Reflections on Deploying Distributed Consultation Technologies with
Community Organisations
Civic Tech, Participation and Society
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Johnson, Ian G.
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Vines, John
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Taylor, Nick
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Jenkins, Edward
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Marshall, Justin
Proceedings of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2016-05-07
v.1
p.2945-2957
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: 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.