ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 we considered what we meant by community practice and illustrated the existence of an inextricable link to community policy.We argued that changes in the culture and mind-sets of policy and practice were necessary, especially in the integrated cyclical activities of policy development and implementation, for both to successfully achieve their goals. However, such changes will not occur without a deepening and enrichment of knowledge about how communities work and what they need. The processes of data/ information collection, classification, and analysis that will enable such an augmentation of understanding of community practice and policy in the network society is the responsibility of research. More specifically, it is the responsibility of those researchers, both academics and practitioners, who form the emerging field of community communication technology research – commonly known as community informatics (Schuler, 1996; Gurstein, 2000; Keeble and Loader, 2001; and Marshall et al., 2004).
