A City in Common

Balestrini, Mara; Rogers, Yvonne; Hassan, Carolyn; Creus, Javi; King, Martha; Marshall, Paul

doi:10.1145/3025453.3025915

Cited by 117 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…Recent examples of this type of activity at large scale can be seen in the Bristol Approach [3], a project that mobilised citizens across the city around the issue of dampness in homes. Central to this project's approach was the development of a sensor kit and a "city commons" of data and knowledge, in which citizens were invested as owners and producers, not simply as recipients of an intervention designed by researchers.…”

Section: Participation and Infrastructuringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategies for Engaging Communities in Creating Physical Civic Technologies

Taylor

Clarke

Skelly

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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Despite widespread interest in civic technologies, empowering neighbourhoods to take advantage of these technologies in their local area remains challenging. This paper presents findings from the Ardler Inventors project, which aimed to understand how neighbourhoods can be supported in performing roles normally carried out by researchers and designers. We describe the end-to-end process of bringing people together around technology, designing and prototyping ideas, and ultimately testing several devices in their local area. Through this work, we explore different strategies for infrastructuring local residents' participation with technology, including the use of hackathon-like intensive design events and pre-designed kits for assembly. We contribute findings relating to the ability of these strategies to support building communities around civic technology and the challenges that must be addressed.

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Section: Participation and Infrastructuringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategies for Engaging Communities in Creating Physical Civic Technologies

Taylor

Clarke

Skelly

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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“…The example of Mapping for Change becoming a social enterprise contrasts with funded academic research projects, like CITI-SENSE, where the facilitator's contract is terminated once funding has finished. In such cases, the research institution loses a "community champion" (Balestrini et al 2017;Balestrini et al 2015) who is perceived as trustworthy by the local community and citizen collaborators, as well as the social capital that this person has generated. The latter is a lost opportunity for having a positive social impact.…”

Section: Solution 2: Astrong Facilitation Model For Participatory Promentioning

confidence: 99%

The Promise of Participation and Decision-Making Power in Citizen Science

Eleta

Clavell

Righi

et al. 2018

Citizen Science: Theory and Practice

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Citizen science is challenging professional researchers and their organizations to rethink the way they do science and connect with society. In any citizen science project, professional researchers are "making a promise" to the public about the level of participation and power in decision making that they are willing to provide to citizen scientists. Researchers should set expectations explicitly to ensure informed participation, trust, and motivation. Also, the design of tools for informed consent, information sharing, recognition, and privacy has to be adapted to the new power relations and distributed knowledge production. Based on fieldwork experiences and literature review about environmental and biomedical citizen science, this article examines the challenges and proposes solutions for: 1) setting expectations for informed participation; 2) addressing privacy concerns and adapting informed consent to evolving interests and networked environments; and 3) promoting citizen governance of research data. Citizen science has the potential to both increase scientific literacy and counteract mistrust and skepticism about scientific evidence of global problems (such as climate change) that need to be addressed. However, there are still many challenges to fulfilling the promise of citizen science-for example, empowering people and gaining trust. A few inspiring initiatives help us reflect on a facilitation model for engagement and informed participation; privacy by design; and new governance models for research data provided by citizen scientists.

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“…al [4] note the limitations with these kinds of researcher-led engagements with communities, especially those designed to support greater participation and collaboration with citizen actors. Tools seeking to empower citizens through the recording and sharing of their common experience are often poorly integrated with practice [15], struggle to become relevant for public bodies [42] and can create challenges for sustaining work beyond project timescales [46].…”

Section: Hci Digital Civics and Participatory Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…al have shown how methods and approaches drawn from Participatory Action Research (PAR) can be more practical for the engagement of grassroots actors [4]. Similarly, our data collection methods were inspired by PAR to ensure sensitivity to the complexities of the specific context within which our research was being conducted.…”

Section: Data Collection and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such a design task is something with which the methods of HCI and digital civics research would doubtless be able to help. Balestrini et al's [4] work in developing a framework for a city commons helpfully discusses the applicability of PAR methods to civic projects. They demonstrate how civic engagement practices can be configured horizontally which in turn resolves issues arising from hegemonic power dynamics, fostering equality of stakeholders in the process.…”

Section: Policy Led Design Versus Participation Led Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Between Grassroots and the Hierarchy

Dow

Comber

Vines

2018

Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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There is a growing interest in HCI research studying technology for citizen engagement in civic issues. We are now seeing issues around technologies for empowerment and participation, long discussed in HCI literature, appropriated and formalised in government legislation. In the UK, recent reforms stipulate that community-based service information should be published in continuously updated, collaboratively designed and maintained, online platforms. We report on a qualitative study where we worked with stakeholders involved in the collaborative design, development and implementation of such a platform. Our findings highlight tensions between the grassroots desire to innovate and local governments' rigid compliance with statutory obligation. We pose a series of challenges and opportunities for HCI researchers engaged in the design of civic technologies to consider going forward, addressing issues of engagement in policy, measures of participation and tools for enabling participatory processes in public institutions.

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A City in Common

Cited by 117 publications

References 50 publications

Strategies for Engaging Communities in Creating Physical Civic Technologies

Strategies for Engaging Communities in Creating Physical Civic Technologies

The Promise of Participation and Decision-Making Power in Citizen Science

Between Grassroots and the Hierarchy

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