Designing community driven participatory platforms : reconfiguring roles, resources, infrastructure, and constraints for community commissioning

Abstract

The advent of the internet and the rise of social computing provides new opportunities to explore the configuration of platforms to support collective participation and production of peer-owned resources. The commons-based peer-production model of Wikipedia is a prominent example of how the configuration of platforms can facilitate the collective efforts of individuals to perform tasks at scale, and for a common purpose. The role of citizens as consumers is beginning to transition into citizens as producers with the advent of these new models of collective participation. The introduction of citizens within these models of production can be seen in the process of requesting and accessing Open Government Data, facilitating engagement with academic research within Citizen Science, leveraging the collective computation of crowd workers, and providing global market places to capitalize on underutilized assets in the Sharing Economy. However, the provisioning of infrastructure to support these technologies and the processes embedded within them continue to be provided as services to individuals rather than being provided by the communities who will utilize these resources. Therefore, this thesis extends beyond the individual and investigates how we can facilitate communities in expressing their own needs, identify supporting resources, and engage in the production of community owned resources. The contributions of this thesis are the introduction of the concept of community commissioning and the exploration of how the design and configuration of platforms can enable communities to take a leading role in technology commissioning. The approach undertaken to explore this area has been conducted through the design, development, documentation, and analysis of two large-scale social computing systems, FeedFinder and App Movement, that continue to be deployed and utilized by communities ‘in-the-wild’. Case study 1 presents FeedFinder, a community driven information resource to support new mothers in sharing experiential data around breastfeeding friendly locations. Case study 2 presents the design and development of App Movement, a community commissioning platform to facilitate communities in proposing, designing, and deploying location-based review mobile applications to support the establishing of community driven information resources. This thesis draws upon these case studies to inform a novel framework that defines the practice of community commissioning and explores the implications of provisioning services to support new configurations of participation.