We are an incredible diverse community of researchers and practitioners from
 all over the planet, with a great potential to change the world. Each one of
 us is making their contribution in their own way, be it in trying to make
 communities work as an activist, reflecting upon ways to improve the
 community-way-of-things as a researcher, or working behind the policy making
 scenes to influence government and corporate decision making. 

 Acting as a community, this potential is so much larger than going it alone.
 We have some very important communal resources. First, there are the
 conferences, like the CIRN Prato series, where we meet face-to-face,
 exchange ideas, and recharge our mental batteries. There is this mailing
 list, for the practical exchange of information and the ongoing discussions
 about who we are and what we do. And of course, there is the Journal of
 Community Informatics, which is starting to have a significant impact as a
 scholarly medium and as an instrument to build the standing of our field.
 Larry Stillman and Mike Gurstein, in particular, deserve a great round of
 virtual applause for all the hard and often underappreciated work they have
 been doing in developing and maintaining these resources in the past years. 

 However, this is not enough. Too much of our knowledge is scatterered,
 hidden in individual or organizational websites, or, even more inaccessible,
 in our heads. The result is that many of us are left out of the mainstream
 and that the mainstream has to do without the expertise of many of us. In
 particular, but not only, the voices of many of our colleagues from the
 South are still insufficiently heard. Only very few can afford to attend the
 face-to-face conferences. And even those who can, lose track of what's
 happening the moment they leave after another all too inspiring event.
 Mailing lists, being such a fleeting medium, are good for becoming aware of
 what is happening, but not so good for building a coherent, comprehensive
 joint body of knowledge.  Harvesting our knowledge resources, making them
 accessible, and collaborating at a distance is way too much work to be
 coordinated by a few individuals. What has been lacking so far, is a dynamic
 knowledge repository necessary for CI research and practice to be supported
 more effectively and efficiently. A resource that is not maintained by a
 few, overworked individuals, but by the community as a whole. 

 At the end of this year's Prato conference, we decided that we were going to
 take up this challenge by setting up the wiki-based CIRN "Living Knowledge
 Base", as a successor to the ciresearch.net static website. In the past few
 weeks, quite a few people have already contributed to this wiki by fleshing
 out its initial structure, procedures, and by providing seed content. In
 particular, I would like to thank Steve Thompson, who has done a marvellous
 job in taming the raw power of the wiki and turning it into something
 useful, Larry Stillman, for his enthusiastic support, paying the bill, and
 being Larry, and Sriram Guddireddigari for agreeing to handle your rapidly
 approaching tsunami of membership applications. As a result of all these
 efforts, today we can proudly launch the CIRN Living Knowledge Base:

  http://cirn.wikispaces.com/ 

 Some of its main resources include lists of people, project, and
 organisational profiles, which you can browse by world or region:

  http://cirn.wikispaces.com/People
  http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Projects
  http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Organisations

 Conferences and events from now on will be maintained at this page:

  http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Conferences+&+Events

 A list of "Social CIRN" Web 2.0 resources can be found here:

  http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Social+CIRN

 A whole range of resources, including Topics, Research Questions, Working
 Articles, Documents, Bibliography, Bookmarks, Wanted will be developed as
 well:

  http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Resources

 As this knowledge base is not only for, but especially _by_ the community,
 good governance is key, We tried to come up with an initial formulation of
 CI Ethics, a Charter and Procedures:

  http://cirn.wikispaces.com/CI+Ethics
  http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Charter+&+Procedures

 The wiki already contains the beginnings of other useful resources, we would
 recommend you simply browse through it and get a feel for what's there.

 Now, most importantly, what about YOU? Everybody is too busy, but we think
 that you should not just browse, but get actively involved as well, to
 fairly divide the workload and ensure legitimacy. To this purpose, we have
 paid a lot of attention to the roles people play, be it wiki or people
 administrators, and "page stewards", who are responsible for creating and
 maintaining the content of a particular page. For an overview of currently
 active community members, as well as vacancies, see:

  http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Contacts

 Now, how do you GET INVOLVED yourself?

 1. Register for the Wikispaces wiki and the CIRN Living Knowledge Base.
 2. Create a personal profile, and, if applicable, one or more project or
 organisation profiles.
 3. Become a wiki admin or page steward.
 4. Take responsibility for an unassigned task.

 Detailed instructions can be found here:

  http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Getting+Involved

 This is just the beginning of what, we hope and expect, will become a
 vibrant community building resource. If we, as a _community informatics_
 community can't get our act together, who can? So, we urge you to get
 involved and be part of this exciting and much needed initiative for us to
 have a bigger say in the direction our one world is heading.

 Aldo

 --
 =================================================================
 Aldo de Moor, PhD
  CommunitySense - community informatics research in practice
 Netherlands
 ==================================================================

With this lead, let me make a pitch again for the CIRN Living Knowledge Base, which aims exactly to make us CI researchers and practitioners eat our own social media dogfood:

http://cirn.wikispaces.com/

We will post to this list quite regularly to ask members to participate and help build the knowledge base. By building it bit by bit, we should be able to get critical mass in a reasonable amount of time. Our first aim is to have something going on there before the next Prato conference.

So, in the spirit of "not asking what CIRN can do for you, but what you can do for CIRN", if you haven't done so yet, please add your personal profile to the wiki. It will take you only 10 minutes, but by having enough people do this, we can actually start to get a presence to the big world out there that we are trying to influence...

Please do your bit and follow the instructions at:

http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Getting+Involved

Thanks,

Aldo