Crowdfunding platforms and the design of paying publics

Crowdfunding enables groups to self-fund the changes they want to make in the world. In other words, digital financial platforms are proving capable of supporting new relations between groups of people as well as offering new ways to organize money. Taking an HCI lens, we look at how some crowdfunding platform owners are approaching social innovation, not only at the level of supporting individual community initiatives, but at the broader level of using their platform to change societal behavior. Through four case studies, we show how crowdfunding has been chosen as a tool to redesign society by promoting environmental or social sustainability. We argue that the groups constituted through these interactions are not merely ‘crowds’, but deliberate constellations built round a thing of interest (or ‘paying publics’). Our interviews with managers and owners explore how interactions with and around platforms work to achieve these ends and we conclude with design considerations

Achieving the Intercalation of the Social and the Technical in Computing: The SREC (Socially Robust and Enduring Computing) Program

This Poster addresses the core issue of iSchool research: How to achieve adequate accounts of what happens when people and organizations use automated (that is, computer-based) information and communication technologies. It outlines the authors??? vision of how persuasive, balanced accounts that properly integrate social and technical perspectives on computing might be achieved, and a research program intended to make this vision real

Computing and the Crisis: The Significant Role of New Information Technologies in the Current Socio-economic Meltdown

There is good reason to be concerned about the long-term implications of the current crisis for the reproduction of contemporary social formations. Thus there is an urgent need to understand it character, especially its distinctive features. This article identifies profound ambiguities in valuing assets as new and key economic features of this crisis, ambiguities traceable to the dominant, “computationalist” computing used to develop new financial instruments. After some preliminaries, the article identifies four specific ways in which computerization of finance is generative of crisis. It then demonstrates how computationalist computing is linked to other efforts to extend commodification based on the ideology of so-called “intellectual property” (IP). Several other accounts for the crisis are considered and then demonstrated to have less explanatory value. After considering how some commons-oriented (e.g., Free/Libre and/or Opening Source Software development projects) forms of computing also undermine the IP project, the article concludes with a brief discussion of what research on Socially Robust and Enduring Computing might contribute to fostering alternative, non-crisis generative ways to compute