Community Networking as Radical Practice

"As daily life online becomes ordinary, and as capacity to engender community online becomes an ordinary function of daily life, what is effective in advancing community networking as a community of practice? How can we get a clear view of community networking as radical practice in social change?" With these questions, Garth Graham engages readers in an essay that addresses "the end of the community networking movement" - while at the same time announcing and developing the foundation for "the start of something else".

Graham begins by providing an analysis of the status of "community networking guides". He notes that these guides tend to assume that "a dense structure" of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is already in place or accessible, thus perhaps already alienating those "starting from zero in a 'digital divide.'" Graham's Internet research also revealed that efforts to write community networking guides seem to have died off, with the most recent "publication" dates being in 2001; most of these "are more 'historical' than useful", he asserts. As an illustration, he points to the decline and disappearance of the Global Community Networking Partnership (GCNP), which he describes as "dead, not just dormant".

To explain this organisation's - and the movement's - latency, Graham begins by elucidating two key assumptions about what the use of technology means:

1. "According to Ursula Franklin, technology is the 'the way we do things around here.'...I think it's reasonable to modify her definition to include 'the way we see things around here.'
2. Internet Protocol (IP) is a symptom of a shift in emergent global culture toward the autonomy of individuals to define themselves. It is not a cause of that shift..."

Having established this grounding, he continues by pointing to the centrality of participation and equal power in online governance. "When all actors are of equal value in sustaining the dynamics of open systems then anyone who interacts (anyone who speaks) can alter the structure of interaction. Unless that can happen, the systems become static (i.e. they die)." Thus, community networking, he explains, "assumes a set of social and cultural changes of which the Internet is a symptom and then asks: 'What new social forms are the most viable in that altered environment?' Community networking's answer is that the form or process called 'community,' re-defined by being online, is the one most viable. In that view then, community networking is not defined institutionally but as the shared experiences of communities of practice related to understanding how community is achieved in the online context as a public good and an essential socio-economic goal."

Networking, for Graham, is at core a matter of relationship. He asserts that "The attempt to connect, whether through weak or strong ties, is always a movement towards morality and responsibility in relationship....[T]he active and willing participant in the life of community, the responsible person, the integrated self makes no assumptions about the system's capacity to self-organize. To me, this brings humanity, tolerance, and humility with respect to that state of openness. If I am open to my experience and you are open to your experience, then the 'we' that occurs through the cooperative [non-zero sum game] sharing of experience emerges more coherently that it would through the noise of prior assumptions. What has deepened is relationship. In society structured by autonomous individuals and machine-based agents, we gain, should we chose to use it, increased capacity in the expression of the self."

Graham hypothesises that public administrators hang on to the idea of the centre, rather than take the idea and significance of self-organising community into account in public policy for socioeconomic and political change. He notes, "That idea of the centre they cling to cannot hold. Up to the point of its failure, everything they do will be predicated on the need for control to ensure its survival. Even their efforts to 'decentralize' are merely efforts to retain control in changing circumstances."

Another dimension to the notion of "community networking as radical practice in social change" is highlighted by the issue of the changing role of the individual in society. Whereas a citizen in a democracy has a right to peace, order, and good government (and has a corresponding responsibility to say what that is), "[a]n individual in a network has an absolute responsibility to act authentically in the representation of themselves. They are responsible for cooperation in relationship, because a network is a non-zero sum game or it is nothing. The authority of structure inherent in self-organization is that the network exists and nothing else....It is, therefore, more than the 'community networking movement' that has died. It is that the community of practice called community networking is the most likely zone of re-socialization to recognize that the constituents of social structure have changed so as to render the very idea of 'movements' as irrelevant to individual action on social change."

To conclude, Graham highlights 4 structural principles shaping social networks and the realities of daily life online:

1. "In community, it is a person's authentic response to the situation, not their professional authority that contributes to the social glue of trust."
2. "The concept of 'communities of practice' is at the heart of an understanding of how the dynamics of informing, knowing, and learning shape a political economy of ideas. Governance in self-organizing systems that are open and that learn is different from governance in hierarchical systems that control."
3. "The absolute need [is] to defend (non-negotiable) the Internet as a commons."
4. "The challenge with ICTs is not to provide simple and passive 'access' to the ICTs. Rather, it is to provide the means by which individuals in their communities can make effective use of these technologies for productive as well as other processes."

In his final words, Graham concedes that he has raised more questions than offered answers, but notes that "Ideas of governance grounded in the notion of the nation state cannot absorb the fact of community online as an essential structural principle guiding public policy without radical change in their understanding of the nature of authority and control." It is local governments, he indicates, that hold the promise of generating "intense shared social context". In short, "Effective community networking then occurs when individuals act cooperatively to make the Internet 'happen' more rapidly in support of the need for community and the need for change in local governance."