A revised version of this paper was published as "Changing Expectations of Inclusion, Toward Community Self-Discovery" in the Summer, 1999 issue of the Journal of the Urban and Regional Information Association (11:2), pages 43-51. Online versions in .pdf format are available from the URISA Journal online archive (may require password access) or as posted on the author's website.

Please Note: This draft paper has been written as a contribution to the discussions and work product of the NCGIA / Project Varenius meeting on the topic "Empowerment, Marginalization and Public Participation GIS." It is a working document under ongoing revision. Please contact the author with any reactions or suggestions you see as needed.

Abstract

This paper aims toward resolution of certain informational dilemmas and imbalances that now face individuals and communities. A strategy of action is proposed, termed "community self-discovery," that is grounded on the assertion of rights that are not yet regarded as generally binding, but which may prove to be essential to achieving justice in any future information society. These "rights of representation" are conceived as belonging to individuals and groups, and as applying equally to representations as produced by the information systems of public and private institutions alike.

This approach to information departs from the current tendency to view information as a kind of object, sometimes classed as a "resource" that can be owned, exploited and sold. While information in its most elemental form, as "data," exhibits some of the characteristics of material objects, the output of information systems is presented here as being representations or patterns. These are non-material sets of relations that emerge in the form of system outputs in response to questions that have been posed.

Asserting that the origin of information is in the questions that are asked, rather than in managed facts or data, requires that a distinction be created and maintained in two integral aspects of the information process. These are presented here as "common information" (the object part that results in system-generated representations); and "counterpart information" (the essential part that is tied to the questions that are asked and to the contexts of interpretation within which information systems operate).

The redefinition of information rights as presented here has two essential components, each of which can be applied in any sector, private or public. First, any individual or group has a right to know how they are specifically represented at the data or record level, in any database. Second, anyone has the right to know the rules by which any system created information from the intrinsically valueless data elements from which it is derived.

Finally, an attempt is made to identify individuals in any community who may be likely to ask these questions. Individuals, as leaders of grassroots organizations or as professionals such as adult educators, librarians, and journalists seem to be the most likely candidates. The proposal is made that academic researchers may assist those individuals, to the extent they are ready, in their attempts to ask meaningful questions of and about information systems.

Motivation

This paper is motivated toward constructing a theoretical frame and method which will be appropriate to community-based information seeking and use. The orientation will be aimed at beginning to construct a model of community learning or self-discovery that can be put to work in many settings.

Information systems are tools that both enable and inhibit this process today. These systems include spatial and geographic information systems, the specific technologies and relations they embed that are of most immediate concern to us.

To invoke a phrase such as "community information seeking" is likely to presume notions of community as well as notions of information that may themselves stand in the way of the goals implicit in community learning and community self-discovery. One step in shifting away from the constraints embedded in our techno- relational structures, or information systems, will be to provide definitions that at least complement the everyday notions of community and information.

Information Systems are Systems of Representation

Information systems are concerned with the creation and management of representations. These representations, or patterns, the system outputs, are based upon combinations of small quasi- entities called 'data.' Though these 'data' in some sense may be considered as the essential constituent units or atoms of an information system, the data themselves have no meaning, and are valueless in and of themselves. Information systems are always concerned with the organization of these 'data' into representations, or patterns; this is the purpose toward which these social-technical devices are designed. The patterns, or representations, are what allow meanings to be constructed.

The definition of information systems as the producers of patterns of relations, or representations, is reflected in the NCGIA Initiative 19 origins of this meeting. The original proposal for that initiative (online at http://www.geo.wvu.edu/i19/origins/proposal.html) contains the phrase "systems of representation" and the root word representation* is used 50 times in it. John Pickles further elaborates this theme in his contributions to the book Ground Truth. (Pickles 1995a) and (Pickles 1995b)

This notion, that the constituent units of an information system are its outputs as representations, is an essential element in the explanation of "common information" versus "counterpart information" below. It also is a key to releasing us from the information-as- object model, and is a pointer toward information systems and the asking of legitimate questions.

Given that the system has produced an output, and that we can call that a pattern of relations or representation, we can assume that this output has been made in response to something. In this paper this something is called "the question," and a range of permissible questions is often designed into an information system, or is the result of convergent understandings between any system and its users or operators. It is in this "question," broadly stated, that all information has its origin.

A productive analogy to the process of representation in information systems, and rights and responsibilities that might be related to these, may be found in examination of some of the ethical issues that have emerged in the activities of anthropological and ethnographic film makers. By extension, we may individually face these issues when we take tourist photographs, or are ourselves photographed against out will. Although established laws may be clear (for instance, allowing photojournalists freedom to photograph faces in crowds), in some cases there are personal aspects to these activities that will cause us to pause. This is very similar to the pause we should encounter when representing others, often with only implicit consent, in our databases.

David MacDougall's treatment of this theme, in an article titled "Whose Story Is It?," (MacDougall 1994 (1991)) situates the questions in the very real context of professional practice. He states that the ethnographic film profession acts with increasing "awareness of the politics and ethics of representation." (At p. 27) Politics and ethics are not laws; this formulation may help us in our case, as we begin to assert rights that we (today) do not have, broad rights to know about our representations, as individuals and communities, as produced by information systems.

Information: The Asking and Answering of Questions

All of what we call information originates somewhere. It is possible to think of this origin as being in a formal knowledge base or well-specified data set. I prefer to frame the origin of information in the asking of questions. One question, then, that can be asked of an "information system" is: Whose questions was this system built to answer?

Most information systems will be mute on this topic. They have been built to respond to questions at a different level, a level of design that does not recognize the set of all possible questions. They are usually organized around the production of responses to a specific subset of these.

If we would like to know the answer to this broader sort of question, a "why-type" question rather than a "what-type" question, we must address ourselves to software design engineer or to some other interpreter; or this might be inferred from the visible operations of the system at work. Such a question requires the entry of a human being, possibly to be considered an essential component of the machine's metadata.

This example illustrates the notion that any machine must necessarily limit the range of questions that are likely to be asked of it, and that stability in the domain of questions asked and answered may occur over time. If one information system, or pattern- generator, does not work for today's purposes, there may be other candidate machines for any questions left unanswered. It appears likely, then, that many decent questions wither away before they find a system that is fit to receive them. For some purposes, this is all to the good. In this light, information systems may be as much in the business of killing legitimate questions as they are in that of answering them, except for a pre-selected few, which they are able to address with endless competence.

Is it possible that the coming era of totally distributed computing will overcome the situation outlined above? The problems may be rooted world of stand-alone systems today. Increasing in the future, millions or billions of people and organizations will maintain their own public / private data sets, somehow sharing information whenever firewalls and access rules allow. A term has been created for this future network of "information rather than of machines," the "interspace." (Schatz 1997) Questions will be launched on the backs or in the pods of what seem to be small, autonomous bugs that are configured as homing devices for required answers, or search results. If one of these returns empty we may appropriately launch it again. The crawlers will be assisted by universal translation software, in a process of "vocabulary switching."

Returning to the question that introduced this section: who is this interspace crawler being designed and built for? Somehow, I don't think it is being built for me. When I require the services of this instrument, it is likely that I will visit my local crawler terminal (formerly library) and ask the crawler manager (formerly librarian) to please "execute a search." It is a service for which I will gladly expect to pay.

Distinguishing Common Information from Counterpart Information

To assist in the creation of meaning through producing patterns of representation is the object of information systems. This formula points toward the notion that there are at least two major and conceptually distinct processes at work. These systems do not create meaning, they "assist" in creating meaning. The production of meaning lies somewhere else.

Let's look generally at the construction and operation of these systems. For system purposes, definitions are created, values are assigned, and the system is populated with 'data' chosen with internal consistency, all oriented toward conformity with the systems internal rules of pattern creation. There is a necessary counterpart to all of this, the domain of possible or expected meanings that are assumed to be consequences of the patterns, or representations, that have been produced.

An essential point to be made here is that the production of meanings is never causally determined by the set of outputs of representation that are created by the information system.

This point seems to be often lost when we talk generically and every day about 'information' and 'information systems.' We impute responsibility for interpretation to the information system itself, and fail to realize that this situation may be fine with most system owners and designers. At the least, they are validated in the definitions that have been embodied in their data-transforming machines. At worst it marks a manifest transfer of values from one sector to another without explicit permission or even recognition.

This chronic confusion over responsibility for use of system outputs, or unwillingness to recognize it, urges us on to begin to speak consistently about these two processes, data transformation versus the creation of meaning, in two distinct terms. Since there is not one "information" but at least two, for now they may be distinguished by the terms "common information" and "counterpart information," at least until a more elegant formalism is established. (See Note 2)

Systems of Representation vs. Information as Resource

Holding the fundamental unit of an information system to be a representation based upon (otherwise valueless) data elements and their rules of combination is an attempt to avoid an object view, and to assert at a dialogical relation always holds between machine inputs, machine outputs, and interpretation. This approach goes against the grain of thought that presents information as a resource. Possibly data elements may be treated like physical resources, but their combination into information cannot.

In a basic text, Sharing Geographic Information, Onsrud (Onsrud 1995, at p. 294 ff.) presents information as "resource," deriving the concept directly from Harlan Cleveland (Cleveland 1985b). Both Cleveland and Onsrud concur in their view that there is something about information as a resource that is "very different from the traditional resources of land, labor and capital" (Onsrud 1995, p. 295). In spite of several apparent differences that they enumerate, "information" somehow ends up exactly in the same market position as the other three, having made a "sudden emergence as a valued marketplace resource." (Onsrud 1995, p. 295). Though they agree that information is now primarily to be found in market contexts, they seem to claim that its fundamental differences will eventually serve in a positive way to somehow undermine many other market assumptions, including the perpetuation of certain hierarchies in the social structure or in the organization of production and consumption.

An alternative analysis may bring us closer to the case. Land, labor and capital may in fact have been closer to information, in earlier times, than our present concepts of them would allow. Our current concepts are conditioned by at least three centuries of trading in these "resources" according to the terms of the market. That they may have once been closer to what "information" is now could be allowed if the analysis of Karl Polanyi is accepted (see, Ch. 6 of The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, "The Self-Regulating Market and the Fictitious Commodities: Labor, Land and Money" (Polanyi 1957 (1944))

By emphasizing that information is a resource, but somehow a "different" resource, yet amenable to commodity treatment in the market, it is possible that Onsrud and Cleveland have actually undermined the basis for conceptual advances that they may otherwise wish to promote. Certainly the transformation of "information" into a marketable commodity in its primary aspect is not on their agenda. Braman's discussion of defining information in public policy contexts (Braman 1989) illustrates how carefully our definitions of information must be made. After exploring several alternatives, including the resource view, she asserts her conclusion: "The first decision that must be made is about the shape of the society that is desired." (Braman 1989, p. 242)

This short description of two basic information definitions can be completed by reminding ourselves that behind all definitions lie agendas. Braman states this explicitly; we may have to probe for the agenda behind Cleveland's formulas. His argument presenting information as resource appears in substantially the same form in his book The Knowledge Executive: Leadership in an Information Society. (Cleveland 1985a) In that work he identifies his audience as "generalist leaders and especially ... those who lead by getting things done -- the executives." (Ibid., p. xvii) Though he claims to see liberating elements in the provision of computers for marginal groups such as "neighborhood organizations" and "American Indian tribes" (Cleveland 1985b, p.194), the resulting expanded political participation may in turn be seen as a problem, as when he cites the "costs of openness" as a threat to "radical reform" (Ibid., p. 190). To rely on a view of information as resource that proceeds from this base may be a mistake if building participatory institutions at local levels is a goal.

Note: For other discussions and critiques of the resource view, see: NPR Morning Edition story on data mining (Amato 1998) (available online at http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/archives/1998/980910.me.html; Vincent Mosco's critique of the resource view (Mosco 1989, p. 21-24); Oettinger's capstone article in the special issue celebrating the Centennial of the journal Science (Oettinger 1980); and Cleveland's note to many others who discuss a resource view (Cleveland 1985a, p. 230)

Challenges to the Legitimacy of Public Institutions

Change is rapid or at least is increasingly apparent in the relations among governmental and administrative institutions. A longstanding and healthy skepticism about the government's role in the lives of citizens is being replaced by deep-seated loss of legitimacy at all levels of public leadership. Growing aversion to the role of money in politics, including the rise of media politics, and public revulsion against the standards of political and personal morality among leaders has led the majority of citizens toward an anti-political or a-political reaction that can be characterized as a crisis of legitimacy.

If causes are sought, several may be found as pervasive in the political sphere. First, our overall system, which rewards membership in one of two authorized parties and drives out views not held within norms espouses by those parties, manifests "a history of excluded political alternatives" (Burnham 1982, p. 17) Along with this structural condition, there are to be counted the movements toward reinvention of government (entry of management principles of the firm); devolution (transfer of powers and responsibilities to the states, often without funding); and the rise of global corporations as the effective seat of international power, with the rise of corporatist public institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Most of these developments can be linked to what Vincent Mosco identifies as the shift in mediation of social claims from legitimate political institutions to the market sphere, ... the now popular view that public policy ought to be made by those with marketplace, rather than political, power." (Mosco 1989, p. 35) In the information and communications sphere he calls this drift the "pay-per society" and states that it "... supports those who contend that market rules should replace, as fully as possible, any government or other public intervention that helps what are identified as less powerful groups." (Ibid., 35)

Mosco offers as corrective: "We need a new definition of self- and collective-determination that would restrict the gathering of information to those areas that communities and their elected representatives have determined to be in the public interest." (Ibid, p. 38)

The spirit of this corrective is also found in the present paper, though with less optimism that actual information-gathering can be limited to the extent he suggests. Rather, a strategy of awareness of what is gathered and how representations of individuals and communities are managed by government and corporate data handlers, coupled with alternative decentralized and autonomous control of self-representation are suggested as strategic responses to the present situation.

In any case, the rise of market-oriented ideologies and rise of corporate power has accompanied the erosion of legitimacy in public institutions. All levels of government are implicated in these trends, due to the formal integration of administrative functions from national to local, including tightly controlled regulatory and budgetary mutual obligations.

Informal Governing Bodies

One expression of the changing legitimacy of formal structures is the rise of quasi-governmental organizations such as Blue Ribbon Commissions an "stakeholder" groups. Often these are constituted by official public bodies, sometimes to assemble expertise in difficult policy areas, sometimes to generate a microcosm of public opinion where this is not expressed within an agency or legislative body, and sometimes to create a form of endorsement and forum for the appearance of debate when policies are already well advanced toward formal adoption. Perhaps convening a stakeholder process is tacit recognition by a constituted body that the structure of "excluded alternatives" must be mitigated in a particular issue area.

While at times the formal institutions may recognize their limitations through establishing informal means, more often they appear to be in quest of a vehicle to validate policies already in place. Often a patina of consultation, public participation and the appearance of pluralistic decision making may be invoked to divert attention from the direct responsibility of authorized decision makers for their acts and the interests that motivate them. (Greider 1993)

Information technologies may be introduced into this mix in at least two major ways. First, public policy choices are increasingly about technology choices themselves. The ongoing national debate, to which only a few have been invited, surrounding telecommunications and electric power deregulation, and related issues of pricing and specific technology choices, are examples. {In note, name the many telecommunications policy forums that have been invoked in the past few years, with little substantive impact on policies}

A second realm in which stakeholder groups have been convened is in the area of natural resource management policy. Complex issues surrounding forest management and logging, fisheries management, and the impact of industrial and agricultural pollution on critical habitats have all resulted in stakeholder group initiatives. In many cases these are seen, especially by those stakeholders who have not been invited to sit at "the table" as diversionary, delaying, or rubber-stamp processes at best, at times termed "window dressing" to legitimate policy directions well underway.

In Greider's terms, "Information, not dirty money, is the vital core of the contemporary governing process. ... raises an unsettling paradox about the nature of democracy and what exactly has gone wrong with it. 'Information' that leads to 'rational' choices is supposed to be a virtuous commodity in the political culture. Democracy, it is presumed, can never get too much of it." Information, in fact, does not of itself produce democracy: The reality is that information- driven politics, by its nature, cannot produce a satisfying democracy because it inevitably fosters its own hierarchy of influence, based on class and money." (Greider 1993, p. 46) It is this perspective, a critical perspective on the relationship between 'information' and democratic society, that must motivate our examination of issues of technology choices in this society. See also Dervin (Dervin 1994)

In many of these stakeholder cases, the technical aspect is instuduced under the rubric of "good science" {Note: as in the ongoing Maine forestry debates, in which each side attempted to gain the high ground of "good science." Schoen highlights this in his critique of the "criteria of technical-rational analysis" and asserts a more fundamental concern in "how problems of social policy and service delivery systems are set." (Schoen and Rein 1994) This policy "framing" always precedes the invocation of stakeholder processes, and always limits the range of outcomes to be expected.

Stakeholder groups and other quasi-governmental policy forums are mentioned here mainly to highlight the erosion of ability in established governmental forms to come to grips realistically with the range of challenges they face, including direct challenges to their own legitimacy. The third point of entry of technical issues into this process is right here. Most public information systems, systems for knowledge creation and representation, have been developed to meet the purposes of existing administrative and institutional structures, whose legitimacy is now being called into question. Thus, the legitimacy of the technologies and their knowledge base is increasingly wrapped up with the erosion of legitimacy of the institutions that created them.

Unraveling the Techno-Bureaucratic Policy Knot

The very real problem of making strategic choices toward effectively unraveling the knot portrayed above is a practical task that emerges from the theme "empowerment, marginalization and public participation geographic information systems." This is not a set of problems amenable to small adjustments or the reliance on technical improvements. The scope of the problem in the GIS domain alone, a significant subset and testbed for analysis of information systems in general, is portrayed by Goss (Goss 1995b 474); also, see (Goss 1995). While Goss convincingly portrays the specific consequences of uncontrolled proliferation of geodemographic information systems, a more general awareness of unintended social consequences of technical adoptions is given by Abler. Giving counterexamples to the dogma that more communications infrastructure is better, especially at the social and geographic peripheries, Abler states that Rural Free Delivery and parcel post "were the deaths of the crossroads store in the rural United States," and more recently, "electronic banking has been the death of locally owned banks throughout the United States." (Abler 1991, p. 42)

Given the complexity of the processes at work and the scales of differences in power relations involved, it is no surprise that strategies for action, for unraveling the knot, range between inadequate and nonexistent; and this situation is in the interest of many who are responsible for information systems at work.

Goss's depiction of the problems presented by the geodemographic industry is not matched by any substantive suggestions about what we as citizens may expect to do about it. He cites a "hyperconformist" response as suggested by Baudrillard, or playfully disruptive tactics as found among the Situationists. (Goss 1995b, p. 193) Neither approach takes our responsibilities and rights seriously. Rather, they seem bound to result only in a strengthening of the capacities of a system that is already portrayed as being out of control. In some sense, these responses reflect the sort of capitulation that characterizes the erosion of public participation generally. Our challenge is to accept the "responsibilities" of competence" invoked by Von Foerster nearly 30 years ago: "The so-called 'communication channels,' the 'mass media' are only one-way: they talk, but nobody can talk back. The feedback loop is missing and, hence, the system is out of control. What cybernetics could supply is, of course, a universally accessible social input device." (Von Foerster 1984 (1971) 599, p. 210) This social input device, in terms of the present paper, would be a general right and duty to ask questions both of and about information systems.

The problems in clearing such a path are the major concern of Daniel Kemmis in Community and the Politics of Place (Kemmis 1990) Kemmis takes community seriously, and he claims that public process is not well-served by the sorts of public participation that are now in place. For instance, his analysis of public hearings indicates that they often do much to polarize communities around issues, and often do little to achieve effective solutions. (Kemmis 1990, p. 52 ff.) A hint at the seriousness with which Kemmis wishes to rethink public orthodoxies is his analysis of the word 'public' itself, concluding: "Because we use the word so much, we not unnaturally assume that it must mean something." (Kemmis 1990, p. 5) The same reservations must be directed toward the customary uses of the word 'information.'

Common and Counterpart: Integral Information Concepts

Though the assertion is made in this paper that common information and counterpart information are "conceptually distinct" and that they are not joined by a "causally determined" link, there are still important ways in which these concepts are intimately involved with each other. Their reciprocal relationship should be made evident.

First, data as the elemental substance of common information must be defined, and systems designers rely on the dominant values and relations that are evident in the natural and social worlds as the sources of categories by which data is defined. Further, the representations that are based on these definitions serve as a sort of mirror in which these values and relations are reflected and thereby reinforced. This process may be the key to the frequent narrowing of possibilities, reduction of diversity, that often seems to accompany the expansion of information technologies, often in spite of the enthusiastic promises of liberation that they carry.

In terms of a traditional cybernetic model, this convergence would be a form of successful negative feedback, resulting in an implicitly desired stable state. To some extent this stable state, convergence and variety reduction may be a positive good. This would especially be true if the stable state toward which our self- representations are converging has been accepted in prior agreement to be a common good. Certainly this can be seen as a process of social stabilization, possibly a welcome good within a framework of general institutional disintegration (or at least constant redefinition). Our pause will come when we begin to have intimations that the reduction of variety in our public lives may be the source of many of our institutional troubles, perhaps being another manifestation of Burnham's "politics of excluded alternatives." The stability of convergent social representations should not give us much comfort.

In a time of rapid institutional change such as ours, the disappearance of diversity may be the disappearance of the possibility for creativity. Anthony Wilden's definition of information refuses an information-as-object model, and while it is related to order, it is a perceived order and not an objective order that his information stresses: "Information is a relationship, not a thing. For a given system, information represents order or organization, and noise, disorder or disorganization, or more strictly non-order or non-organization. The relationship between order and disorder is relative to its context -- physical, biological, human, historical. Disorder does not necessarily mean randomness or chaos, only that it is not perceived or not perceivable as order." (Wilden 1987, p. 183) He later quotes Gregory Bateson on the source of the "new": "All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints -- is noise, the only possible source of new patterns." (Ibid., at 189, quoting from "Cybernetic Explanation").

While we might say that systems of common information competently handle knowledge, it is only in the domain of counterpart information, all that is not ordered according to the requirements of common information systems, that the potential for creativity gains. It is a possible danger that property relations will do to common information what they have already done to the "fictitious commodities" of labor, land and money, and that sources of counterpart information will be starved for the materials needed to creatively solve the problems at hand. Or, to not create those materials, through the pervasive believe that they lie in some other hands.

This presents one further mystery of information as resource, not enumerated in the lists of Cleveland and Onsrud. That is that the information, common information, is actually produced initially and collectively by the people in whom counterpart information resides. The basis of common information markets neatly neglects to remind us that the information that is marketed originated in a vast public domain made up of those who are also the targeted customers or worse, outsiders. (For the insular position and information self-sufficiency of outsiders, see (Chatman 1996))

The Rights of Representation

Wilden's identification of informational for creativity in problem-solving brings us back around to the central topic of communities. In a time of rapidly changing relations among formal institutional structures and of serious questions of legitimacy at all levels, there is a slowly growing sentiment that many pressing problems can only be addressed effectively at the community level. Though the honesty of its invocation at times may be questioned, this sentiment seems to lie behind the various stakeholder processes convened at local levels by authorities in other formal jurisdictions. Outsiders, sometimes well-informed and motivated outsiders, are convened in policy debates but are not included in the framing of those debates. In some cases, the stakeholder process is invoked in order to sidestep or undermine alternative frames that are truly unpleasant in the dominant administrative view.

Without pursuing the exact complexities of how any community may be defined, it seems adequate to state with some assurance that the notion of community is fluid, not amenable to fixed boundaries of location and time, and often self-defining. That administratively- convened stakeholder groups are not "communities" is asserted, even though included interests are often designed to mimic community diversity in microcosm. {At this point a note on early definitions of "stakeholder" may be appropriate. The term comes from gaming at cards, and the "stakeholder" was the trusted nonparticipant who was charged with holding the stakes; as totally neutral outsider, this original sense has been totally lost in contemporary stakeholder public policy processes, in which those at the "table" are actually presumed to represent the deeply held and often deeply divided contesting positions on the issue at hand. So some extent, stakeholder processes show many of the weaknesses that Kemmis identifies in traditional public hearings. Actual possibility of creative change through accommodation is seldom an available choice, if only because the stakeholder group is usually denied authority to make decisions and is condemned to advisory positions only}.

That physical, geographic location is often an essential element in community definition is obvious. My neighborhood, the streets of Hamlin and Mayo, is a well-defined community that has often acted in a coordinated manner on common interests. Who is included in this community is easily defined, plus or minus a few abutting lots with addresses on other streets, and a few transient tenants on the block. The justice of these inclusions and exclusions may be questioned in any specific case; that this is a community and it is locally self- defined cannot.

Location also plays a role when communities form in reaction to outside threats. This is seen in community action against physical invasion, including invasive siting decisions made by outside forces, organizations or agencies. Sometimes a community is faced with rearguard action, taking account of community insiders who are complicit in assisting outsider designs. This is the seedbed of community conflict, a condition that appropriately designed community information systems, counterpart information systems, may hope to address.

Communities may also bridge localities or geographic boundaries that are quite serviceable for many purposes, but not for all. In one economic development project known to this author, one town, a close cultural and economic partner with others nearby, is excluded from the development plan due to a county line. In a counter-case, towns along the Maine-New Brunswick border have active resource sharing agreements, ranging from social events to shared fire services, in spite of the existence of an international boundary line.

The fact is that common information systems, including GIS/LIS, are most comfortably put to work in dealing with well defined boundaries like ownership parcels and town lines. As to the meanings embodied by those parcels and lines as expressions of community values or even shared economic values, the common information systems have little to say. To a great extent concerns about "access" to information revolves narrowly on how sharable any system's definitions are when applied to any specific case. If any one parcel record represents location, ownership and land use, access questions center on who will be given those particulars, and at what cost.

There is a sense, less recognized, in which common information is put to work in creating communities and establishing values, often without the knowledge of those who eventually become members of these aggregates. To the extent that community-building is self-determined, it is a project in which counterpart information is mainly put to work. In an aggregated, other-defined community (and can this be called community at all, or is it rather something different, a sort of socio-economic packaging) individual characteristics are combined in ways that only benefit the operators and owners of the aggregating system of representation. If mutual caring is thought to be a characteristic of humans in community, then these system-produced packages are the antithesis of caring: certainly no person feels "cared for" by a common information system; it is common knowledge that system operators care little for the people represented via the capacities of their machines.

Though these owners and designers (socio-packaging engineers) may claim that their work benefits real people, often through the efficiencies claimed by niche marketing, most individuals would express great surprise at the quasi-community groupings they have joined without their will, and the names given to them. {Check Goss for specifics} I not only dwell in a house on Hamlin Street and am a citizen of Orono, Maine and the United States of America, I also suspect that I have been a member of National Demographics and Lifestyles' "Kurt and Heidi" cohort (Goss 1995b, p. 187) and that I am headed toward MicroVision's "Mainstream Families (MVG2) (Goss 1995)

I should pause to state that I don't really think that all of this social segmenting and clustering has much effect on my life. But how would I ever know? In any case, empirical measurement of impact is less important than a tendency, already finding an example in this text in the form of information's move from an object in perpetual re-creation, costless creativity, in the public sphere, toward becoming a generally acknowledged thing, quite well suited for the market. Goss stresses this concern in a persuasive way: "My concern over this technology is not whether geodemographics really can accurately predict profitable marketing strategies, but rather that geodemographics displays a strategic intent to control social life and that the ideological conception of identity and social space within the model may become real -- in other words, that the assumptions will be validated at the strategies take effect." (Goss 1995b)

Though we often think of these issues under the general frame of "privacy" and that the effects are of most concern to individuals, these examples and Goss's critical comments introduce community into the quotient in a very real way. Moving from private concerns to community self-definition is our present strategy and goal.

It is actually from this point, where social packaging confronts authentic community (however it may have come into existence, however it is self-defined) that there may be an opportunity to unravel the knots of institutional illegitimacy.

A Unified Approach to Information Access Rights

One question that individuals or communities may wish to ask is "how am I, how are we, represented in these information systems?" Corollary questions include, "in what ways are we already complicit in this process of being defined by others?" and "how can our self- expressed alternatives be asserted, if we desire?"

These questions do not only involve matters of data and accuracy of records, but require an understanding of how such systems, in the control of others, go about assembling and packaging these data elements into the form of information products. This knowledge, increasingly important, is not included in current social agreements or laws regarding rights to know. Asserting access to this knowledge is the assertion of a right we do not now have.

Though his specific action proposals do not seem adequate in guiding us toward an effective strategy in pursuit of our rights to know, especially to know how we are represented, Goss's concluding remarks point toward an objective situation that seems helpful in devising a strategy that works. He states, "there is increasing complementarity in function between public and private bureaucracies as the state ventures into the business of government and as commerce seeks to administer the lives of consumer-citizens." (Goss 1995b, p. 194)

This is a concise restatement of the gradual erosion of the bounds between public and private as outlined in the sections on legitimacy, above, and links directly to Mosco's identification of the market, rather than the political process, as the new prime mediator of social claims, "the now popular view that public policy ought to be made by those with marketplace, rather than political, power" (Mosco 1989, p. 35) This dissolving of public / private bounds alerts us that our present rules of information access, treating public and private institutions differently in terms responsibilities and protections, should be questioned.

To what, exactly, can we claim a right to know? Do we, individually or collectively, have a right to anyone else's entire database, for free or at any price? The provisions of Freedom of Information Acts at the federal and state levels are aimed at securing transparency in governmental process. It is not clear how universal access to state-managed data will provide this. Governmental units at all levels have legitimate concerns that their work will be effectively stolen by private sector data raiders, possibly to be sold back later in value-added form. At the same time, individuals and communities have legitimate fears that data that is very place-specific can be used against their interests in ways out of their control. These legitimate concerns should be addressed in any attempt at unified information access rules.

Two access standards, if established, may lead to adequate and just access across all sectors, public and private: 1. All data that has been collected from or about any named entity, whether as an individual or as a community, but be available for inspection and correction. 2. All system methods and rules that guide the aggregation or combination of data toward any system work output (representation) must be of open access.

These two dimensions, record-level contents on individuals and groups, and system-level operations on data contents, should be sufficient to provide transparency of any data handling system, whether in the public or private sector.

Without more complete elaboration of the rationale behind these rules, it is asserted that access within this frame will allow or promote contention over the ways in which data is used to form representations, rather than being stopped at the level of contention over the data itself.

Asserting Rights That Don't Now Exist

Individuals could begin by asserting a right that does not exist, the "right of representation." By analogy this may be extended to communities, where leverage toward self-representation seems to be less than that possessed by individuals. This "right of representation" is as fundamental to preservation of our civic well- being as was the assertions of "right to representation" made at the Nation's founding. (Cite (Black 1997) on the basis in the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments, and in the Declaration of Independence, for among other valid but unenumerated civil rights, the right to pursuit of knowledge as a form of pursuit of happiness.)

(See Note 3.)

The opportunity of exercising this right, a "right of representation," against information systems in all sections, is the basis of a program of community learning described below as community self-discovery.

Community Self-Discovery

Asserting a right to know how I as an individual am represented in common information systems, to know the ways in which my "data" are aggregated, to whom they are sold, the patterns of trade and relations among firms that are shown by the virtual migrations of my virtual self as a socially-packaged product -- through asserting this right I am, in some fundamentally surprising way, allowed an opportunity to learn about myself. Learning the extent to which my self is a socially determined creation of a techno-bureaucratic state of affairs will be an essential factor in my further strategies of self-discovery.

By analogy, a community can begin the process of self-discovery through asking questions of the many data sources in which it is represented. This is not trivial business. Often the outside world, a more formally organized state than in found in many local communities, knows much more about my and my community than I know about them. The locational conflicts described a few paragraphs earlier evoke a need to adopt strategies of community self-defense. Often the invasion is successful; suddenly it is too late.

It is possible that this process of community discovery, or community learning, can proceed best not by asking the questions internally, among self-recognized members, "who are we?" and then to publish that to the world (perhaps as an Internet home page). Rather more important would be the information, "how do they see us?" What are the demographic characteristics already in existence and applied to any group, formally localized or not? Systematic asking of the question, "what do you know about us, what's in your database that claims to represent us and our community's individual members," may bring the possibility of reflective self-definition in ways that would not be possible through internal means.

Of course, the respondent will often remain mute on these subjects. Interpretation of that silence in specific cases will also give community self-discoverers some data on which to reflect. One thing seems clear: to the extent a "community" can ask these questions at all, it must already be removed by some small distance from official jurisdictions, perhaps conceived at the town level. No mayor or town manager is likely to take the political risks that may be involved in initiating a process such as this. Yet towns as towns have a stake in their own self-definition, and should not be denied an opportunity to take this direction.

During the Public Participation GIS Workshop (July, 1996) the concept of "community learning centers" was raised as an appropriate setting for the implementation of more advanced GIS, suitable for community planning purposes. The question was discussed as to whether such centers would be something new, a new community institution, or would be something built upon the existing structures. Certainly no answer to this can be prescribed.

For capacity-building at the community level, see also (Flora, Sharp et al. 1997) and (Schoen, Sanyal et al. (1998, forthcoming)).

Who is in a position to articulate questions as are proposed here to be asked? Who can legitimately assert the "right of representation" on behalf of any community? Leaders of grassroots community groups come to mind, though accompanied by some caution as to limitations of their self-defined community interests. Public officials such as town managers are candidates, though they may take on an activist role somewhat uncertainty, given the local political balances that must be maintained. Journalists, especially those working for locally-owned community newspapers and other media (a diminishing number) would have a stake in building community knowledge through this process. Finally, we could look toward public educators including such professionals as adult education specialists, extension educators and public librarians. Though these professionals often see their mission in terms of meeting one-on-one needs, there is some room for professional redefinitions that will encompass the tasks suggested here. (Cite Huwe, 1997 #657) In a way, librarians are community "stakeholders" within the early definition of the term: persons who are trusted to ensure the integrity of the game while others enact the rituals of conflict. As "information professionals" (and here we might be tempted to say, only common information professionals), a librarian may be empowered to extend questions of community identity out into the world, and also be in a position to share results of the quest, even with others in other community settings. It should be assumed that librarians, or any others who may accept the role, will not aim toward claiming these questions and assertions as their exclusive professional rights (and how could one group claim rights over rights?), but rather would act as an example for growing numbers of individuals and groups who themselves might make these claims.

If we accept the notion that how we are represented by others is as important in our lives as how we seek to represent ourselves (that is, that my driving record on file at the state's motor vehicle department is as important as the statement I may make by means of the kind of car I choose to drive), can the owners of common information systems find the courage or reason to share what they know with the people they know it about?

To think that systems of enforcement will ever be devised that prevent the creation of these other-constructed representations is an error worthy of the Man of La Mancha leading to a task more forbidding than that of Sisyphus. It can't be done. To the extent that these openings toward a culture of information sharing can be encouraged, they should be sought. Perhaps some growing notion of ethical action will open these sources. Probably not.

Knowing this, there seems to be a two-part strategy available to any individual or community which wants to follow this path. First, to pursue the knowledge that one, individual or group, is represented in a common information system, and then to get a notion of the profile of qualities, characteristics or attributes that make up the representation -- this is one strategy, and it should be pursued systematically, with sharing of successes and failures among those who care. Failing in access to the specific contents on these profiles may not mean no success at all has been achieved. On the contrary, the mere certainty of the existence and configuration of the profiles may be enough basis on which to object, or to begin to construct an alternative. When limits to the process are reached (when the respondent becomes mute) the points of imbalance in existing power relations will become better known. It may be possible that in some small way help may be sought through revisions of the law.

The second part of this strategy is to begin to put into effect a systematic self-representation that is the creation of, and is maintained within control of, the originating community. If the process is authentic, the community may have an opportunity to explore the truly unknown, and to bring back creative possibilities from the roaring noise or confusing chaos found there, the chaos of the not yet defined. What is learned in this process will rival anything that can be learned via "access" to common information systems. Deciding to act within this frame, communities may have opportunity to pursue the creation of what Braman terms the "autopoietic state." (Braman 1994); for theoretical elaboration of this process, see also (Bruen 1974)

These two forms of initiative may compose a strategy of empowerment in the information age, and may result in a realistic understanding of information, both common and counterpart, and of the society which this composes. Initiating this process through design of tools, articulation of motivations, pursuit of legal change, and rethinking policy frames is the overall task of a "public participation GIS."

Footnotes

Note 1. Encouragement for this paper's goals has been found in Charles L. Black's New Birth of Freedom, in which he states: "The foundations of American human-rights law are in bad shape" (his emphasis), while giving solid directions based on law as to the directions in which something better can be found. (Black 1997)
Note 2. It seems that the tactic of establishing two words for these two aspects will have greater chance of success than Von Foerster's various attempt to reform usage of the simple term "information" (Von Foerster 1980), even given the most amusing form of his convincing argument: "One can turn a library upside down; no information will come out." (at p. 19) Searching for two appropriate terms is in keeping with Norretranders' invocation of information vs. "exformation," portrayed by him as the necessary contextual frame without which the creation of meaning from information is unthinkable; (Norretranders 1998 (1991))). All of these attempts must be judged fruitless in the light of Poerksen's extended description of information as a "plastic word." (Poerksen 1995 (1988), Ch. 2)
Note 3. The suggestion or assertion of this right may also point us toward the meaning of class distinctions and class conflict in an information society. The need to assert this right implies that there are competing classes who have become or ought productively to become parties in a contest over rights. Perhaps these can be identified: a) those whose primary employment responsibilities and commitments are to the building and ownership of common information systems, b) who are or ought to be confronted by assertions from those whose primary loyalty is to the health of counterpart information, its production through creative interpretation of the data presented by their world and through the discovery of values through creative use of information.

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