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The Journal of Community Informatics provides an opportunity for Community Informatics researchers and others to share their work with the larger community. Through the application of a rigorous process of peer review knowledge and awareness concerning the community use of Information and Communications Technology is, in this way, being brought to a wider professional audience.

Communities and technologies are key to community informatics. These technologies cover a wide range, with sophisticated computer and networking technologies only being one end of the spectrum. Face-to-face and other non-computerized technologies can be just as important, if often not more so. ICTs should therefore always be read as covering this whole spectrum.

Human Centered Systems in the Perspective of Organizational and Social Informatics

The aims of clinical and translational research are to achieve a better understanding of the pathogenesis of human disease in order to develop effective diagnostic, therapeutic and prevention strategies. Biomedical informatics can play an important role in supporting this research by facilitating the management, integration, analysis and exchange of data derived from and related to the research problems being studied. A key aspect of this support is to bring clarity, rigor and formalism to the representation of 1. disease initiation, progression, pathogenesis, signs, symptoms, assessments, clinical and laboratory findings, disease diagnosis, treatment, treatment response and outcome, and 2. the interrelations between these distinct entities both in patient management and in clinical research, thus allowing the data to be more readily retrievable and shareable, and more able to serve in the support of algorithmic reasoning.

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium of leading biologists, clinicians, informaticians, and ontologists who develop innovative technology and methods allowing scientists to create, disseminate, and manage biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. Our visionis that all biomedical knowledge and data are disseminated on the Internet using principled ontologies, such that they are semantically interoperable and useful for improving biomedical science and clinical care. Our resources include the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library, the Open Biomedical Data (OBD) repositories, and tools for accessing and using this information in research. The Center collaborates with biomedical researchers conducting Driving Biological Projects to enable outside research and stimulate technology development in the Center. The Center undertakes outreach and educational activities (Biomedical Informatics Program) to train future researchers to use biomedical ontologies and related tools with the goal of enhancing scientific discovery.

Drug Ontology is developed by the nosology project at Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. This project seeks to discover new therapeutic uses and adverse effects of drugs by finding diseases that have gene expression profiles similar to those of the known indications and adverse effects of drugs. The objectives of the Drug Ontology are: * defines a core set of concepts and relationships that allow us to integrate information from multiple sources, * provides classification services along multiple axes, * provides links to external sources so that data not in the ontology can be queried from these sources.

From the start of the 21st century, a new form of employment has emerged in developing countries. It employs hundreds of thousands of people and earns hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Yet it has been almost invisible to both the academic and development communities. It is the phenomenon of "gold farming": the production of virtual goods and services for players of online games. China is the employment epicentre but the sub-sector has spread to other Asian nations and will spread further as online games-playing grows. It is the first example of a likely future development trend in online employment. It is also one of a few emerging examples in developing countries of "liminal ICT work"; jobs associated with digital technologies that are around or just below the threshold of what is deemed socially-acceptable and/or formally-legal.

Science Museum Learning Collaboratories: Helping to Bridge the Gap Between Museums' Informal Learning Resources and Science Education in K-12 Schools