Progress toward establishing community networks in regional Queensland

There can be no doubt that the Internet, which is the current building block for the information age, has unprecedented implications for society at large to the stage of fundamentally changing many aspects of human existence. Even societies seemingly untouched by the Internet today will be affected by the changing nature of those segments that are inextricably embedding it into many facets of their commercial, organizational, and societal lives. The uneven adoption of Internet technologies across the world is great cause for concern to international collaborative bodies whose efforts are related to global inequity (ITU 2002; UNDP 2001; DOTforce 2001). The societal base for application of information technology represents the next stage in the development of the information systems discipline which until recently has been largely confined to an organizational focus.