Connected Kids: Community Information System Design and Development.

People mean many different things when they discuss democracy in the context of new technologies. However, two relatively consistent themes focus on the advantages that new technologies offer: (1) information democracy, ability to generate more, better information and distribute it to larger audiences, (2) improving the operations of liberal democratic governments by better interaction between citizens and their governmental representatives. However, a major impediment to achieving these goals is the problem of access and the fast development of tools that will allow users to post content to an information system. Further, some of the most useful information should be shared across organizational boundaries. The challenge here is to find ways to satisfy diverse organizational criteria for usability and functionality, while simultaneously enabling community organizations to contribute to a cross-organizational community information system. Connected Kids is a collaborative project bringing social science and computer science researchers together with representatives of city and county government in RPI's home town of Troy, New York and a wide variety of not-for-profit youth service agencies to develop a community information system (for details, please see http://troynet.net/ConnectedKids )