Global Movement for social Inclusion in Information Society

Community networks which, besides using the Internet as a tool for development, are also a new type of association within the digital era a new entity that places in a net the neighborhood, town or city organisations. And, by doing it through the Internet, they are released from their local anchoring (typical of the BBS and "Freenets") to project themselves in a global form through interaction and co-operation with other community and city networks. These organisations do not question Capitalism: they tend to conform global networks aiming to integrate citizens to the Information Society and to diminish or abolish the Digital Divide. A significant case is the Global Partnership, which gathers together citizens networks from Europe, EEUU, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. These citizens' networks use computer-mediated communication (CMC), to expand their scope of activities, achieve better internal and external organization, and get articulated with citizen's movements around the world, among other uses.
Supporters of CMC-based initiatives and activists involved in civic networking argue that not only can the new media be harnessed to reverse the decline of public communication and bias, but that they offer new possibilities to surpass all there was previously achieved using old media. Some of the claims civic networks make for electronic citizens networks are: efficiency and ease access to information; new tehcnology can be harnessed to measure citizens preferences in representative democracies, and it makes easier for citizens to respond, thus making political participation easier; CMC can transform the conditions of collective political action by creating new organizational possibilities; the received wisdom will no longer be simply received, but re-processed, re-created, and re-disseminated among other citizens networks; CMC can be used to promote the access of the majority of the population to information Society, thus increasing the access possibilities to education and jobs, among other advantages.
Supporters of civic networks also claim the advantages of new media in terms of efficiency and competitiveness for the local economy (by creating micro enterprises related to informatics and telecommunications), and argue in favor of universal access to the Internet. Many explicitly make reference to a broader Habermasian view of the new media as providing a new arena of communication, a new public sphere that can replace the old one, now limited by fragmentation.
For Douglas Schuler, author of "New Community Networks: Wired for Change" (1998), new computer-based "community networks" are a recent innovation intended to help revitalize, strengthen, and expand existing people-based community networks, much in the same way that previous civic innovations have helped communities historically. He states that telecommunications are at the heart of almost all the aspects of contemporary everyday life.
From the late nineties on, citizen's networks go several steps further: they do not only use ICTs as a main support and organizational means. They claim the building of Information Society as a "New" society. In order to do that, Citizens Networks have to build partnerships between diverse social actors: communities, governments, enterprises, and Universities. Richard Lowenberg (2000) explains: "Community networks (CN) pragmatically integrate virtual communities of interests with geographic communities of place. CN, preceded by community radio and community television initiatives, continue working in and learning about the local realm of their increasingly tele-mediated society. CN are involved in extending local wired and wireless infrastructure: providing access, training and content brokering and development; provoking and facilitating new public-private networked partnerships (