Communicating local governments: Implementing community informatics

The main goal of the project is to do an explorative analysis of the ways in which local communities in Norway adopt IT innovations and implement new digital services, and how their efforts are related to improve social capital and social values of citize ns. The emphasis is on providing a classification of implementation strategies and an assessment of them in terms of visions, instruments, activities and presumed social benefits. In addition, we will analyse what local governments perceive to be their ma in assets as well as main challenges when working to implement new digital services. The analysis will focus particularly on the following characteristics of local implementation efforts and strategies: - Visions and goals for digital services - Level of responsibility, access to 'champions', relationship between local government and local vendors - Mainstreaming versus substitution, persuasion strategies and marketing efforts towards local government employees and users of services - Prioritised areas o f digitalisation and criteria for technological choices. What is done to avoid de-contextualisation. - Strategies for coping with non-use. Parallel information about the activities and strategies of local government and local firms will be collected, and we will look at matches and mismatches between supply and demand with respect to technologies and systems. The overall analysis will be integrated into a social capital perspective from urban informatics. Output will be focussed on the following: - Con tributions to the international research literature on implementation of public digital services. - Contributions to the international research literature with respect to theoretical and conceptual benefits gained from integrating a social capital view in to the analysis of how local communities try to make gains from developing digital services. - A user-oriented text about strategies and locally applicable methods for constructing useful computer-usage profiles.