Supporting Social Innovation through Visualisations of Community Interactions

Abstract

Online communities that form through the introduction of sociotechnical platforms require significant effort to cultivate and sustain. Providing open, transparent information on community behaviour can motivate participation from community members themselves, while also providing platform administrators with detailed interaction dynamics. However, challenges arise in both understanding what information is conducive to engagement and sustainability, and then how best to represent this information to platform stakeholders. Towards a better understanding of these challenges, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a set of simple visualisations integrated into a Collective Awareness Platform for Social Innovation platform titled commonfare.net. We discuss the promise and challenge of bringing social innovation into the digital age, in terms of supporting sustained platform use and collective action, and how the introduction of community visualisations has been directed towards achieving this goal.

Sustainability Meets Information Technologies: Recent Developments and Future Perspectives

“…For example, through the participatory design of a digital platform, commonfare.net, T-A researchers have worked on translating complex concepts like the one of Commonfare, or the welfare of the common, into IT systems [46]. To further question socio-economic inequalities, when working on commonfare.net, researchers gave visibility and support to activist groups, implemented means for the creation of alternative, groupbased currencies [47], and rethought the way that trust could be visualized when dealing with common-based dynamics [48]. As participatory design, the work conducted on Commonfare has exemplified the repoliticization of participatory design practices in the last decade [49] and has brought into question the role that design researchers play between grassroots initiatives and institutions [50].…”

Co-designing Collaborative Care Work through Ethnography

“…The goal of the project is to support communities beginning with their shared values (Bassetti et al, 2019) and interests on the improvement of accessibility of welfare state provisions as well as on grassroots welfare and care practices (Sciannamblo et al, 2021). The designed platform, called commonfare.net, includes storytelling, digital currency (Teli et al, 2018) and trust representation tools (Rough et al, 2019), and it is now managed by an association including some researchers belonging to the initial consortium.…”

Ethnographies of Collaborative Economies across Europe: Understanding Sharing and Caring

“…The goal of the project is to support communities beginning with their shared values and interests on the improvement of accessibility of welfare state provisions as well as on grassroots welfare and care practices (Sciannamblo et al, 2021). The designed platform, called commonfare.net, includes storytelling, digital currency (Teli et al, 2018) and trust representation tools (Rough et al, 2019), and it is now managed by an association including some researchers belonging to the initial consortium.…”