From Publics to Communities: Researching the Path of Shared Issues Through ICT

Abstract

In recent years, citizens' movements such as the Arab Spring or Euromaidan protests have clearly shown that, whenever affectedwhether negatively or positivelyby the state and government decisions, citizens act to deal with the shared issues. Groups of people who organize themselves to address (mainly political) issues were defined as a 'public' by the philosopher John Dewey. He believed it is necessary to improve communication to create a 'Great Community' as a cohesive group of a public. Although information and communication technologies (ICT) lead to ambivalent effects on pursuing this goal and often distract the mass of people from discussing these issues, we argue that nowadays ICT can improve communication and has the potential to foster the detection of issues and therefore promote the (trans-)formation of a public into an issue-based community. As our foundation we took a literature study covering the formation of publics and their potential to evolve into communities, as well as their interplay with technology. This formed the basis for the development of our operational model that 'follows the issues' for capturing the (trans-)formation of a public. Based on our model, we outline different perspectives on detecting shared issues as early indicators for publics based on ICT and derive implications for researching this process from a practical perspective.

Emergent Collaborations Outside of Organizational Frameworks: Exploring Relevant Concepts

“…They discuss not only the technological platform that supports the two publics over time but also how the new tool changed things, such as the division of labor at the shelter. Ludwig et al [59] have applied ICT as a tool to study the formation of publics, rather than to shape or form them. A public may be perceived as 'A locus in which material resources and discourses are appropriated and exchanged' [60, p. 127].…”

Designing in between Local Government and the Public – Using Institutional Analysis in Interventions on Civic Infrastructures

“…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.…”