Michael
Gurstein
Dr.
Gurstein is currently a Visiting Professor in the School of Management at
the New Jersey Institute of Technology and a Principal with Michael Gurstein
& Associates, Vancouver BC specializing in community based technology
applications. He is an Honorary Professor at Central Queensland University
in Australia. A Canadian, he completed a B.A. at the University of Saskatchewan
in Canada and a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge and was a senior public
servant in the Provinces of British Columbia and Saskatchewan. From 1992-95
Dr. Gurstein was a Management Advisor with the United Nations Secretariat
in New York.
His publications include "Community Informatics: Enabling Communities with Information and Communications Technologies" (Idea Group, 2000); and "Burying Coal: Research and Development in a Marginal Community" Collective Press, Vancouver. Dr. Gurstein has served on the Board of the Vancouver Community Network, the British Columbia Community Networking Association, Telecommunities Canada, and was a Charter Member of the Steering Committee of the Global Community Networking Partnership. Dr. Gurstein is receiving wide recognition for his work as a pioneer in the burgeoning area of Community Informatics. He has recently been invited to give Keynote addresses at the J.F. Kennedy School at Harvard University, at the United Nations-International Year of the Aged, the Institute of Advanced Studies--UCLA, the University of Missouri, Renselaar Polytechnic and in Australia, Italy, Argentina, and the UK and guest lectures at Claremont Graduate University and the University of Michigan among others.
He was the international co-Chair of a major conference on ICT's and Civil
Society held in Russia in 2003. In late 2002, Dr. Gurstein was awarded a substantial
grant from the Ford Foundation to support his research work in the area of
Community Informatics in addition to research grants from the Canadian Social
Science and Humanities Research Council and the US National Science Foundation.
He is currently the Chair of the (Global) Community Informatics Research Network
and the Editor of Community Informatics: a Global Journal whose first edition
will appear in September, 2004.