Community Informatics (CI) is an academic field of study that seeks to examine how information and communication technologies such as Web 2.0 and mobile technologies can be deployed for the benefit of communities. Community is, however, a problematic and polysemic term, meaning different things to different people and has inherently political overtones. This paper aims to bring to the attention of practitioners in the field of CI the contested nature of the term ‘community’ and to examine the historical origin of the term and the multiple ways in which it has been and can be used. In exploring this term, we make use of more literary, historical and sociological approaches. Such approaches can offer new insights on the topic for audiences from more technical academic disciplines. With such discussion to forearm practitioners of CI of the problematic ways in which community has been and can be used, we offer the following recommendations: (1) use of the term ‘Community’ remains largely unproblematised and we ought to be more mindful of its history; (2) community be recognised as a locally contingent position; (3) as a term of reference its use should be carefully considered within specific contexts; and (4) a fuller exploration of the term in the CI discipline is needed. We hope that these recommendations may lead to more reflexive practice in the discipline of CI.