Download or read book Evaluating Civic Technology Design for Citizen Empowerment written by Erhardt Charles Graeff and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civic technology should empower us as citizens. Despite its breadth as a field, civic technology often takes its lead from Silicon Valley companies that espouse design goals potentially hazardous to participatory democracy. In this dissertation, I explore: How might we design civic technologies for citizen empowerment and evaluate their impact on this goal? With their growing role as mediators of democracy, it is insufficient for civic technology designers to evaluate their designs in terms of ease of use and increased engagement with their platform. Research from political and developmental psychology shows the importance to lifelong civic engagement of learning experiences that cultivate a citizen's perception they can make change (political efficacy) and their belief in having responsibilities to the public good (civic identity). To achieve these positive feedback loops, we need a richer framework for civic technology design. This dissertation proposes two solutions: 1) empowerment-based design principles for civic technology and 2) a prototype toolkit for evaluating the impact of civic technology on political efficacy. Because empowerment is contextual, the proposals here focus on tools and platforms built to support "monitorial citizenship," an increasingly popular form of civic engagement aimed at holding institutions accountable. To see these solutions in action, I report on a case study of SeeClickFix, a civic technology company that builds tools enabling citizens to report infrastructure problems to local governments. Two surveys of political efficacy and a randomized experiment with active users of SeeClickFix, followed by interviews with SeeClickFix staff, indicate the validity and utility of evaluating political efficacy as a measure of empowerment as well as the limitations of testing for incremental improvements.

Download or read book Civic Media written by Eric Gordon and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examinations of civic engagement in digital culture—the technologies, designs, and practices that support connection through common purpose in civic, political, and social life. Countless people around the world harness the affordances of digital media to enable democratic participation, coordinate disaster relief, campaign for policy change, and strengthen local advocacy groups. The world watched as activists used social media to organize protests during the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution. Many governmental and community organizations changed their mission and function as they adopted new digital tools and practices. This book examines the use of “civic media”—the technologies, designs, and practices that support connection through common purpose in civic, political, and social life. Scholars from a range of disciplines and practitioners from a variety of organizations offer analyses and case studies that explore the theory and practice of civic media. The contributors set out the conceptual context for the intersection of civic and media; examine the pressure to innovate and the sustainability of innovation; explore play as a template for resistance; look at civic education; discuss media-enabled activism in communities; and consider methods and funding for civic media research. The case studies that round out each section range from a “debt resistance” movement to government service delivery ratings to the “It Gets Better” campaign aimed at combating suicide among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth. The book offers a valuable interdisciplinary dialogue on the challenges and opportunities of the increasingly influential space of civic media.

Download or read book Citizen E Participation in Urban Governance Crowdsourcing and Collaborative Creativity written by Silva, Carlos Nunes and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2013-06-30 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between citizens and city governments is gradually transforming due to the utilization of advanced information and communication technologies in order to inform, consult, and engage citizens. Citizen E-Participation in Urban Governance: Crowdsourcing and Collaborative Creativity explores the nature of the new challenges confronting citizens and local governments in the field of urban governance. This comprehensive reference source explores the role that Web 2.0 technologies play in promoting citizen participation and empowerment in the city government and is intended for scholars, researchers, students, and practitioners in the field of urban studies, urban planning, political science, public administration, and more.

Download or read book What Can a Body Do written by Sara Hendren and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all. Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built. In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it—from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture—Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.

Download or read book Meaningful Inefficiencies written by Eric Gordon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public trust in the institutions that mediate civic life-from governing bodies to newsrooms-is low. In facing this challenge, many organizations assume that ensuring greater efficiency will build trust. As a result, these organizations are quick to adopt new technologies to enhance what they do, whether it's a new app or dashboard. However, efficiency, or charting a path to a goal with the least amount of friction, is not itself always built on a foundation of trust. Meaningful Inefficiencies is about the practices undertaken by civic designers that challenge the normative applications of "smart technologies" in order to build or repair trust with publics. Based on over sixty interviews with change makers in public serving organizations throughout the United States, as well as detailed case studies, this book provides a practical and deeply philosophical picture of civic life in transition. The designers in this book are not professional designers, but practitioners embedded within organizations who have adopted an approach to public engagement Eric Gordon and Gabriel Mugar call "meaningful inefficiencies," or the deliberate design of less efficient over more efficient means of achieving some ends. This book illustrates how civic designers are creating meaningful inefficiencies within public serving organizations. It also encourages a rethinking of how innovation within these organizations is understood, applied, and sought after. Different than market innovation, civic innovation is not just about invention and novelty; it is concerned with building communities around novelty, and cultivating deep and persistent trust. At its core, Meaningful Inefficiencies underlines that good civic innovation will never just involve one single public good, but must instead negotiate a plurality of publics. In doing so, it creates the conditions for those publics to play, resulting in people truly caring for the world. Meaningful Inefficiencies thus presents an emergent and vitally needed approach to creating civic life at a moment when smart and efficient are the dominant forces in social and organizational change.

Download or read book Democracy May Not Exist But We ll Miss It When It s Gone written by Astra Taylor and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is democracy really? What do we mean when we use the term? And can it ever truly exist?Astra Taylor, hailed as a “New Civil Rights Leader” by the Los Angeles Times, provides surprising answers. There is no shortage of democracy, at least in name, and yet it is in crisis everywhere we look. From a cabal of plutocrats in the White House to gerrymandering and dark-money compaign contributions, it is clear that the principle of government by and for the people is not living up to its promise. The problems lie deeper than any one election cycle. As Astra Taylor demonstrates, real democracy—fully inclusive and completely egalitarian—has in fact never existed. In a tone that is both philosophical and anecdotal, weaving together history, theory, the stories of individuals, and interviews with such leading thinkers as Cornel West and Wendy Brown, Taylor invites us to reexamine the term. Is democracy a means or an end, a process or a set of desired outcomes? What if those outcomes, whatever they may be—peace, prosperity, equality, liberty, an engaged citizenry—can be achieved by non-democratic means? In what areas of life should democratic principles apply? If democracy means rule by the people, what does it mean to rule and who counts as the people? Democracy's inherent paradoxes often go unnamed and unrecognized. Exploring such questions, Democracy May Not Exist offers a better understanding of what is possible, what we want, why democracy is so hard to realize, and why it is worth striving for.

Download or read book Democratic Innovations written by Graham Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-02 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines democratic innovations from around the world, drawing lessons for the future development of both democratic theory and practice.

Download or read book Civic Power written by K.Sabeel Rahman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What will it take to restore American democracy and rescue it from this moment of crisis? Civic Power argues that the current threat to US democracy is rooted not just in the outcome of the 2016 election, but in deeper, systemic forms of inequality that concentrate economic and political power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. Drawing on historical and social science research and case studies of contemporary democratic innovations across the country, Civic Power calls for a broader approach to democracy reform focused on meaningfully redistributing power to citizens. It advocates for both reviving grassroots civil society and novel approaches to governance, policymaking, civic technology, and institutional design - aimed at dismantling structural disparities to build a more inclusive, empowered, bottom-up democracy, where communities and people have greater voice, power, and agency.

Download or read book Democratic Professionalism written by Albert W. Dzur and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing expert knowledge to bear in an open and deliberative way to help solve pressing social problems is a major concern today, when technocratic and bureaucratic decision making often occurs with little or no input from the general public. Albert Dzur proposes an approach he calls “democratic professionalism” to build bridges between specialists in domains like law, medicine, and journalism and the lay public in such a way as to enable and enhance broader public engagement with and deliberation about major social issues. Sparking a critical and constructive dialogue among social theories of the professions, professional ethics, and political theories of deliberative democracy, Dzur reveals interests, motivations, strengths, and vulnerabilities in conventional professional roles that provide guideposts for this new approach. He then applies it in examining three practical arenas in which experiments in collaboration and power-sharing between professionals and citizens have been undertaken: public journalism, restorative justice, and the bioethics movement. Finally, he draws lessons from these cases to refine this innovative theory and identify the kinds of challenges practitioners face in being both democratic and professional.

Download or read book The Right to the Smart City written by Paolo Cardullo and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2019-06-07 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Globally, Smart Cities initiatives are pursued which reproduce the interests of capital and neoliberal government, rather than wider public good. This book explores smart urbanism and 'the right to the city', examining citizenship, social justice, commoning, civic participation, and co-creation to imagine a different kind of Smart City.

Download or read book Sustainable Smart City Transitions written by Luca Mora and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-02-23 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book enhances the reader’s understanding of the theoretical foundations, sociotechnical assemblage, and governance mechanisms of sustainable smart city transitions. Drawing on empirical evidence stemming from existing smart city research, the book begins by advancing a theory of sustainable smart city transitions, which forms bridges between smart city development studies and some of the key assumptions underpinning transition management and system innovation research, human geography, spatial planning, and critical urban scholarship. This interdisciplinary theoretical formulation details how smart city transitions unfold and how they should be conceptualized and enacted in order to be assembled as sustainable developments. The proposed theory of sustainable smart city transitions is then enriched by the findings of investigations into the planning and implementation of smart city transition strategies and projects. Focusing on different empirical settings, change dimensions, and analytical elements, the attention moves from the sociotechnical requirements of citywide transition pathways to the development of sector-specific smart city projects and technological innovations, in particular in the fields of urban mobility and urban governance. This book represents a relevant reference work for academic and practitioner audiences, policy makers, and representative of smart city industries. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology.

Download or read book Everyday Politics written by Harry C. Boyte and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasingly a spectator sport, electoral politics have become bitterly polarized by professional consultants and lobbyists and have been boiled down to the distributive mantra of "who gets what." In Everyday Politics, Harry Boyte transcends partisan politics to offer an alternative. He demonstrates how community-rooted activities reconnect citizens to engaged, responsible public life, and not just on election day but throughout the year. Boyte demonstrates that this type of activism has a rich history and strong philosophical foundation. It rests on the stubborn faith that the talents and insights of ordinary citizens—from nursery school to nursing home—are crucial elements in public life. Drawing on concrete examples of successful public work projects accomplished by diverse groups of people across the nation, Boyte demonstrates how citizens can master essential political skills, such as understanding issues in public terms, mapping complex issues of institutional power to create alliances, raising funds, communicating, and negotiating across lines of difference. He describes how these skills can be used to address the larger challenges of our time, thereby advancing a renewed vision of democratic society and freedom in the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Social Media and Everyday Politics written by Tim Highfield and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From selfies and memes to hashtags and parodies, social media are used for mundane and personal expressions of political commentary, engagement, and participation. The coverage of politics reflects the social mediation of everyday life, where individual experiences and thoughts are documented and shared online. In Social Media and Everyday Politics, Tim Highfield examines political talk as everyday occurrences on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Tumblr, Instagram, and more. He considers the personal and the political, the serious and the silly, and the everyday within the extraordinary, as politics arises from seemingly banal and irreverent topics. The analysis features international examples and evolving practices, from French blogs to Vines from Australia, via the Arab Spring, Occupy, #jesuischarlie, Eurovision, #blacklivesmatter, Everyday Sexism, and #illridewithyou. This timely book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in media and communications, internet studies, and political science, as well as general readers keen to understand our contemporary media and political contexts

Download or read book Participatory Design Theory written by Oswald Devisch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, many countries all over Europe have witnessed a demand for a more direct form of democracy, ranging from improved clarity of information to being directly involved in decision-making procedures. Increasingly, governments are putting citizen participation at the centre of their policy objectives, striving for more transparency, to engage and empower local individuals and communities to collaborate on public projects and to encourage self-organization. This book explores the role of participatory design in keeping these participatory processes public. It addresses four specific lines of enquiry: how can the use and/or development of technologies and social media help to diversify, to coproduce, to interrupt and to document democratic design experiments? Aimed at researchers and academics in the fields of urban planning and participatory design, this book includes contributions from a range of experts across Europe including the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Spain, France, Romania, Hungary and Finland.

Download or read book The Good Citizen written by David Batstone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Good Citizen, some of the most eminent contemporary thinkers take up the question of the future of American democracy in an age of globalization, growing civic apathy, corporate unaccountability, and purported fragmentation of the American common identity by identity politics.

Download or read book Building on Smart Cities Skills and Competences written by Panos Fitsilis and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-07-06 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides insights on skills required to achieve success in smart cities from a variety of industry and human factors perspectives. It emphasizes the balance between learning skills, technical skills, and domain-specific skills in these industries, with special emphasis given to innovative software development models. The authors note that digital transformation requires complementary measures that are not overtly aimed to support infrastructure investment but are instead directed at promoting entrepreneurship, improving digital skills, engaging citizens, applying new transformation strategies, and developing innovative software. All of the above are considered strategically important, especially for medium-sized cities since that enable them to be more competitive in the global economy.

Download or read book Citizen Science written by Susanne Hecker and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Citizen science, the active participation of the public in scientific research projects, is a rapidly expanding field in open science and open innovation. It provides an integrated model of public knowledge production and engagement with science. As a growing worldwide phenomenon, it is invigorated by evolving new technologies that connect people easily and effectively with the scientific community. Catalysed by citizens’ wishes to be actively involved in scientific processes, as a result of recent societal trends, it also offers contributions to the rise in tertiary education. In addition, citizen science provides a valuable tool for citizens to play a more active role in sustainable development. This book identifies and explains the role of citizen science within innovation in science and society, and as a vibrant and productive science-policy interface. The scope of this volume is global, geared towards identifying solutions and lessons to be applied across science, practice and policy. The chapters consider the role of citizen science in the context of the wider agenda of open science and open innovation, and discuss progress towards responsible research and innovation, two of the most critical aspects of science today.