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CQL '90 Proceedings of the conference on Computers and the quality of life
The PEN project in Santa Monica: interactive communication, equality, and political action
Journal of the American Society for Information Science - Special issue: information resources and democracy
The HomeNet field trial of residential Internet services
Communications of the ACM
The use and impact of the Blacksburg Electronic Village
Community networks (2nd ed.)
Community dynamics and the BEV Senior citizens group
Community networks (2nd ed.)
Communications of the ACM
Better home shopping or new democracy?: evaluating community network outcomes
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940
America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940
Community Networks--Lessons from Blacksburg, Virginia
Community Networks--Lessons from Blacksburg, Virginia
Weak ties in networked communities
Communities and technologies
Participatory design in community computing contexts: tales from the field
PDC 04 Proceedings of the eighth conference on Participatory design: Artful integration: interweaving media, materials and practices - Volume 1
Collective efficacy as a measure of community
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Modeling online participation in local governance
dg.o '05 Proceedings of the 2005 national conference on Digital government research
When opinion leaders blog: new forms of citizen interaction
dg.o '06 Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Digital government research
Modeling online participation in local governance
dg.o '06 Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Digital government research
Local Groups Online: Political Learning and Participation
Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Collaborative framework for supporting indigenous knowledge management
Proceedings of the ACM first Ph.D. workshop in CIKM
Logging home use of the internet in the Blacksburg Electronic Village
International Journal of Advanced Media and Communication
Viewpoint: empowering communities with situated voting devices
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Wild at Home: The Neighborhood as a Living Laboratory for HCI
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) - Special Issue of “The Turn to The Wild”
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A community computer network facilitates civic participation by providing pervasive local resources online and by connecting people to local communication and discussion channels, public and non-profit organization leaders and members, and many other civic resources. We present findings from longitudinal data (two rounds between 2001 and 2002) of a stratified random survey of 100 households in a mature community network, the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV). We offer exploratory and confirmatory analyses, including a 'civic effects' model, that show demographic characteristics (education, age) and psychological factors (extroversion) explain staying informed, collective efficacy, group membership, activism, and using the Internet for civic and political purposes. The model further explains differences in respondents' involvement in local issues once they go online. Informed activists with multiple group memberships become more involved in local issues once going online, whereas informed non-activists become less involved once online. Our study suggests that in order to play a constructive role in creating a more civil society, community networks should explicitly pursue strategies that encourage community activism. One way to do this, given the strong role of association membership in activism, is for ISPs to offer bundled standard Internet applications at low cost to non-profit community groups (e.g. email for leadership, online discussion for members, web space). Community networks should also promote and support the use by local groups of innovative tools for non-experts, such as easy collaborative web-based tools for information production and collaboration.