Communication in infrastructuring, or tales from a collaborative project

Abstract

We present empirical examples of approaches to communication taken by the consortium of a large scale participatory design project in Europe, framed in terms of organisational communication in an infrastructuring process. The examples are understood generally in terms of the goal of fostering internal communication practices away from hierarchical relationships, which align with the political goals of participatory design and of the project. More speciically they are also understood in the framework of strategies and tactics in terms of actions taken within an infrastructuring process. The examples relate to the role of the words consortium partners use to describe and talk about the project across diferent disciplines; the metaphors we construct to assist the design, development and communication; and the use of tags to assist iltering and management of mailing lists. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing;

Designing Community Technology Initiatives: A Literature Review

“…This increased interest in civic matters can also be found at OZCHI, where one can observe an increase in work targeting the civic domain, especially in the last fve years (e.g. [12,21,22,37,48,63]). Researchers at OZCHI call for more action on the topic, such as Foth et al [22], who urge HCI researchers to design for citizen-ability (the design of community and civic engagements) and to use their skills and knowledge to contribute to new policies and forms of citizen empowerment.…”