In the burgeoning literature on new forms of participation in the public sector, many different understandings of ‘civic technologies’ exist. One interpretation that the authors of this paper found useful was that by Handler and Conill (
2016), who linked ‘civic technologies’ with large public-accessible datasets and the re-purposing of a set of web technologies towards achieving civic goals. For example, in the investigation of the expense claim scandal of the British House of Commons in 2009, the
Guardian produced a simple web tool that enabled the public to browse individual records in a large dataset to flag those of perceived importance. In 80 hours, 20,000 users reviewed 170,000 entries of a total of about 450,000 to help prioritise the investigation. Handler and Conill (
2016) use the term ‘civic technology’ to suggest that it may be described by an assemblage of (1) many-to-many or many-to-few interactions online; (2) large datasets with open access to the public; (3) and the combination of mature web technologies. While perhaps short of a definition, Handler and Conill (
2016) suggest such technologies ‘are specifically created to enable, facilitate, and enact civic participation’ (p. 161). While other techniques of civic participation including hackathons have been acknowledged, in our article, civic technologies are collaborative software that support open calls for participation around shared concerns, mostly by local government and civic groups. Unlike the workplace or home, such applications of web technology are assumed to be ubiquitously accessible to various publics and increasingly sufficiently mature to be used by even those with low technical skill (Bilandzic and Venable
2011).
From this, we can establish a set of characteristics: (1) they address both the ‘community or societal level’, as argued in community informatics (Bilandzic and Venable
2011), while they link in with formal processes of political organisations (Bødker and Zander
2015). (2) They depend on voluntary participation (Goodchild
2007). The interactions these technologies support are performed in the public domain by various civics, often outside the constraints and incentive schemes of business organisations. This has been demonstrated by the ‘cold start problem’ of publicly accessible geospatial technologies depending on buy-in of actors dispersed across various locations (Rattray
2006; Bao et al.
2013). From this, they exhibit (3) distinct modes of interaction, such as ‘crowdsourcing’ (Howe
2006) and ‘peer-to-peer collaboration’ models (Benkler
2007). In those modes, an open call for participation is addressed to a large audience given a series of participation requirements. (4) Designs should thus account for flexible and spontaneous formation of publics on shared concerns (Le Dantec and DiSalvo
2013).
The question of
who is involved in their design takes on a political dimension when a system is developed and deployed. The design itself may be (1) intentional and commissioned, or (2) occur through day-to-day decision making and ‘design-in-use’. In the former case, problematic questions may arise around the ownership of data/technology stemming from the agenda and goals of the commission organisation. In the example by Handler and Conill (
2016), the call to participation was made by a private company that used the capacity of civic action to their own means. In local government, pervasive critique is directed at the fact that most government-organised participation remains constrained by rules set by government (Boonstra and Boelens
2011). The latter case is influenced by actors with both informal influence (e.g. residents and their representative community groups) and formal authority, such as planners and other officials (Saad-Sulonen
2012). Tensions over ownership and influence may arise as digital infrastructures are shared among actors (Graham and Marvin
2001) and where incompatible communication standards are employed (Monteiro et al.
2012). Public policy, guidelines set in law, and third-party terms and conditions over data access and ownership emerge as design considerations (Jackson et al.
2014). Consequently, the chasm between technological capability and socially desired requirements is hard to negotiate and appears in growing complexity due to the divergent attitudes of different audiences involved. For example, concerning participation, Korn and Voida (
2015) discuss the issue that audiences at the periphery of political processes may feel an increasing sense of disenfranchisement.
Thus, it has been suggested to move attention beyond the focus on selected technologies or user groups to develop more systemic perspectives for ‘infrastructures’ comprised of sets of software and information in use (Monteiro et al.
2012). In their designs, designers could embrace the ‘challenge of more open tasks, unanticipated user goals, new measures of system efficacy, and even conflicts among users in large communities’ (Shneiderman
2011). To avoid a potential ‘colonialisation’ of local government through proprietary technologies, designers are encouraged to put non-experts at the heart of determining desirable technological scenarios (Hollands
2008). Instead of comprehensive technology solutions, participatory designers propose focusing on understanding practices of
infrastructuring in the everyday life (of local government) and offer options for civic groups to take ownership of technology deployments (de Lange and de Waal
2013). The question arises: just how should the public get involved?
2.1 Considering the everyday and involving non-expert actors in design of civic technologies
In ‘infrastructuring’ participation, Le Dantec and DiSalvo (
2013) introduce the concept of ‘attachments’ as a set of relations and commitments individuals make to a shared matter of concern. These attachments are voluntary, for the most part, informal and flexible. Dewey defined those ‘civics’ as groups ‘indirectly and seriously affected for good or evil’ who become ‘distinctive enough to require recognition and name’ (Dewey
1927). In the formation of civics in relation to shared concerns, Le Dantec and DiSalvo (
2013) see ‘infrastructuring’ as a set of practices of enablement, self-recognition, appraisal of resources (software, information) and people available towards a revision of the present situation. Here, infrastructuring is described as distinct from participatory design, as it focuses more on a possible realisable future with the means available ‘in place’, where available (digital) technology is used as part of an intervention. Innovation and what is defined as ‘new’ is then very much included, embedded and explored in the everyday practices and, thus, what is ‘new’ goes beyond technology-focused definitions of newness. Le Dantec’s argument reminds us of earlier iterations attending to everyday practices as interesting sources of designs (Star
1999; Suchman
2005). Perhaps it might also be exemplified in past endeavours in which participatory design activities were applied over a timeframe of eight years for the design of a media space (Dalsgaard and Eriksson
2013). As a result, established methods of co-design took on a novel quality as they became embedded within and taken for granted by stakeholders involved in the construction project.
In practice, the distribution of ‘ownership’ in civic infrastructures and the work of ‘infrastructuring’ itself, across many different actors with formal and informal influence, quickly become a political matter. For example, in the development of a community network, researchers noted the irony that ‘ordinary people’ whom the project sought to empower were absent from early design discussions (Carroll
2005). In redesigning a semi-public space using media technologies, boycott by or turnover or resistance of key stakeholders was observed (Saad-Sulonen
2010). This may particularly be the case if there are very different expectations towards use of space. Furthermore, as developing and embedding any civic infrastructure is costly, it requires private investment and specialist skills, and will thus almost always be mediated through experts (Rattray
2006). Thus, perhaps the degree to which technology deployments can truly be driven ‘bottom-up’ by citizens may be limited (Townsend
2013). Often, intermediaries play a role by ‘creat[ing] connections between [...] different tools’ and the infrastructures they create are ‘both technical building blocks and artful integrations’ (Saad-Sulonen
2012, p. 23).
In the use of civic technologies, geographic space has greater influence in the politics of the design context (Dourish and Bell
2007) and is important in designing for everyday ‘situated engagements’ of public expression (Bohøj et al.
2011). For example, a review of 40 community websites around Amsterdam found that most websites are focused on informing, helping and asking for help, and connecting with neighbours; however, the review also identified resource sharing, organising activities and crowdfunding of community projects (Niederer and Priester
2016). Thus, the kinds of civics relevant to this article overlap with the material context, from which they draw power and legitimise demands for change in interaction with local government (compare Natarajan
2015). For example, the development of a street archive and description of practices of information collection heavily overlapped with the material contexts of the road, creating new interaction dynamics among social actors living there (Taylor et al.
2015). A resident took on the informal role of ‘archivist’, raising her ‘power’. Subsequently, some residents chose to give their data only to the researchers involved who were perceived as neutral intermediaries. In public services, geographic proximity may also enable civic groups to form on matters of concern, as documented in a bridge repair project that helped groups of residents and a team of academics to combine to achieve a shared goal (Le Dantec and DiSalvo
2013). In the urban context, the material context thus remains of importance as a source for objects of contention, mutual interest and a sense of community.
If the goal is to change, for example, the established (political) institutions and digital infrastructures, as some demand, interventions that put community at their heart, working at a small geographical scale or as a single group, can struggle to make such ‘vertical impact’ (Taylor et al.
2015). In fact, research on local authorities’ planning processes found indications of a strong separation between information technology used at different levels of political administration (Weise
2016). Thus, community informatics, the study and embedding of software with local civic groups, perhaps disregarding local authorities’ setup, ‘is a necessary but not a sufficient condition’ for new forms of participation (Staffans and Horelli
2014) due to the difficulty of scaling such ‘bottom-up’ initiatives to meet the workings of local government. Perhaps a better strategy is to give attention to the design of suitable technical interfaces and transparency within local government. Civic technologies offer opportunities to form ecologies of people, practices and ‘data forms for generating, viewing and possibly analysing data’ in matters of civic concern (Taylor et al.
2015). The question is how such practices can be better supported, for example by the process-orientated work of local government that is more directly driven by national laws and requirements. Where are the processes – not to mention the political action – that will enable such civic infrastructures to be formed and changed over time?
2.2 Towards awareness for political systems in collaborative systems design
Over the years, research on collaborative work has involved all levels of government. As a military psychologist, Hutchins (
1995) worked for and with national government agencies studying coordination and cooperation on aircraft carriers through detailed ethnographic work. Engeström and Escalante’s (
1996) detailed longitudinal study of the ‘postal buddy’ self-service kiosk for the US postal service involved work with postal agencies broadly delivering an important public service. Bonnie Nardi’s work related strongly to the role of public libraries as centres of communal learning (Nardi and O’Day
1999). Other studies charted the deployments of early local computing networks and public question-and-answer software as in Santa Monica’s PEN project (Rogers et al.
1994). This is complemented by the rich work on participatory public geographic information systems, which developed in the 1990s alongside and often out of sight of the usual literature on computer-supported collaborative work. For example, Rattray (
2006) discusses the deployment of an open-access web-based geographic information system across the whole of the involved US public-sector bodies. In this line of work, some academics also experimented with participatory approaches to let unskilled residents customise ‘expert’ software (e.g. a geographic mapping application) to help create civic maps for things like perceived public safety across a neighbourhood (Leitner et al.
2002).
While user involvement in software deployments has been a pertinent concern throughout the literature on participatory design, arguably there has been a change in the quality and intensity of research that has regained an interest in the boundary of the public sector (government) and the public at large (Bødker and Zander
2015). As shown by Handler and Conill (
2016), socio-technical developments now make it likely to encounter large datasets online. The literature on open data and associated hackathons has been testament to this. Local government now grapples with being accountable to publics who have increasingly become apparent online (Olivier and Wright
2015). In a take on participatory design in everyday civic life, the concept of ‘infrastructuring’ recognises that user involvement can also relate to the creative linking of a range of software particularly in low-resource and perhaps low-skill social contexts in civic groups (Le Dantec and DiSalvo
2013)
. Dismissing any comprehensive technical ‘solutions’, some useful approaches were made in studying organisational settings through contextual design, combing artefact study with prototype design (Beyer and Holtzblatt
1999) or the ‘locales framework’ emphasising the value of everyday practice as inspiration for design (Fitzpatrick et al.
1998). Added to this, hybrid methodologies have been proposed combining life logging and automated trend spotting to establish how issue-based publics form (Ludwig et al.
2016). In meta-design (Fischer et al.
2004), the wider socio-technical and socio-political contexts of institutional processes are the outcomes of design and, in turn, help to explain constrains to design choices.
In terms of participatory approaches with local government and civic actors, UrbanSim (US) and the Aarhus Media Space (Denmark) provide examples for prolonged engagement with political forces in a design project. Initially, the UrbanSim project aimed to provide a civic technology for developing multiple perspectives on quality of life with the ambition of letting anybody come up with their own assessment schema (Friedman et al.
2008). They recognise the impracticability of participatory methods that claim to involve everybody. They thus involved a set of civic groups in a ‘targeted co-design process’ by drawing heavily on forms, data schemas and assessment methods that those groups had developed already. Furthermore, the co-design of the Aarhus Media Space, a new library for the city of Aarhus (Denmark), counts as another example of longstanding, intensive engagement of the public, over a timeframe of eight years (Dalsgaard and Eriksson
2013). Through the long timespan and recurring participatory action, participation became seen as a normal, expected thing, part of the ‘infrastructure’ of the project if you will. Time, resources, committed leadership and understanding of the value of participatory activities were mentioned as key issues. The cases demonstrate (1) how software development tapped into existing datasets from local organisations (Friedman et al.
2008); and (2) how long-term projects relate to stakeholders and their processes (Dalsgaard and Eriksson
2013).
Short-lived design projects are more likely to discount the role of established practice and the diversity of audiences’ different agendas. For a research strategy, the study by Dalsgaard and Eriksson (
2013) pointed to the importance of developing a structured scheme through which to capture results from activities with various stakeholders, so to ‘infrastructure’ means to capture learning. This is a particular concern for the strategy outlined in this article also. Prior methodological approaches have perhaps failed to exploit these broader insights for guiding and shaping the design of their technical interventions. The argument of our paper is the underdevelopment of suitable ethnographic approaches for the design of civic infrastructures based on awareness of
political structures that influence the deployment of digital technologies and where user groups may not initially be readily identifiable. This underlies the need for social ‘sustainability’ of civic infrastructure, in the sense that any collaborative software is only effective if it speaks to the needs and concerns of the audiences it engages (Chilana et al.
2015) on a voluntary basis.
2.3 Suggested requirements for an approach to design civic infrastructure in local government
Essentially, this article suggests revisiting institutional concepts in systems design through a focus on
regular (i.e.
patterns of) interactions and the recognition of those patterns in design. This approach is particularly useful for work that takes the organisation of local government as a starting point, for example by relating to available public data or administrative processes issued by these organisations. The emphasis here is on looking at the interactions between local government and civic groups (Bødker and Zander
2015). Based on the available literature, we have attempted to group requirements towards an analysis strategy along three important characteristics of the civic infrastructure, the set of software involved in establishing, mediating and sustaining civic participation in local government. It is likely not an exhaustive list (see Table
1).
Table 1
Indicative requirements for an institutional approach to civic infrastructure.
Recurring actions | ●Firstly, relating to Korn and Voida ( 2015), sensitivity to recurring actions of local government and civic actors is necessary, by probing for patterns in their interaction that serve as rules and describe how choices in relation to civic infrastructure are made. ●Designers need to understand the incentives for (voluntary) participation (Grudin 1988). Participants’ motives for (non-) participation in local matters vary. This would account for (1) formally expressed requirements; (2) informal, commonly accepted practices; and (3) observed patterns of interaction during participation moments. |
‘Messy’ information space | ●Secondly, ‘messy’ information spaces must be accommodated, supported by various digital artefacts (software and data) across diverse social settings (see Monteiro et al. 2012). ●In relation to a collaborative setting, ‘information spaces’ describe the overall sets of information artefacts in circulation across various social settings and sites (Bannon and Bødker 1997). ●To help identify opportunities for intervention, the approach should highlight the politics behind use and maintenance of the digital technologies and information involved at the boundary of local government and civic groups (Bødker and Zander 2015). |
Capacity for ‘self-organisation’ | ●Thirdly, the approach should recognise the potential of informal civic self-organisation (Taylor et al. 2015), as a tenet of civic collective action that may result in some form of ‘commissioning’ or influencing of public services provided by local government (Olivier and Wright 2015). Addressing the motives of user audiences provides a ‘theory of social dynamics’ on why different audiences engage with local government (Healey 1999). ●Through written policies, observation of practices and accounts of participants (Lowndes and Roberts 2013), interventions invite speculative changes to roles and rules based on existing practices. This view corresponds to the design-happens-during-use argument (Fitzpatrick et al. 1998). |
In response to these requirements, the rest of this article outlines working within local government contexts to generate insights on potential future interventions. The strategy relies on the observation of regular practices that may be influenced by existing regulatory requirements and that, in turn, may influence the designs of civic technologies that are made available to the public at large. When looking at the various ways in which research projects have approached political participation on local matters, the institutional approach outlined may thus lend itself to the kinds of methods that aim to work in collaboration with local government (Korn and Voida
2015). In participatory action originating with interests that diverge from local government actors, ‘disruption’ occurs where there is an orientation that does not fit the established political process and where political action is very much part of special moments. Korn and Voida (
2015) note ‘activist technologies often support immediate, short-lived campaigns and events that result in a number of individual protest actions’. Increasingly, this stream of work begins to recognise the importance of recurrence, raising the need for methods aimed at the
institutional aspect of civic action. While this is an issue in the literature, what is essential in longer-term participatory design practice are plans for ‘how to capture insights from participatory activities in a structured way’ (Dalsgaard and Eriksson
2013).