Yesterday we held our ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing 2020 (CSCW 2020) workshop in Civic Technologies: Research, Practice, and Open Challenges. CSCW is the premier venue for research in the design and use of technologies that affect groups, organizations, communities, and networks by bringing together top researchers and practitioners. Although Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Human-Computer Interaction communities have shown a growing interest in researching issues around civic technologies, yet most research still focuses on projects from the Global North. For this reason, Adriana Alvarado Garcia, Claudia Flores Saviaga, Jorge Saldivar, Christopher A. Le Dantec and I organized this workshop with the aim of advancing CSCW research by raising awareness for the ongoing challenges and open questions around civic technology by bridging the gap between researchers and practitioners from different regions.
From our open call for participation we received 23 position papers and 49 proposals by researchers and practitioners from academic and civic institutions in 15 countries! This allowed us to discover very different approaches and to bring together people with very diverse background and expertise to:
- discuss how the local context and infrastructure affect the design, implementation, adoption, and maintenance of civic technology;
- identify key elements of the configuration of trust among government, citizenry, and local organizations and how these elements change depending on the sociopolitical context where community engagement takes place;
- discover what methods and strategies are best suited for conducting research on civic technologies in different contexts.
The organizing team will now focus on compiling all the contributions in a report to be released in arXiv in the following weeks but, in the meantime, I would like to thank again participants for making this workshop possible 🙂
Pablo Aragón 