The Community Domain theme stands in relation to contemporary debate about "Public Domain 2.0" (Kluitenberg, 2003), but emphasizes the idea of domain from a grass roots perspective and the idea of community starting with the individual rather than the demographic.

ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose seek to engage diverse communities— of interest, geography, ethnicity, race, belief. In particular, we seek projects that recognize the hybridity of communities and take transverse routes across communities.

Many of the members of these communities have no specific interest in art or technology or their intersection. Yet they have stories to tell and images of the city to map. ISEA2006 and ZeroOnen San Jose are looking for projects that actively engage these audiences and help build bridges between them in ways that may utilize digital technologies, but which are not about those technologies.

In other words, the goal is not to train people to become artists but to use digital and networked technologies to allow people to participate in the creation of their own stories – to become producers rather than only consumers.

Local Communities and Global Diaspora

We know many of the reasons that people emigrate from a country—war, persecution, famine, economic opportunity. But often their routes are not random. Why is San Jose home to a Vietnamese community of 80,000 that doubled in size in the 1990s? How did Silicon Valley become the site of such an entrepreneurial culture? What about Bangalore in India? Or any number of other diasporic and rhizomatic nodes. As part of the overarching Community Domain theme, ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose are particularly interested in community-based, telecommunications-enabled projects that explore the links—or lack thereof—between geographically dispersed “local” (not necessarily based on ethnicity or nationality) communities.