Topics in Social Informatics: Civic Engagement and Technology

Civic engagement involves joining with others to identify and address issues facing a community. Examples include volunteering to clean up a park, participating in a town hall meeting, and voting. Conversations about civic issues emerge in many public and private spaces, including public libraries, coffeeshops, and through group messaging platforms, like WhatsApp. This course will investigate how computing systems have been used to help people surface issues in various ways---from community sensing systems to crowdsourcing budget issues---as well as address issues through online discussion, mutual-aid, and coordinating volunteer networks. Technology can serve as a force multiplier for civic engagement; however, there are important considerations related to their design, deployment, and sustaining them over time. Civic technology is embedded within a policy, political, and technical environment that can be tricky to navigate. Many people also lack access to the time and training to fully engage with a technology; failure to recognize these barriers related to the “digital divide” can result in systematically preventing some groups of people from participating in civic activities. Additionally, there may be unanticipated risks associated with the way that a civic technology collects, manages, and shares personal as well as group level information. These ethical issues deserve special consideration in a civic engagement and socio-technical context.