Abstract
This paper addresses the challenges and potential of citizen-driven technologies. It strives to find answers on how relevant contexts for these technologies can be identified and what a fertile and transdisciplinary development process could look like.
The goal of civic technologies, civic tech for short (Patel et al, 2013), is the design of alternative approaches to “platform capitalism” (Scholz 2012, Srnicek 2016) for an expansion of the sovereignty of the citizens using those technologies. Since digitization permeates all facets of our everyday lives (cf. Ryser 2014, De Waal 2014), citizens need to take on an active role in dealing with it. In this way, open-source technology offers the possibility of developing critical dialogue and transparent usage. In a long run, these technologies have the chance to grow into digital commons (cf. Ghosh 2006, Hardt & Negri 2009, Ostrom/Helfrich 2011) so that citizens can use and adapt them to their purposes and the changing conditions of their surroundings.
There is a long way to go until these technologies reach the status of digital commons. From own experience of developing open source technology within my doctoral research (Schubert, 2018), one of the main challenges was to bridge the gap between publishing the open-source technology and at the same time integrating it into local as well as situated practices, as work in initiatives or protest events in an urban and rural context. But the experience showed that just publishing an open-source repository does not mean that it can be accessed by the actors involved. Meaningful, interdisciplinary tasks need to be carried out to make digital content understandable and adaptable. Additionally, visibility for the repository needs to be created so that the repository is known and used by interested peers worldwide.
To help tackle these challenges in the future in a more profound way, this paper wants to explore how various actors cope with these issues, and which approaches they have found to deal with them. To gain this deeper understanding, paper will analyze three case studies: firstly, it will explore the Digital Plan of the Barcelona City Council, including the Ethical Digital Standards Policy Toolkit.1 Secondly, it will evaluate the open-source Grow Room project of Space10, the innovation hub of IKEA.2 And thirdly, it discusses the insights of the Socially Engaged Design (SED 2) workshop on “Civic Tech” which took place in October 2019 at the University of Technology Limassol.
At the end of this paper, a suggestion will be made on how to cope with those challenges more productively in the future, and through that strengthen the development as well as the deployment of civic tech in society – to offer an alternative form of digital usage which gives power and knowledge to citizens and not continuously take them away.