Community Networking and Civic Participation: Surveying the Canadian Research Landscape
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the relationship between new ICTs and civic participation by examining the role played by specific kinds of ICT-enabled community organizations, namely community networks, in fostering civic participation in local, geographically-based communities in Canada. Existing research and anecdotal evidence suggest that community networks foster civic participation in the emerging information society by providing access to new ICTs for those threatened by digital exclusion, and by providing, via training and other services, opportunities for their effective use within communities to promote communication, information sharing, community involvement, social development and local learning. The paper documents community networkings achievements in civic participation by reviewing the growing research literature on community networks, and by examining a number of case studies from an on-going research project of the Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN). Early results from CRACINs research reveal a number of noteworthy successes, while raising questions for future research as well. The paper also finds that community networks in Canada currently face a number of challenges that jeopardize their ability to sustain, let alone advance, the gains made in recent years.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".