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Civic hacking: Re-imagining civic engagement in datafied publics
Stefan Baack ([email protected], @tweetbaack) Tamara Witschge ([email protected])
Centre for Media and Journalism Studies
University of Groningen
Empowerment?
State simplifications
vs. Local knowledge
Empowerment?
1. Civic hacking is about creating better means of connecting local
knowledge and practices with centralized government
1. Not knowing who is responsible
2. Council websites not user-friendly
“If somebody is able to report a problem with a pothole outside their house and next week it’s fixed, they have learned that engagement
with authority is not futile… FixMyStreet is a gateway drug into
bigger civic engagement.”
Giving citizens “a sense of agency”
Designing tools for the “citizen user”
è Enabling ‘direct’ exercise of power
Designing tools for the “citizen user”
è Enabling ‘direct’ exercise of power
- Connecting local knowledge with centralized government
Data Power?
Empowerment?
2. Civic hacking as a struggle for legibility
Structured data? Going through a webpage “and trying to spot in that where the names of speakers are, where eldest votes
is…to work out…which people voted in which way”
Structuring data as an editorial
process.
Increasing legibility by reducing a problem of scale?
“I reviewed those documents, you
couldn't – you were too busy trying to pay the mortgage – so let me tell you
what they show” (Rosen 2013)
Conclusion
1. Empowering citizens by giving them a sense of agency
è Connecting local knowledge and
practices with centralized government
2. Structured data a necessary precondition for doing so
è Struggle for legibility
Thank you!
Stefan Baack ([email protected], @tweetbaack) Tamara Witschge ([email protected])
Centre for Media and Journalism Studies
University of Groningen
References
Rosen, J. (2013, September 3). The “awayness” problem. Retrieved April 15, 2014, from
http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/the_awayness_problem.php
Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: how certain
schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
