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Communityinformaticsasinnovationinsociotechnicalinfrastructures

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The Journal of Community Informatics, Vol 11, No 2 (2015)

Community Informatics as Innovation in SociotechnicalInfrastructures

John M Carroll 1, Patrick C Shih2, Jessica Kropczynski3

1. Distinguished Professor, College of Information Sciences and Technology, ThePennsylvania State University, PA, USA. E­mail: jmcarroll@psu.edu

2. Research Associate and Lecturer, College of Information Sciences and Technology,The Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA. E­mail:patshih@ist.psu.edu

3. Postdoctoral Researcher and Instructor, College of Information Sciences andTechnology, The Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA. E­mail:jnk14@ist.psu.edu

Introduction

Community informatics (CI) is the joining and convergence of community with informationsciences and technologies. It integrates the oldest social institution of human kind withthe newest frontiers of material society. It is an area of social science and computerscience; it is an area of research and understanding, and of activism. It is and should bemultifaceted and multivocal. There is not one trajectory for CI, but many.

CI is concerned with the challenges and opportunities for human community in an ageincreasingly dominated by technology. This includes investigating long­standing technicalchallenges and approaches, for example, Day's (2014) analysis of inequity in access, andthe challenge of deploying better models of public access computing. It includes acommitment to holistic analysis of how information technologies are changing humanrelationships (de Michelis, 2014). CI includes recently codified technical challenges andapproaches, such as Foth's (2014) program for integrating digital and physical activitiesand concerns, and supporting community interactions beyond mere awareness orapproval, and Bødker's (2014) focus on identifying emerging communities and practices inlongitudinal studies. It also includes broader and emergent challenges, such as Gurstein's(2014) call for continuing articulation of Internet rights and responsibilities of citizens, orde Cindio's (2014) and Schuler's (2014) agendas for how the Internet can expand theconcept and practices of citizenship. CI also includes concerns with broader engineeringpractices to guide development of community systems and assess their impacts (Simone,2014), and with the future course of community technologies, such as de Moor's (2014)description of inter­community interactions.

In this paper, we characterize sociotechnical innovation as a trajectory for CI: by this wemean integrated innovations in the information and technology infrastructures ofcommunities that enable innovation in communities themselves as social systems. Weframe our work with the observation that this trajectory already has a significant historyin CI. In the balance of the paper, we describe recent research emphasizing technologyaffordances of mobility and hyperlocality, aggregation and suprathresholding, informationanalytics, local digital currencies, reputation management systems, and crowd­basedcoordination. Finally, we present "InnovationStarter" an envisionment scenario thatenables community innovation infrastructure by incorporating and leveraging each ofthese technologies made possible through previous work in CI.

Community Networks and Sociotechnical Innovation

Our work grows out of the tradition of community networks, a genre of locally basedinitiatives in community activism and community development centered in North Americaduring the early 1970s through the early 1980s (e.g. Schuler, 1996; Carroll, 2012). Inquite a few cases, innovative information technology infrastructures were developed incommunity contexts, and were creatively appropriated by community members whobenefited from new interactions and co­productions, and new opportunities to learn abouttechnology and to participate in society.

The Berkeley Community Memory (BCM; Rossman, 1975) was a mainframe­based systemdeployed in 1973. It was presciently focused on enabling member­initiated activities suchas arranging ride shares, finding chess partners, and reviewing restaurants. It is oftenremembered for the member­organized Alameda County Vietnam War memorial. Theseare interactions and social co­productions we take for granted today. They wereunprecedented in 1973. The core functionality of BCM was electronic bulletin boards (so­named because the public access terminal in Leopold's Record shop was right below aphysical bulletin board). This functionality became widespread in late 1970s and pervasivethrough the 1980s.

Santa Monica Public Electronic Network (PEN; Rogers et al., 1994) was a municipalcommunity network, that is, run by local government. It was established in 1989. Whilethe original vision was dissemination of public information, citizens appropriated thenetwork overwhelmingly for discussion (as in BCM, all citizens could participate or eveninitiate forums) and local email (PEN was a closed network, not integrated with theInternet). The city established public access terminals in libraries and other public space,and usage was far less demographically skewed toward wealth, youth, higher education,and males than was, or still is, typical. For example, one third of users were female(versus a norm of about 10% at that time). The system was so widely used that in thelocal elections of 1990 all 30 local candidates organized and campaigned online. PEN isremembered for the PENFEMME women's group which, among other things publiclyconfronted anti­female online behavior, and for an episode in which homeless citizenspublicly and successfully lobbied the local government for improved showers and lockers.

The Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV; Cohill & Kavanaugh, 2000) was a web­basedcommunity network deployed in 1993. It was focused on community education about theweb, and on community development through the web. The BEV was an early adopter ofthe web; the first specifications of hypertext markup language (HTML), the foundation ofthe World­Wide Web, were published as the BEV was being planned. Nevertheless, theBEV was quickly appropriated. In 1994, Blacksburg's schools were connected to theInternet. The public library and the Blacksburg Seniors, among others, began offeringcourses and tutoring on Internet and web skills. Between April 1994 and April 1996,accesses to BEV web pages increased by a factor of 1000 to about 50 accesses per monthper capita. By 2001, citizen access to the BEV (and the Internet) was nearly 90%, greaterthan it is today for citizens of the United States. Also by the time, more than 700community groups and local businesses had established websites (80% of the total),including dozens of web­based businesses. (For more detailed discussion and discussion ofother cases, see Schuler, 1996; Carroll, 2012).

In their times, community electronic bulletin boards (1973), municipal networks (1989)and open, web­based community systems (1993) were new technology infrastructures. Inthese cases, the new infrastructures were widely and creatively appropriated for civicpurposes (sharing rides, remembering local war dead, enhancing the visibility ofmarginalized citizens, regulating misogynistic behavior, developing community capacity).We see these projects as concrete demonstrations of sociotechnical innovation, thepossibility of creating new infrastructures for innovations in community itself.

In the balance of this paper, we frame a contemporary example of community informaticsas innovation in sociotechnical infrastructures. In the next six sections, we describe recentresearch emphasizing technology affordances of mobility and hyperlocality, aggregationand suprathresholding, information analytics, local digital currencies, reputationmanagement systems, and crowd­based coordination. Finally, we present anenvisionment scenario for a community innovation infrastructure incorporating andleveraging these technologies.

Mobility and Location (Hyperlocality)

Contemporary web and mobile networking enables hyperlocality, people can share oraccess content pertaining to the geographical locale they work and live in as they movethrough and carry out activities in that very locale. Hyperlocality raises new andtransformative affordances for community information infrastructures; members cancreate, share and comment on community information when and where it is of interest.They can leverage interstitial time, the time between major goals and activities, for civicactivity. They can civically capitalize on ephemeral social opportunities, such as passingsomeone in the street. They use the physical community itself as an information index forinformation and interactions pertaining to the community (Carroll et al., 2015a).

The affordances of mobility and location are illustrated by a community heritage app LostState College (Han et al., 2014b). The app allows people to browse photos anddescriptions of local landmarks and upload their own images related to local history with abrief description (Figure 1). The image, its location in the community space, and thedescription are logged for other users. Thus, the functionality is analogous to genericsocial media photo sharing (e.g., Instagram), but hyperlocated: The images anddescriptions are contributed by and viewed by neighbors, and are drawn from places andevents in the local community, celebrating the memorable moments that happen aroundus in the local community.

Figure 1. Lost State College allows people to capture and share images andstories related to local historical landmarks

Lost State College exploits affordances of mobility and location for reflection and localheritage construction. A subsequent app, Community Animator (Carroll et al., 2014),allowed citizens to characterize their interests and make themselves available fordiscussions with others while they are in public places (Figure 2). When the user signs on,the app pinged proximal other users with compatible community interests.

Figure 2. (Left) Login to Community Animator (Center) Select Interest Areas(Right) Nearby Citizen Conversation In­Progress

Aggregation (Suprathresholding)

Suprathresholding discounts the attention burden of establishing and maintainingawareness of what is going on, easing one's ability to retrieve from and contribute tocommunity information, a prerequisite for generalized participation in community activity.

Local community information, when examined source­by­source, is very sparse. Localnewspapers, nonprofit groups, businesses, bloggers and forums each generate relativelyfew news items or posts. Analogously, local community interactions online, examined site­by­site or service­by­service, often fail to exceed the threshold of community perception ­few posts and even fewer comments. Web 2.0 infrastructures can suprathresholdinherently sparse information and interaction by aggregating various information feeds(Carroll et al., 2015a).

Local News Chatter (LNC; Figure 3) is a smartphone application that aggregates localnews articles and tweets from local Twitter accounts, based on term frequency in thearticles and tweets. The analysis updates hourly, presenting the index terms through atag cloud (Han et al., 2014a). Local news and local tweets are both relatively sparseinformation channels when viewed topic by topic, but aggregating the two channels in onedisplay, and presenting a collection of news story­tweet aggregates suprathresholds thelocal news space, making it more animated and more interesting. Formal and non­formalnews sources are continually contrasted, and local tweets suggest potential neighborhoodcontacts. LNC leverages existing Twitter infrastructure and practices, and repurposesexisting news content and tweets. Thus, it requires little learning for users, and no newcontent creation.

Figure 3. Screenshots of LNC. Tag cloud presented with different tag sizes (left)and corresponding local news article (right).

LNC addresses community news generally, but the design concept can be extended tomore specific community news concerns. Community Incident Chatter (CIC; Figure 4)aggregates local news articles and social media information for local emergencies (Shih etal., 2014a). In this case, information aggregation supports not only awareness, butmobilization and coordination of helping throughout the community.

Figure 4. Left: A Tag cloud that presents current local incidents (left); local newsarticle about the fire incident (right).

Analytics: Quantifying Digital Traces

Beyond integrating geographical places with information and interaction pertaining tothose places, and aggregating information feeds across the community, social mediacontent can also quantify digital traces of users in the local community. In the CommunityPoll application, we used a sentiment analysis algorithm to extract polarity of publicopinions from tweets about local news topics (CP, Figure 5). This was embodied as anadd­on to Local New Chatter called "Public Attitude Meter" that displays the averagesentiment scores in a bar graph (Shih et al., 2014b). If the meter score is positive, athumbs­up icon will be displayed next to the text, whereas a thumbs­down icon will beshown if the meter score is negative. Moreover, each individual tweet also has a positiveor a negative attitude indicator in which a positive tweet shows a green bar whereas anegative tweet shows a red bar next to the user profile image.

Figure 5. Screenshots of the Community Poll application. A tag cloud displayeddepending on the time window (left) and corresponding local news articles,tweets, and a result of Public Attitude Meter based on the sentiment analysis

(right).

The goal of Community Poll is not to accurately calculate sentiment, but to present a data­grounded artifact for reflection and discussion. Based on user self­reports, the PublicAttitude Meter evoked curiosity about the sentiment score and drove people toward localnews topics they would not otherwise have pursued. It encouraged people to moreactively participate in discussions on social media by voicing their opinions and concerns.

With an interest in identifying locations of community interest, the Arts Festivalapplication supported a four­day community summer arts festival (ArtsFest), includingcheck­ins, photo sharing, identification of favorites, and integration with data on prioryears of the festival (Shih et al, 2015c). Figure 6 presents a heatmap visualization ofgeotagged photos taken throughout the festival. The irregular distribution of photosindicates places that attracted more photo taking in some areas of the festival overothers. This kind of analytic suggests places of popular interest for other festivalattendees, as well as less visited places that might need more exploration. These analyticsrevealed interest patterns that would be otherwise costly to uncover by survey methods.

Figure 6. Heatmap of GeoTagged Photos at ArtsFest

In addition to geolocational data, we also analyzed the structure of social media metadatasuch as temporal patterns to triangulate crisis activities. Community Incident Report (CIR;Figure 7), is a novel emergency planning system that integrates police reports, local crisisinformation, and social multimedia content to foster citizens' awareness of localemergency information and to assist emergency planners in planning for recurring andcyclical events (Shih et al., 2015b ). CIR retrieves police reports, local news articles,tweets, and photos during a timeframe related to specific incident tags selected by theuser. The locations of the police station and the hospital are also presented on the map sothat the emergency planners could easily estimate the response time to the incidents.Neither police reports nor social media alone is able to fully capture the rich contextsurrounding all the local incidents during a large festival of this scale. CIR can be used bylocal emergency planners as a way to alert citizens of crisis, gauge citizen perception onlocal crisis events, and involve citizens in the deliberation and planning process.

Figure 7. The CIR interface.

Local Currencies: New Frameworks for EconomicExchange/Cooperation

Various alternative currency and exchange paradigms have emerged through the pastcouple of decades, enabled by information technologies (Carroll & Bellotti, 2015). Theseparadigms attenuate the supervision of large institutional actors; for example, crypto­currencies do not require banks, and peer­to­peer micro­enterprises, like AirBnB, do notinvolve centralized hotel corporations. They often strengthen economic interactions withinlocal communities, for example, local currencies, like Berkshares, and the Bristol Pound.They also strengthen co­production (Carroll, 2013), reciprocal value exchanges, forexample, voluntary service exchanges, as in time­based currencies/timebanks, requirecooperation to succeed at all (for example, services involving learning), and nearly alldyadic service exchanges produce mutual well­being as an outcome.

Timebanks are an interesting example. A core principle of timebanking is equity: everyonehas time, and everyone's time is worth the same. This principle is somewhat ideal, but itenables an exchange framework in which people marginalized by the mainstreameconomy can participate on an equal footing with other community members. Participantsearn time credits by providing services to one another, while at the same time buildingsocial capital and a sense of personal worth (Carroll, 2013). Doctors in the National HealthService of the United Kingdom can prescribe participation in a timebank for patients withdepression and feelings of isolation. In the timebank, members receive credit for servicessuch as accompanying elderly members who are shopping or visiting elderly people intheir homes, making it more possible for the elderly to live on their own (Ryan­Collins etal., 2008). The timebank is innovatively conflating the traditional roles of recipient andprovider of health services.

The Mobile Timebank (MTB; Figure 8) application enables finer grain service requests andoffers, and has the capability for location­based requests (Han et al., 2015). This allowspeople to participate in timebanking exchanges more opportunistically, and with lessplanning overhead. Thus voluntary service exchanges can become a part of everydayactivity. This directly addresses one of the known limitations of current timebanking,namely, the relatively limited range of services on offer (Bellotti et al., 2014; Shih et al.,2015a).

Figure 8: Screenshots of the timebanking smartphone app. Add task view (left);task list view (right).

Reputation Management Systems

While timebanking and other non­profit systems are steadily growing, similar commercialpeer­to­peer businesses that match service or goods requestors to providers are positivelyexploding. Examples include AirBnB for accommodation, Lyft for transportation,TaskRabbit for odd jobs and Yerdle for giving stuff away. As these commercial services aresuccessfully challenging conventional economic models, we seek to help their non­profitcousins such as timebanking to also realize their potential for significant growth, economicimpact and societal benefits, particularly for those who are poorly served by theconventional economy.

One of the incentives for volunteer participation is establishing reputation and buildingsocial capital (Carroll et al., 2014). To establish a reputation in the timebank system, wedesigned a reputation management system that shows additional information onmember's profile page that contains a full summary of one's personal information,specialties, and timebanking activities (Figure 9). Thisinformation can also be used formatching services or making recommendations when members are requesting or lookingfor services. The reputation management system could be leveraged to help users buildtrust and social capital within a local community. As with many introductions andexchanges hosted by online services, the users of these services often feel morecomfortable engaging with strangers when the exchange is supported by reputation­basedsystems. This is typical of sales on sites such as eBay or Amazon or professionalnetworking service sites such as LinkedIn. Identifying local stakeholders when it comes toa particular issue has always been a challenging task due to the difficulty in externalizingtacit knowledge from recent institutional memory. Incorporating reputation­buildingmechanisms in future timebanking, volunteering, and peer­to­peer systems is essential toeasing the coordination of local community projects.

Figure 9. Screenshots of the profile page. Profile page for a member (left); areview page (middle); profile page for an institution (right).

Crowd-based Coordination

A key challenge in solving complex tasks is to bring enough interested bodies together.Crowd based coordination efforts have been shown to help users organize massparticipation efforts as well as handing off intermediate work through microtaskmanagement. Experimental platforms such as Catalyst (Cheng & Bernstein, 2014) andFoundry (Retelny et al, 2014) have been developed to aid the coordination of massparticipation events. We developed Future State College (FSC; Figure 10), a smartphoneapp that supports the municipal planning processes through enhanced citizen awareness.The municipal government of State College, like many municipalities, develops a decadalmaster plan to guide local development. The master plan includes many detailed sketchesand other images of future streetscapes. A user of FSC can access plans and images fromthe community master plan based on location through their personal mobile device. Ourdesign rationale is that situating the planning materials in the physical places to whichthey refer will make planning more vivid and concrete, and thereby more accessible tocitizens, removing the participation "costs" of attending formal planning reviews, andhelping bridge the gap between municipal planners and community residents (Carroll etal., 2014).

Figure 10. Screenshots of FSC. Local master plan (left) displayed on a map(right).

Envisionment Scenario

The aforementioned section demonstrated how hyperlocality, suprathresholding, smartanalytics, peer­to­peer currencies, reputation management systems, and crowd­basedcoordination could be leveraged as sociotechnical infrastructures to facilitate communityactivities. We envision a platform that acts as a clearinghouse for calls to action from localgovernments and organizations by designing these affordances into future communityplatforms. Even in a small community, local groups and initiatives can be siloed, acommunity hub that integrates information presented by hyperlocality, suprathresholding,and smart analytics mechanisms may increase visibility for these groups and projects andallow for new avenues of community participation. Timebanking implemented withreputation management features can be used to incentivize action and participationthrough equity hours rather than relying on community funding. We proposeInnovationStarter (Figure 11), a crowd­based coordination that incentivizes crowd­basedcommunity participation by rewarding citizens with timebank hours in exchange forparticipating in community tasks. InnovationStarter capitalizes upon hours to not onlyincentivize action, but organize tasks at hand. Hours committed to a future project can beused as a threshold to organize action and will only be deducted from a timebank users'account if the activity takes place. Furthermore, a particular number of hours needed forspecific tasks may be used to acquire volunteers with specific skill sets or necessary toolsto carry out a task.

Figure 11. InnovationStarter

Imagine a local news story about a nation­wide increase in community vegetable gardens.The story appears on InnovationStarter and a large number of citizens begin discussingthe desire for a community vegetable garden, and a few reference locations in town thatare otherwise unused lots that may be ideal locations for such a project. The city notesthe attention that this issue has received, identifies a location that is suitable for acommunity garden, and posts a call to action on InnovationStarter. A local governmentplanner creates a map of the proposed project, given the space available, she estimatesnecessary labor for the activity. She posts the activation threshold for the activity as 2persons with ground tillers for 2 hours of work, 10 people (each with one packet of 20vegetable seeds and a trowel) for 3 hours of work to arrive 2 hours after the start of theactivity and spend 2 hours planting. Future activities are scheduled to water, weed, andharvest vegetables on a regular basis.

The citizens that participate in the activity receive online testimonials regarding theirattitude and work ethic to complete the project which make them more reputablecommunity members to engage in prestigious projects, or when posting their ownrequests. While citizens that invest in hiring an outside company to create and maintain acommunity garden may feel a sense of pride as they pass the garden, we believe that acitizen created garden will instill a deeper sense of community among those thatparticipated and citizens that are aware of the initiative.

Innovating with Sociotechnical Infrastructures in CommunityInformatics

The concept of smart cities is widely referenced, though the idea is often limited tomanagement of fairly low­level service infrastructures (electricity, water, sewage, etc.;Harrison et al., 2010). The concept of smart cities is exciting, and could be more excitingif extended to innovative sociotechnical infrastructures and civically smart cities(Campbell, 2012; Schuler, 2014). Naturally, smart cities, like any other smart ideas ofhumans, are likely to be dystopian in some unanticipated respects. We are not arguing forsociotechnical innovation as a singular trajectory or paradigm for community informatics.Rather, we want to include this trajectory, which we trace back to the communitynetworks of the 1970s and subsequent decades, among approaches in the future ofcommunity informatics.

We identified a set of contemporary technologies that present new affordances for thedesign of community information infrastructures, mobility and hyperlocality, aggregationand suprathresholding, information analytics, local digital currencies, reputationmanagement systems, and crowd­based coordination. Various app development projects,in our group and others, are exploring how these affordances can be utilized in communitysystems, and how they can be integrated in information and technology infrastructures ofcommunities to better enable innovation in communities themselves as social systems.

A research challenge in smart cities is to understand complex urban systems throughformal and informal channels of information so that innovative adaptation strategies canbe available not only for emergency management, but for routine local development.

Smarter infrastructure is one of the primary goals of smart cities. The idea of the smartcity often alludes to capitalizing upon opportunities to aggregate and manage big data in away that benefits the growth and development of a city (Celino, 2013). Urbanperformance depends not only on the hard infrastructure, or physical capital of a city, butit is increasingly linked to the availability and quality of knowledge, communication, andsocial infrastructure through social capital and awareness (Coe et al., 2001). Social capitalconnects communities to themselves and aids in the urban competitiveness to adapt,learn and innovate (Campbell, 2012).

Social infrastructure can be a great deal of work to maintain, especially given the amountof information generated by a city. Crowd­based coordination aids in the process ofactivation thresholds, roles, and building reputation systems in a local community tocreate new forms of collective community engagement. Our envisionment scenariodescribes how several themes of community informatics may come together in oneplatform.

A moral challenge for smart cities (and for smart societies) is ensuring that everyone canparticipate in and benefit from innovation, and that community infrastructures incorporateand innovate with current technologies. This not a simple matter of providing access tosmartphones, a technology our proposals in this paper depends upon. Thus, while overallaccess to smartphones is still lower in sub­Saharan Africa than in Europe,for example,some African countries had tenfold growth in mobile telephony in the past decade; inSouth Africa and Nigeria nine in ten people own mobile phones; 34% of South Africansown smartphones (Poushter & Oates, 2015).

The Berkeley Community Memory and the Blacksburg Electronic Village innovated at theleading edge of information infrastructures, but in both cases, the leading edge oftechnology quickly became mundane. What seems more significant from the vantagepoint of 2015 are the sociotechnical innovations of electronic bulletin boards and web­based community systems that were enabled, and that were eventually emulated acrossthe world. There may always be emerging technologies within the grasp of a few andbeyond the grasp of many others. We do not have to support or agree with this, if wechoose to deal with it. Innovative community infrastructures of the past made emergingtechnologies more available more quickly, driving creative appropriations for civicpurposes. This success pattern can and should be continued and developed.

In this paper we have examined a range of separate sociotechnical innovations that canbe composed into an innovation infrastructure for communities, InnovationStarter.However, we know that separate sociotechnical innovations also have a linear­historicalrelationship: technology­in­use tends to evoke further problematization and ideation indesigners, and further creative appropriations in users (the task­artifact cycle; Carroll etal. 1991). Sociologists have come to a similar view extending ideas of structuration oforganizations and communities, that technologies are open to new uses that are notembodied in the technology itself but in situated practice (Orlikowski, 2000). Challengesof adoption and deployment are central to CI, but through partnerships with communityorganizations we have found environments in which relatively simple systems have grownand developed into more robust projects. These systems cannot only provide hyperlocalawareness, information aggregation, and regular analytics, but can also be used tosupport partnerships and collaboration strategies among community stakeholders. Afurther direction in sociotechnical innovation as an approach to community informatics isbetter understanding this historical co­evolution.

Communities today face complex challenges to improve quality of life for citizens whilenurturing economic­ and socio­economic development. Designs that experiment with openand user­driven innovation for interacting with urban landscapes and adapt communitysentiment can act a valuable common resource for citizens in smart cities.

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