In this position paper we highlight our strategy for co-creating a platform to support community resilience that goes beyond a situated research. We first engage with a diverse set of stakeholders to conceive the design problem, and then we address the implementation aspects with local communities. We briefly illustrate a number of methods and strategies used to identify and extract the general socio-technical requirements from communities in different contexts

Meesters, Kenny

Piccolo, Lara

Roberts, Shadrock

English

Open Research Online

Open Research OnlineThe Open University’s repository of research publicationsand other research outputsCo-designing for Community Resilience Beyond theLocalConference or Workshop ItemHow to cite:Piccolo, Lara; Meesters, Kenny and Roberts, Shadrock (2017). Co-designing for Community Resilience Beyondthe Local. In: Workshop Participatory Design, beyond the local, 8th conference on Community & Technologies, 27Jun, Troyes.For guidance on citations see FAQs.c© [not recorded]Version: Accepted ManuscriptCopyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyrightowners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policiespage.oro.open.ac.ukCo-designing for Community Resilience Beyond the LocalLara S. G. PiccoloKnowledge Media InstituteThe Open UniversityMilton Keynes, UK MK76AAlara.piccolo@open.ac.ukKenny MeestersDelft University of TechnologyDelft, NetherlandsJaalaan 5, 2628 BXk.j.m.g.meesters@tudelft.nlShadrock RobertsUshahidiNairobi, Kenyashadrock@ushahidi.comABSTRACTIn this position paper we highlight our strategy for co-creatinga platform to support community resilience that goes beyond asituated research. We rst engage with a diverse set of stakeholdersto conceive the design problem, and then we address the imple-mentation aspects with local communities. We briey illustrate anumber of methods and strategies used to identify and extract thegeneral socio-technical requirements from communities in dierentcontexts.KEYWORDSCommunity resilience, Human-computer interaction, Crisis1 INTRODUCTIONThe design challenge reported in this paper refers to building acollective resilience platform to help communities to reconnect, re-spond to, and recover from crisis situations. In technical terms, weare adding new intelligent algorithms to the widely used Ushahidicrisis mapping tool1. The platform has been co-created with mul-tiple, local and distributed, communities. Although participatorydesign activities have been situated, therefore dealing with par-ticular social issues and immersed in a socio-cultural reality, theresulting platform should keep its versatility as a global player.We understand that co-designing a digital platform goes beyonddiscussing features and co-creating graphical elements with endusers. To actually build a systemic view of the technical artefactunder conception, the design should comprehend articulation ofmeanings among multiple stakeholders, and eliciting requirementswith a socio-technical approach, considering also the potentialimpact of the new artefact on the community.To this end, our design initially brought into discussion the mean-ing of community resilience, supported by a digital and social toolwith some community leaders across the world. Once a general andglobal picture of the design problem was created and translated intosocio-technical requirements (what to design), we have conductedsome participatory design workshops with specic communities tothen dene how to develop the platform.In this paper, we briey describe some strategies and methodsbased on the Organisational Semiotics [5] [1] that we applied tounderstand our design problem "beyond local", as a preparation stepfor planning and executing the participatory design workshops.2 CO-DEFINING COMMUNITY RESILIENCEInitially building the concept from the literature, our research un-derstands community resilience driven by technology as "a process1https://www.ushahidi.comof continuously enabling a broad range of actors to acquire a rele-vant, consistent and coherent understanding of a stressing situation,empower decision makers and trigger community engagement onresponse and recovery eorts, including long term mitigation andpreparation." [4].Situating this denition, we interviewed 8 community leadersto understand the meaning of community resilience and the roleof technology in their own contexts: 3 in Nepal; 2 in Nigeria; 2in Indonesia; and 1 in India. The social issues they were ghtingagainst include securing shelter and new ways of subsistence afteran earthquake, elections monitoring against corruption and vio-lence, sexual harassment and abuse, pursuing human rights, youthempowerment, and environmental issues.For analysing the leaders’ notion of community resilience, wedrew a general picture by mapping the main forces revealed in threelayers: informal, formal, and technical (Figure 1). Technical aspectsare in the core, surrounded by the formal level, where elements thatregulate the way people act are. People’s beliefs, values, intentionsand motivations are in the informal level. Following this metaphorof the “Semiotic Onion” [6], the three levels constantly inuenceeach other from the moment the technology is conceived until theappropriation by a social group [1] [6].Figure 1: Key elements of designing for community re-silience in the technical, formal and informal levelsThe main challenges revealed in the informal level are related toengaging local people and policy makers to use a platform. The lackof familiarity with technology or specically with the platform werefrequently cited as barriers for engagement. Still in the informallevel, the platform should be perceived as trustworthy and reliableby all users and stakeholders. The informal and formal aspects arerelated to the organisation of the communities, referring to the waythey are structured to work and to interact with others, and part-nerships between communities, agencies, responders, NGOs, etc.These aspects dier from one scenario to another, and the platformmay improve such connections and communication. The platformalso has to be in line with local government policies, not only tobe accepted by them, but also adopted for inuencing decisionmaking. Technically speaking, the most evidenced problems arenetwork infrastructure, which may be precarious in some disastersituations, the desired integration with other media and communi-cation platforms, such as WhatsApp, phone (voice platforms), and,nally, the challenge of dealing with dierent languages, whichmay even co-exist in the same scenario. The analysis evidencedthat engaging a community encompasses not only raising aware-ness of their problems and possible solutions, but also how to usethe platform in technical terms. The introduction of a platform topromote community resilience should consider: i) Develop digitalliteracy; ii) Develop adaptive capacity; iii) Raise community voicethrough social media to inuence local government decisions; andiv) Involve policy makers and responders with the platform.3 SOCIO-TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTSTo understand the way community leaders deal with informationand also to translate their current practices and wishes into socio-technical requirements, we relied on the representation of the “semi-otic ladder” (Figure 2), a framework that considers how informationoperates in distinct levels. The six levels of Semiotic Ladder are rep-resented as steps from the perspective of physical world, empirics,syntactics, semantics, pragmatics, and the social world. Issues atthe three lower layers will answer questions as to how informationis structured, used, transmitted, what its properties are, etc. Theupper layers are concerned with the use of signs, the meaning inthe communication, intentions, etc. [5]. This structure evidencesthe information that are part of the IT systems and those related tothe social environment.Figure 2: 6 steps of the Semiotic ladderSome examples of concerns and wishes similarly reported byat least 3 leaders interviewed are People should not be afraid ofmaking a report due to conicts with other stakeholders. Convincethe community that the platform is meant to help, not to manipulate.in the social level; Complement the platform with physical meetingswithin the community on how to solve issues in the semantics; Forevery reported issue collect geographic coordinates, date, anonymityof the reporter, pictures, source, issue in the empirics level.4 DESIGNWORKSHOPSTwo participatory design workshops focusing on the implementa-tion and integration of requirements happened in February of 2017in Nepal. Even though Nepal has particularities when dealing withdisasters, like the topography that strongly inuences logistics, thediversity of communities involved in the resilience process providedus with a good sample of dierent stakeholders’ perspective.Dierent groups engaged in recovering from an earthquakewere involved in these workshops. Residents, volunteers, technicalcommunities, students and professionals aliated with crisis man-agement institutions participated in the activities, which includedinterviews and focus groups beyond participatory design [3]. Work-shops participants were invited to rst criticise the present, then toenvision the future, and moving from the present to the future.Results pointed out both digital and non-digital solutions related,for instance, to ways of sharing and presenting information, integra-tion of dierent communication channels and social media, and theevident need to check the validity of the information, and avoidingpeople to spread contradictory and untrustworthy information.5 DISCUSSIONTo achieve social impact by means of a technical intervention,it is essential to consider in the design the sociocultural contextwhere the artefact is going to be used. The participatory designworkshops aimed to reveal socio-technical and cultural elementsto be addressed in the implementation of a tool to be accepted andadopted. As Bodker [2] states, “interaction needs to be understoodand addressed in the context of people being together and sharing.”.Our strategy to address both general needs/wishes and to co-design solutions with stakeholders started at the macro level andthen moved to the micro, local, level. We rst aligned general per-spectives from dierent contexts to build a general picture of thedesign problem, to then address implementation aspects (the howto develop) locally, in such way that the communities’ needs andwishes can be considered as instances of the design problem.This is a work in progress and the results of the design workshopsare still being processed. Then we will be able to properly comparethe outcome in terms of local/global, as well as the eectiveness ofthe design solutions to cope with disasters in dierent contexts.6 CONCLUSIONSThis paper reported an ongoing research that aims to co-create asolution with communities, but aiming at a solution to be adoptedbeyond the local. We illustrated methods to address socio-technicalelements in preparation of participatory design activities.REFERENCES[1] C. Baranauskas. 14. Social Awareness in HCI. interactions 21, 4 (July 14), 66–69.[2] Susanne Bødker. 2015. Third-wave HCI, 10 Years Later—participation and Sharing.interactions 22, 5 (Aug. 2015), 24–31. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2804405[3] Tina Comes, Kenny Meesters, and Shadrock Roberts. 2017. D2.2 Socio-TechnicalCommunity Requirements. http://www.comrades-project.eu technical report.[4] Tina Comes, Stina Toerjesen, and Kenny Meesters. 2016. D2.1 Requirements forboosting community resilience in crisis situation. http://www.comrades-project.eutechnical report.[5] K. Liu. 2000. Semiotics in Information Systems Engineering. Cambridge University.[6] Ronald Stamper. 2001. Organisational semiotics: Informatics without the com-puter? Information, organisation and technology: Studies in organisational semiotics.Academic Press, NY.2

Co-designing for Community Resilience Beyond the Local

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Co-designing for Community Resilience Beyond the Local

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