Working Towards Continuity in a Highly Volatile Community Network

Sustainability has been identified as a key, yet controversial issue in community informatics and community networking research. This paper describes an action research study which utilises the PAD methodology of participatory design and sociocultural animation to investigate an urban apartment complex comprising approximately 160 residents in Brisbane, Australia. The site is characterised by a high turnover of residents and thus offers various opportunities to study different facets of sustainability in the context of systems design for residential community networks. The paper explores three aspects of sustainability: community capacity building, neighbourhood identity and the continuity of the online community network itself; and how these aspects apply to this case study both online and offline. Preliminary results indicate that (a) working towards increasing conventional forms of social capital may lead to high barriers of entry and is thus counterproductive to ensuring sustainability in highly volatile and diverse communities; and (b) there is a need to move beyond technology for collective activity and work towards peer-to-peer networking tools which allow for a fluid, diverse and individualised swarm of residents