Creating personas for political and social consciousness in HCI design

Personas have become an important tool for Human-Computer Interaction professionals. However, they are not immune to limitations and critique, including stereotyping. We suggest that while some of the criticisms to personas are important, the use of personas is open to them in part because of an unquestioned focus on explicating user needs and goals in traditional persona research and creation. This focus, while helping designers, obscures some other potentially relevant aspects. In particular, when the goal of the product or software being designed is associated with social and political goals rather than with bringing a product to the market, it may be relevant to focus personas on political aspirations, social values and the will or capacity of personas to take action. We argue that it is possible when producing personas (and associated scenarios) to partially move away from representing needs and embrace personas which more explicitly represent political or social beliefs and values. We also suggest that a phenomenographic approach to user data analysis is one way to achieve this. We provide empirical evidence for our position from two large-scale European projects, the first one in the area of Social Innovation and the second in the area of eParticipation

Money for the Common Wealth of the Multitude: Toward a User-Managed Currency and Payment System Design

This thesis will begin with a critique to the orthodox paradigm in monetary economics. Secondly, I will offer a theoretical, economic, structural and biopolitical analyses of the origin, nature and effects of money on society. After a critique to conventional paradigm of money, I will then propose a semiotic genealogy of money followed by an analysis of the Common, the Multitude together with a tentative fourfold proposal for monetary reform, i.e. a monetary dispositif for the socio-economic emancipation of the Multitude from the rule of capital to build a new paradigm of money. In particular, I will discuss the literatures on basic income and the emerging notion for bottom-up welfare named Commonfare; the Neo-Chartalist approach to money; complementary, viz. subaltern currencies; and crypto-currencies and distributed ledgers technology. In turn, I will present the two qualitative methodologies that I endorsed to design and research four sites of inquiry in Iceland, Spain, Finland and Italy: Participatory Action Research and Critical Muti-Sited Ethnography. A discussion of fieldwork findings will follow. Moreover, I will offer a comparative analysis on fieldwork findings by identifying not only commonalities and differences among the four sites, but also by eliciting the limits of methodological choices. I will conclude this thesis by arguing to refine the theoretical framework introduced in the literature review; and notwithstanding personal and objective limitations to the application of the monetary dispositif in the real world, I will advocate for further inquiry on Money for the Common Wealth of the Multitude to increase the quality and effectiveness of the debate on suggestions for monetary reform

Commoncoin: a multi-signature self-remuneration complementary crypto-currency and basic income provision system

In the context of citizen empowerment via the design and implementation of Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation (H2020-CAPSSI) such as commonfare.net as the output of the project Poverty Income and Employment News (hereafter, the PIE News project – www.pieproject.eu), Commoncoin can be thought of as a bottom up radical provocation about the meaning of the reappropriation of the power of money for and by the users of currency and payment systems. Indeed, at the time of writing in July 2017, the digital currency (DC) for the Commonfare platform (www.commonfare.net) is being designed as a version of bottom-up basic income in the form of a complementary currency deployed as a cryptocurrency stored in the Freecoin Social Wallet (www.freecoin.ch) implementation, which is the digital wallet prototyped for pilot participants in the PIE News project

Framework for implementing alternative credit schemes and digital social currencies

This deliverable documents the state of the art of legal frameworks of implementation both in general, but also particularly for D-CENT Digital Social Currency experiments with pilot communities in Spain, Iceland, Finland and the use case in Italy. The richness in contexts of the various pilots is remarkable and is being taken into account as Freecoin software development and systems are rolled out in the last phases of the project. At a glance, only the Spanish and Icelandic regulatory contexts are detailed enough to allow for experimentation within clear boundaries. . In Iceland there is only a single article that remands to the prohibition to issue bonds to the bearer outside the national banking system. Conversely, in Finland, rules are absent, although digital alternative and complementary currencies are not considered as illegal, they just exist in the informal economy. Finally, Italy is on its way to processing regulation in both the legislative and executive. Hence, Freecoin implementation will have to take into account these differences while promoting lawful operations in each pilot specific context in order to empower communities with a long-term viable framework of implementation

D4.4 - Design of Social Digital Currency

The Freecoin Toolchain is a toolkit to build blockchains for the social good. It aims to improve decentralised trust and identity management for the D-CENT pilot communities. D-CENT is bringing together complementary currency design and the latest development of digital currencies, made famous by Bitcoin. It will run digital social currency pilots in communities that are already actively designing tools for collective decision-making in local economies

Field Research and User Requirements Digital social currency pilots

This report provides a background for building a framework for implementing and federating digital complementary currency experiences, and for improving their social benefits. Enabling communities to manage exchange using alternative digital social currencies as new tools for growing a civic sharing economy, including a strong role for interoperable digital social currencies remains the principal goal

Conclusioni: commonfare in Trentino, risultati del dibattito e questioni aperte

L’obiettivo dell’evento #CommonFareTrentino (Impact Hub Trento, 21 aprile 2017) è stato quello di aprire il dibattito sul Commonfare anche in Trentino e tentare di risolvere un'anomalia. L’anomalia – certo non decisiva nello sviluppo del progetto, ma comunque significativa – sta nel fatto che il progetto PIE News / Commonfare (finanziato a livello Europeo fino a giugno 2019), attività con l'orizzonte di sviluppare la piattaforma Commonfare.net in ottica di sostenibilità post-progettuale, vede il territorio all’interno del quale è stato in buona parte ideato (il Trentino) non coinvolto come pilot, ossia come contesto/luogo entro il quale co-sviluppare ed adottare la piattaforma con la partecipazione di popolazione, associazioni e istituzioni. Spinti dall’interesse dimostrato da parte del pubblico, gli atti di questa tavola rotonda intendono essere una pietra angolare per il futuro sviluppo del Commonfare anche in Trentino, attraverso la piattaforma commonfare.net

ESARDA Connector: Issue 2

The European Safeguards Research and development Association ESARDA aims to bring together all those involved in safeguards, so that progress and continuous improvement in international safeguards can be achieved efficiently and to a professional standard. The principal issues are co-ordination of research, exchange of information and joint execution of R&D programmes. Peer reviewed scientific and technical articles relating to safeguards and verification are published in the ESARDA bulletin. The ESARDA Connector however provides general information on ESARDA and its members, working groups activities, news, upcoming events and technical articles.JRC.G.II.7-Nuclear securit