Deep Trust in the Future of Community Informatics

Engaging in community-based ICT projects, whether for research, design, or implementation purposes, often requires a long-term engagement among practitioners, researchers and community members. In this paper, we discuss how these projects are fundamentally shaped and reshaped by the trust building process, through which 'relations' with a community become deeper 'relationships'. The discussion is based on our experiences in two separated field sites: a Seniors Community Center in Northern Italy, where we established a 3-years long participatory research and design project; and an 8-month ethnography of Community Technology Centers in three marginalized favelas of Vitória, Brazil, where we have explored ICT use by local residents. We identify the difficult challenges in the process of developing trust relationships, commonalities between the two different contexts, and discuss the role of “deep trust” relationships in the future of CI.