDC] is about lifelong learning now, and we are trying to re-articulate what lifelong learning means to other ends besides jobs! We have to learn to address alternative lifestyles. What about the people who live in the pockets of society? Who live by temping, by going from job to job; these people do not necessarily want careers and jobs for life. Generally we have to re-work the middle-class bias in government programs and language around jobs and job creation. As it stands the job is the ultimate end and that works against community!

Quite clearly community-networking is about so much more than access to the information society and employment. Community practitioners and government need to continue to work together negotiating what is meant by social capital and social economy in the hope of establishing a funding landscape that positions access to technology, training and human support for constructive learning environments as a public good, where community is collectively negotiated and investments are really for the long term.

Certainly with respect to Industry Canada their agenda was not our agenda. We saw this as an opportunity; a doorway to community…and one of the tensions that manifested immediately was this notion of Industry Canada that once the technology was there and demand was established then it had to self-finance itself. So we demonstrated that there was a demand but no real way for self-financing. We went through many thoughts of how do we create economic opportunities for Foreign Trained Professionals, reach out to small businesses that can’t afford services that these professional can provide. Quite soon on we abandoned any idea of self-financing and we said to Industry Canada that this is not your sole responsibility but you do have a responsibility since you surfaced the need, and we should work together to develop the model that will be appropriate. Not surprisingly, they never anticipated the human factor in all of this. Yes the technology is a great thing, but they still don’t know how to respond to and finance human needs.


Conclusions

There is little question that the tensions between ‘consumer’ and ‘citizen’ discourses of community, as described by Feenberg and Bakardjieva (2004) in their investigation into online communities, are rife in the landscape of Canadian government supported community-networking initiatives. Indeed, the results of this research demonstrate that community practitioners perceive a pervasive tendency in government of seeing community centers’ as business service providers; community practitioners as employees; and community members as clients surfing, picking and clicking their way to employment opportunities and civic participation; and this deeply troubles them. Indeed, there has been a constant tension at play in the Canadian government supported community-networking landscape between these consumer discourses of community and the more citizen-based discourses that seem to guide how most community practitioners do community services and see the communities they serve.

Where the consumer discourse privileges statistics and numbers to efficiently and effectively measure and fund community-networking initiatives, community practitioners see community as a much broader, more complex and nuanced phenomenon in which community is understood as

“…the scene in which a large share of human development occurs, [and] is a fundamental human value…’communities are social entities that have two elements. One, a web of affect-laden relationships among a group of individuals, relationships that often crisscross and reinforce one another…The other a commitment to a set of shared values, norms and meanings, and a shared history and identity’” (Feenberg and Bakardjieva, 2004, p.2).

In the citizen discourse, community is not something that is viewed, picked and/or clicked, but rather hinges on ‘affect-laden relationships’ between people. Community is also not something that can be purchased, measured or tracked quantifiably, nor does it fit neatly into neo-conservative justifications of return-on-investment. As Feenberg and Bakardkjieva (2004) have argued and as the results of this research have clearly shown, “unlike the consumption model of the internet, the success or failure of online community has no easy measure, no dollars and cents return and there is no NASDAQ quote to still doubts and settle debates" (p.2). And it is precisely the continued insistence of the Canadian government on a business model and language of community and quantifiable measures of access and employment opportunities as measures of success—compounded by their desire to neatly tuck community-networking initiatives into a neo-conservative procrustean bed—that has severely limited their ability to understand what is really happening on the ground in community centers across the country participating in government supported community-networking initiatives.

Indeed, the results of this research demonstrate that the sense of community generated through community-networking initiatives like CAP in Canada, have little to do with access to technology and the internet and everything to do with what Clark (2003) and Sandvig (2003) have characterized as the ‘third-spaces’ emerging around technology-based community projects. This research has clearly shown that access to such valuable, physical, on-the-fly ‘third-spaces’, where site users have the chance to meet others and develop social networks, plays a far greater role in fostering a sense of community than mere technological access and training alone. And while such ‘third spaces’ are difficult if not impossible to capture with quantifiable measures, this research clearly demonstrates that the contribution of these ‘third spaces’ to social capital development and integration, particularly with respect to seniors, new immigrant communities, and especially foreign-trained professionals is crucial to increased civic participation; all of


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which further emphasizes the increased imperative of Canadian government to identify a mechanism for capturing such stories and narratives and incorporating them more prominently into decisions surrounding the funding of community-networking initiatives.

Further, this research has also demonstrated that Loader and Keeble’s (2004) cautioning that as much as new ICTs may be a source of empowerment for community groups and members, they may also be a means of their subjugation, alienation and marginalization is to be taken seriously. We need look no further than the story recounted by the single women’s housing community organizer: For her community members, older low-income women, the practice of accessing the community-network for housing information does not open the possibilities for a better life and livelihood through increased participation in the information society; rather it clearly limits such vision and imagining. For these women, accessing the community-network is in fact a source of stress in their lives; another job that they must learn and complete that offers little to no payback. As Loader and Keeble suggest, community practitioners do in fact need to be on guard for such ambiguity in their negotiations and dealings. Not surprisingly therefore, many expressed desires to be more adept at assessing the needs of their constituents, expressing a need for more funding related to training community practitioners around the best practices involved in conducting needs assessment.

Clearly, the tensions and contradictions between consumer and citizen discourses of community that exist between community practitioners and government with respect to their unique practices and views need to be resolved if Canadian government supported community networking initiatives are to have greater success in the future. Community practitioners and government need to continue to work together to negotiate and define what is meant by ‘social capital’ and ‘economy’ and how to better fund initiatives that target such notions in the future. Crucial to this negotiation is the Canadian government’s desire and willingness to tackle the problem of reconciling narratives and stories (both successes and failures) into the mechanisms of quantitative decision-making. As one community practitioner so passionately put it: ‘The government needs to spend more time on conversations like this…they need to take the time to listen to these stories…money is thrown around and it must be all used, but no one cares to understand what is happening with it.’


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