Michael Gurstein (October 2, 1944 – October 8, 2017) was a Canadian best known for his work in the development and definition of community informatics as the area of research and practice concerned with enabling and empowering communities through the use of information and communications technology. He was a native of Edmonton, Alberta, but grew up in Melfort, Saskatchewan and did his first degree at the University of Saskatchewan in Philosophy and Politics. Gurstein held a PhD in Social Science from Cambridge University. Early working life Gurstein worked as a senior civil servant for the Province of British Columbia in 1972–1974 and for the Province of Saskatchewan (Department of Northern Saskatchewan) in 1974–1975. He then established and ran a management consulting firm, Socioscope, undertaking research linking organizations to information technology. While working as a management adviser at the United Nations in New York (1992–1995), he was offered a post as Associate Chair in the Management of Technological Change at the University College of Cape Breton. While on Cape Breton Island, he founded the Centre for Community and Enterprise Networking (C/CEN) as a community-based research laboratory (what has now come to be known as a living lab) exploring possible applications of information and communications technologies to support social change in what was then one of Canada's most economically disadvantaged regions. C/CEN, established in 1996, was a pioneer in online conference management, among other areas, and held the first online conference with simultaneous translation using IRC and court translators to provide text translation in French simultaneous to the direct meeting being transcribed in English. The centre also undertook the first NetCorps placement (in Angola) and provided online support to the local Cape Breton music industry. Community informatics Gurstein's book Community Informatics: Enabling Communities with Information and Communications Technologies (Idea Group, 2000) and the conceptual framing for community informatics grew out of his experiences in Cape Breton. The book was the first major publication in the community informatics field, and introduced the term "community informatics" into wider usage as referring to the research and praxis discipline underpinning the social appropriation of information technology. Within the area of community informatics, a major contribution has been Gurstein's introduction of the notion of "effective use" as a critical analytical framework for assessing technology implementation superseding approaches based on the more commonly accepted frameworks such as that of the "digital divide". The co-edited book Connecting Canadians: Investigations