Understanding the Design and Implementation of Civic Technologies in Resource-Limited Public Organizations

With advances in computing and open data, more and more public organizations have collaborated with volunteer technologists – people with information technology (IT) skills who voluntarily help public organizations with their IT needs – to create or adopt civic technologies to solve public issues, and to support civic engagement in local communities. This dissertation aims to inform the design and implementation of future civic technologies in public organizations, by presenting three studies that investigate public organizations’ practices when designing and implementing civic technologies. In particular, we focus on the implementation of social media in nonprofit organizations (NPOs), the design process of civic hacking projects, and civic data hack-a-thons in several resource-limited public organizations and communities. We first investigate how 26 small environmental NPOs leverage social media for various public engagement activities to identify challenges that public organizations encounter when implementing civic technologies. Next, we study two ways that volunteer technologists and public organizations collaboratively create civic technologies. In Study 2, we examine the factors that influence the sustainability of 16 civic hacking projects during which volunteer technologists and public organizations collaborate on designing technologies to solve community issues, both through observations and through 19 interviews. In Study 3, we investigate how to generate actionable data analytics products for NPOs during civic data hackathons, and explore the roles of brokers to support the collaborations between civic technologists and public organizations. Based on findings from these studies, we argue that evaluating the engagement outcomes through civic technologies, solving the internal organizational challenges that prohibit engagement, and reconciling the needs of various stakeholders, are all crucial for public organizations to better engage with communities through civic technologies. In addition, taking into account various public organizations’ constraints and facilitating data literacy is essential for the sustainability of civic technologies in public organizations. Last, building good relationships between various stakeholders and leveraging brokering activities (translation, coordination, alignment, and contact brokering) to bridge different community of practices are all critical for collaborations during the design and implementation of civic technologies. Informed by findings and insights from the studies, we identify design implications and practical guidelines for civic-minded volunteer technologists and public organizations, to foster the design and implementation of civic technologies and the associated collaborative work.PHDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144063/1/youyangh_1.pd

Transitions in digital personhood:Making sense of online activity in early retirement

We present findings from a qualitative study about how Internet use supports self-functioning following the life transition of retirement from work. This study recruited six recent retirees and included the deployment of OnLines, a design research artifact that logged and visualized key online services used by participants at home over four-weeks. The deployment was supported by pre- and post-deployment interviews. OnLines prompted participants’ reflection on their patterns of Internet use. Position Exchange Theory was used to understand retirees’ sense making from a lifespan perspective, informing the design of supportive online services. This paper delivers a three-fold contribution to the field of human-computer interaction, advancing a lifespan-oriented approach by conceptualizing the self as a dialogical phenomenon that develops over time, advancing the ageing discourse by reporting on retirees’ complex identities in the context of their life histories, and advancing discourse on research through design by developing OnLines to foster participant-researcher reflection informed by Self Psychology

A Review of Research on Participation in Democratic Decision-Making Presented at SIGCHI Conferences : Toward an Improved Trading Zone Between Political Science and HCI

We present a review of 80 papers representing efforts to support participation in democratic decision-making mostly related to local or national governments. The papers were published in leading human–computer interaction (SIGCHI conferences) venues. Most of this literature represents attempts to support assembly- oriented participation, wherein decisions are made through discussion, although referendum-type participation, involving decision-making based on voting, has gained attention too. Primarily, those papers addressing agenda-setting have examined organization-led forms, in which the agenda is controlled by those issuing the call for participation. Accordingly, the authors call for more research into support for representative models and participant-driven agenda-setting. Furthermore, the literature review pinpoints areas wherein further interdisciplinary engagement may be expected to improve research quality: in political science, HCI-informed methods and new ways of using physical input in participation merit more research, while, from the HCI side, cultivating closer relationships with political science concepts such as democratic innovations and calculus of voting could encourage reconsideration of the research foci. These observations speak to the benefits of a new research agenda for human–computer interaction research, involving different forms of participation, most importantly to address lack of engagement under the representative model of participation. Furthermore, in light of these findings, the paper discusses what type of interdisciplinary research is viable in the HCI field today and how political science and HCI scholars could usefully collaborate.Peer reviewe

Re-Shape: A Method to Teach Data Ethics for Data Science Education

Data has become central to the technologies and services that human-computer interaction (HCI) designers make, and the ethical use of data in and through these technologies should be given critical attention throughout the design process. However, there is little research on ethics education in computer science that explicitly addresses data ethics. We present and analyze Re-Shape, a method to teach students about the ethical implications of data collection and use. Re-Shape, as part of an educational environment, builds upon the idea of cultivating care and allows students to collect, process, and visualizetheir physical movement data in ways that support critical reflection and coordinated classroom activities about data, data privacy, and human-centered systems for data science. We also use a case study of Re-Shape in an undergraduate computer science course to explore prospects and limitations of instructional designs and educational technology such as Re-Shape that leverage personal data to teach data ethics

Content analysis of a rural community’s interaction with its cultural heritage through a longitudinal display deployment

In this paper we present content analysis related to our longitudinal deployment of the Wray Photo Display within a rural village community. The situated display based system enables village residents to upload images (typically photos) relating to their community for viewing by fellow residents and visitors to the village. Residents can also provide a response to pictures via the system's commenting feature. A content analysis has revealed that the majority of images uploaded to the system relate to the cultural heritage of the village (across both 'past' and 'contemporary' categories). Furthermore, analysis of the comments relating to these images reveals a wide range of use, including: clarification (e.g. the subject of the photo or the period when it was taken), identification (e.g. identification of relatives in the photo) and narratives (e.g. "...my mum & dad rented from Mr Phillipson who lived next door...")

Identifying and transforming sites of power in collaborative community-based research

For this dissertation, I analyzed collaboration practices and power structures within three community-based participatory research (CBPR) studies I conducted for my Ph.D. I ask: 1) How do dominant power structures, epistemologies, and narratives manifest in HCI research and praxis? 2) How can we structure research to support our community partners\u27 goals while resisting dominating and extractive practices in academic research? To respond to these questions, I conducted member checking interviews with my collaborators and a duoethnography with my dissertation advisor, Dr. Sheena Erete, about our experiences in the studies as a Black female professor and a white female graduate student. I grounded my findings in Black feminist thought by employing the intersectional analysis method developed by Erete, Rankin, and Thomas (2022). Through my intersectional analysis, I identified how systems of power and disciplinary norms influenced Dr. Erete\u27s and my decisions about how to structure our collaborations and organize our time and labor. These decisions impacted the distribution of benefit and harm within our collaborations. Systems of power also manifested in cultural narratives imbued within the studies; these narratives informed our methods and interactions with our collaborators and community members. I organize these findings into five saturated sites of power (a term developed by Collins, 2019) within CBPR. These are sites where intersecting systems of power acutely impact collaborators\u27 experiences and study outcomes. To support researchers in developing a non-extractive and mutually beneficial CBPR practice, I offer a set of reflexive prompts that address three themes: 1) evaluating researchers’ capacity for the work; 2) distributing resources through CBPR; and 3) using narratives as a reflexive tool. This dissertation contributes to critical human-computer interaction (HCI) literature and offers recommendations that researchers can use to intentionally co-design studies that mitigate harm and advance community-defined goals

Feminist epistemology for machine learning systems design

This paper presents a series of feminist epistemological concepts as tools for developing critical, more accountable, and contextualised approaches to machine learning systems design. Namely, we suggest that the methods of situated knowledges or situating, figurations or figuring, diffraction or diffracting, and critical fabulation or speculation can be productively actualised in the field of machine learning systems design. We also suggest that the meta-method for doing this actualisation requires not so much translation but transposition - a creative and critical adaptation to speak to machine learning contexts.Comment: Workshop A Toolbox of Feminist Wonder - Theories and methods that can make a difference, Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing CSCW 23, October 14-18, 2023, Minneapolis, MN, USA, 5 page