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Volume 2, number 1: January 2005Access, Communities and Information TechnologyIntroductionWell, it took a while, but welcome to another issue of Tangentium. The three papers in this month's issue are connected to the linked themes of access and communities. Often, our definition of "community" draws boundaries around who is included and who excluded. These exclusions may be explicit. In a purely online community, access can be controlled by passwords. Knowledge of these keys can be restricted to those who meet a particular profile or who have signed a registration agreement (a method of "inclusion" which may involve a substantial fee and in any case is easy to revoke). The inclusion of certain hypertext links as opposed to others constitutes a subtler means of control over what visitors to particular portals are easily able to access. This month's first feature essay - Coyne, Lee and Parker's Permeable Portals: Designing congenial web sites for the e-society - is a fascinating review of how these factors overtly or covertly influence the process of designing for the WWW. But there are also more implicit, or even unintentional, ways in which boundaries can be drawn around communities. They can even be excluded entirely from participation in public or economic life. Fiander's essay, Rural life and internet accessibility: A partnership of exclusion? discusses how, in the information society, rural areas are disadvantaged by their lack of access to necessary infrastructure. Already, digital divides are opened up between those who can access the Net in their own homes and those who are dependent on public facilities such as libraries. Rural areas feel the divide even more keenly as they lack both these public goods themselves and/or the transport networks needed to access them. Information technology, however, can also help communities in their quest to gain access to policy decisions. In Scotland, there is a legal requirement to consult "community councils" in any decisions which affect them. An IT system that supports the work of these councils is being piloted in a selection of rural and urban communities. This project is introduced in Macintosh and McKay-Hubbard's paper, Renewing Democracy with 'E-Community Councils'. All this month's papers were contributed to the 2004 IADIS conference on the e-society, held in Ávila, Spain, in July 2004, and have been reproduced with permission. NewsIt is likely that Tangentium will continue to be published on an irregular schedule, but we hope from now on to release two or three issues per year. If you would like to be notified of when a new issue is due out please e-mail the editor and you will be added to our mailing list. We still need authors and reviewers. Remember that Tangentium is now a fully peer-reviewed journal and we are in the process of acquiring an ISSN number. Please read our submission guidelines if you are interested and note that we actively encourage contributions from students and/or anyone who does not hold a "traditional" post in academia. | |