7: The organiser’s perspective

Design stage: Refining and story boarding

In this session, we are looking into a different user group: that who may be considered ‘organisers’. Thinking of your project partners here. Some of them are civic groups and others are local government.  What is their role in supporting ‘civics’ forming online? When proposing a digital intervention, such as the ones you are working on, many key concerns arise in respect to how this system may be sustained, who will support it in terms of finance, maintenance, help for those using it. In the aftermaths of the Expense Scandale, for example, Handler et al. (2016) discuss the Guardian’s use of ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘game mechanics’ to quickly make sense of a large number of expense claims. For this, they published an open call for participation in which any Internet user could review tax receipts and flag noteworthy transactions. In this example, the Guardian was the organiser and also produced of this ‘civic technology’. However, that need not always be the case. May different setups are possible. In the world of digital products those are most often the software provider, the organisational user, and a wide and diverse range of end users. Early on, it is important to envision the eventual governance after a digital product has been deployed.

Seminar: In the seminar we will will spend some time to discuss the likely organisers’ concerns in your own project. We will use this discussing in the selection of one solution you will be prototyping in the weeks ahead.

Team: Discuss the different solutions that you have individually come up with. Choose a solution and discuss why you made this choice in a post for the design log.