a personal and group identity. The term was brought to prominence by Michael Gurstein. Michael Gurstein says that community informatics is a technology strategy or discipline that connects at the community level economic and social development with the emergence of community and civic networks, electronic commerce, online participation, self-help, virtual health communities, "Tele-centres", as well as other types of online institutions and corporations. He brought out the first representative collection of academic papers, although others, such as Brian Loader and his colleagues at the University of Teesside used the term in the mid-1990s. CI brings together the practices of community development and organization, and insights from fields such as sociology, planning, computer science, critical theory, women's studies, library and information sciences, management information systems, and management studies. Its outcomes—community networks and community-based ICT-enabled service applications—are of increasing interest to grassroots organizations, NGOs and civil society, governments, the private sector, and multilateral agencies among others. Self-organized community initiatives of all varieties, from different countries, are concerned with ways to harness ICT for social capital, poverty alleviation and for the empowerment of the "local" in relation to its larger economic, political and social environments. Some claim it is potentially a form of 'radical practice'. Community informatics may in fact, not gel as a single field within the academy, but remain a convenient locale for interdisciplinary activity, drawing upon many fields of social practice and endeavour, as well as knowledge of community applications of technology. However, one can begin to see the emergence of a postmodern "trans-discipline" presenting a challenge to existing disciplinary "stove-pipes" from the perspectives of the rapidly evolving fields of technology practice, technology change, public policy and commercial interest. Whether or not such a "trans-discipline" can maintain its momentum remains to be seen given the incertitude about the boundaries of such disciplines as community development. Furthermore, there is a continuing disconnect between those coming from an Information Science perspective for whom social theories, including general theories of organisation are unfamiliar or seemingly irrelevant to solving complex 'technical' problems, and those whose focus is upon the theoretical and practical issues around working with communities for democratic and social change Given that many of those most actively involved in early efforts were academics, it is only inevitable that a process of "sense-making" with respect to these efforts would follow from "tool-making" efforts. These academics, and some community activists connected globally through the