To answer the question of participation with any community groups, it is important to first look at the concept of access.
1. Participation requires easy-to-use, easy-to-afford, and easy-to-find terminals in public spaces as well as home computer dial-in access. It is better to locate public access computers in venues in which people tend to gather informally during the course of their daily lives, for example in churches, recreation centers, local businesses, cafes, laundromats, alternative schools, youth centers, shopping centers, and even bars and sports facilities.
2.Work with grassroots neighborhood and community organizations. These groups are not only the best suited for structuring access and training programs to the needs in their communities, but they are also the appropriate arenas for helping to address and restructure the social inequalities that are fueling the information gap and affecting participation.
3. Plan programs with local neighborhood self-help groups to help develop programs that can address specific needs of community residents. Setting up a committee or form a group of local people is also one of means of promoting participation.
4.Outreach including publicity and education to community organizations will emphasize the need for providing information content while encouraging the people to participate. It is also important to offer variety of classes, case management services, and a host of volunteer matching with the community members to fulfill different needs.
5. Open more opportunities by including (paid) staff roles, board members, advisory board members, and volunteers in the community program.
6. Use a variety of delivery channels such as telephone, cable television, and radio transmissions. Strive for high-quality, low-cost technology and at the same time taking your user needs into consideration by getting continuous user feedback.
You might also want to look at articles that offer great insight on participation and community networks. These articles will also give you lessons from real communities that can in turn be used to improve your own community's participation:
Douglas Schuler (1996) Community Networks: Building a New Participatory Medium: http://www.cpn.org/sections/topics/networking/civic_perspectives/comm_networks.html
Jonathan Lillie (1997). Possible Roles for Electronic Community Networks and Participatory Development Strategies in Access Programs for Poor Neighborhoods: http://www.unc.edu/~jlillie/310.html
Gary Chapman and Lodis Rhodes (1997) Nurturing Neighborhood Nets: http://web.mit.edu/org/t/techreview/www/articles/oct97/chapman.html
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