1. What is a Community Information and Participation System (CIPS)?

A CIPS is a computer system that combines a number of technologies to create an information providing system for communities that would allow them to provide feedback on the information they want and how they want it organized. A CIPS tightly coordinates a suite of computer programs which provide a number of services such as a specialized community search engine, a computer conferencing area, email services, e-library facilities and multimedia functions such as audio “netcasting”.

2. What are the components of a CIPS?

At the core of the system is an information-providing tool: it could be a multimedia netcasting show as well as a search engine designed especially for a particular community. This information-providing tool must be useful enough to gather the attention of a particular community and guarantee that its members will come every now and then to visit the CIPS site and be easy to access (no login required, unless there are privacy or security concerns). In the case of the community search engine, this is designed to search only the web sites of a particular community. That community can be geographic or interest-based, such as all web sites of the municipalities of a region or the SSR practitioners international community . The strength of such a search engine is that it can focus searches on a particular subset of the web and searches that subset more deeply. In the case of multimedia netcasting, the site could air a weekly show that community members could access on-line or download. The show would focus on the main topics of interest for that particular community and the production team would accept comments and contributions to the contents of the show at any time. The information-providing tool is the core element of the system, but a complete CIPS also needs a way for participants to communicate their information needs. They need an electronic space to present their questions to the community which uses the web sites and the organizers of the sites. This is provided by an e-conferencing system tailored to facilitate collaborative learning and collective knowledge building. The idea behind the whole concept is that the real source of information and knowledge in a community is not the static information sitting in sites presented in ways the site organizers presume is the way people want it. The people who visit the sites have more knowledge and information than can ever be packaged into websites. The task is to marry the information in the web sites constantly with the people who interact with it.

3. Is this just theory?

This is a new way of looking at the World Wide Web, but it already has a couple of pilot application which are operating successfully. The oldest is SoliComm.net - the Solidarity Community Network. This is a CIPS designed especially for the world's union movement. It is operated by the Training Centre of the International Labour Organization in Turin, Italy. It searches over 300 labour websites while providing its community members with free email, conferencing, e-library and web site hosting services. The latest is example is Radiolabour. This CIPS presents two different radio shows each week: a short 5-minute highlight of the main news of the week related to the labour movement and a full 30-minute show with detailed news. Radiolabour is operated independently by a community of labour journalists and activists widely dispersed over the globe. They interact with each other and the listeners through the CIPS conferencing system. These examples have proven that the CIPS concept is not only an innovative way of looking at the interaction of people and the World Wide Web but that the concept is workable.