Community Informatics & I

In this essay, inspired by the timeliness of our chronologically shared symbolic birth (the journal’s inaugural issue and my professional career as a faculty member) I briefly discuss and critically analyze the influence of community informatics upon my professional journey, in our mutual symbiotic growth, intersections and divergences. I also share my insights and reflections of the process that might influence readers’ own thinking about the past, present, and future of community informatics and its identity, intersections, growth, and more. This opportune moment allows me to draw upon intersections with my current work in social justice and inclusion advocacy and trace my privileged positionality to the “nurturing intellectual embrace” of community informatics that opened many proverbial doors and areas of impact over the years. In the process, I use evidence chronicled in my current curriculum vita that serves as a roadmap providing documentation “on the record” of milestones and activities referenced along the journey as I also develop ponderings of the past, current, and future emergence and growth of community informatics. In tracing key directions of growth through my own lens of experience and reality with community informatics shows how broader aspects in the larger society, academic world, and information field have strongly curtailed its emergence and adoption. Considering such factors directly might be helpful to shape its positive placement and positionality moving into the future.