Q: Where is the Wealth of Nations? A: In Communities.

This issue of JoCI has as its lead an important article by Michael Arnold making the case for the conceptual (and thus theoretical) autonomy of a specifically “community” informatics. This elegantly and forcefully argued paper draws upon a range of sources and analytical insights from theorists not often cited in social science or information systems research all to make the case that communities have to be understood as being more than the sum of their parts and that the systems that support these must integrate these insights into their design and formulation.