2 research outputs found
Reflections on deploying distributed consultation technologies with community organisations
In recent years there has been an increased focus upon developing platforms for community decision-making, and an awareness of the importance of handing over civic platforms to community organisations to oversee the process of decision-making at a local level. In this paper, we detail fieldwork from working with two community organisations who used our distributed situated devices as part of consultation processes. We focus on some of the mundane and often-untold aspects of this type of work: how questions for consultations were formed, how locations for devices were determined, and the ways in which the data collected fed into decision-making processes. We highlight a number of challenges for HCI and civic technology research going forward, related to the role of the researcher, the messiness of decision making in communities, and the ability of community organisations to influence how citizens participate in democratic processes
Exploring the role of sociotechnical systems to support deliberative localist decision-making
Ph. D. ThesisThe importance of civil society to our communities has always been socially significant but has an
increasingly important economic and democratic function. The localism agenda of successive
governments has pushed local authorities to devolve powers and responsibilities for community-level
policymaking to civil society organisations while, at the same time, significantly reducing the funding
required to adequately support such processes. Civil society groups are expected to fill the gaps left by
local authorities without the skills, resources and experiences, or without the bureaucratic processes
or participatory models of their erstwhile incumbents. At the same time, a crisis in democracy caused
a growing mistrust of the political class has raised questions about the legitimacy of our political
systems, and the aggregative logic of the internet, fuelled by nefarious politically motivated actors,
has further obfuscated the boundaries between truth and knowledge. The thesis put forward in this
dissertation is that in order for civil society to cope with the increased responsibilities that have been
devolved to it while maintaining their civic and democratic duty, new and more extensive
participatory forms of public engagement, and the sociotechnical systems to support such processes,
are required—first, to foster inclusion and second, to realise the ethical, epistemic, democratic and
civic virtues fostered through public deliberation about issues of shared concern.
Deliberative systems—the idea of a distributed talk-based model of democracy—forms the
underlying theory that drives this research, both conceptually in the way it motivates design and
practically in the ways in which it shares the participatory ideals of localism. This dissertation seeks to
explore the use of sociotechnical digital artefacts (or, sociodigital artefacts) to investigate the ways in
which deliberative democracy is enacted in instances of localism where ‘highly interested’ but ‘nonrepresentative’ actors are collaboratively carrying out policy-making activities, taking decisions that
affect the lives of their communities. This exploration takes shape over three case studies where I
design, deploy, and evaluate the role of a sociodigital system intended to foster the qualities of
deliberative democracy. In the final chapters I synthesise the insights from each study around a
discussion on the interrelationship between HCI, localism, and deliberative democracy with a focus
on the role of technology to support devolved decision-making