New Paper in The Journal of Community Informatics

Martin Wolske (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and I have a new paper in The Journal of Community Informatics. The paper is called “Critical Questions for Community Informatics in Practice from an Ethical Perspective.”

Here’s a brief description from the paper:

Collaboratively developed through three years of conference workshops, this set of guiding critical questions seeks to further promote ethical practice in CI…These guiding critical questions affirm the need to state social justice principles more explicitly in community informatics. Unequal power relations will always be a factor and CI practice can benefit from guidelines to ensure these relationships are more equitable.

Many people from around the world contributed to the development of this framework over three years of Community Informatics Research Network conferences in Prato, Italy. I believe the framework is quite relevant and applicable beyond the scope of this topic. It was a real honor to work with Martin Wolske and many other colleagues on this project. I hope it will be useful and also elaborated upon.

Panel Discussion on Civic Media at Harvard

It’s a bit late for this announcement, but I thought I’d share that I will be speaking on a panel tonight at Harvard with several absolutely incredible people. I am honored to participate in this book talk event and look forward to joining this important discussion. If you are in the Boston area this evening, please consider attending. Thank you.

Here’s the blurb from the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society’s website:

What does civic engagement look like in a digital age? What does it mean to participate in civic life when the lines between online and offline, political and social, organization and network are increasingly blurred? We define civic media as the “technologies, designs, and practices that produce and reproduce the sense of being in the world with others toward common good.” We offer this intentionally broad definition to accommodate what we see as a growing range of civic practices. And we hope that the term is generative, not restrictive – that it sparks the imagination about what it might include. But this isn’t simply a casual investigation. There is urgency in defining the term, as there is danger of these emerging practices of civic engagement simply getting lumped into larger media trends, or on the flip side, getting written off as anomalies narrowly defined. The term civic media suggests an “acting with” as a means of achieving a common good. It is inclusive of the range of intentional actions that people take with and through technologies, designs, or practices (aka media). Throughout the book, civic media is exemplified not through products or outcomes, but through the processes and potential of using the tools available to strive for the common good.

Join the editors and contributors of the new book Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice (MIT Press 2016) for a discussion on the role of civic media in the changing face of democracy around the world.