Hacking for Situated Civic Engagement

Local civic participation in the UK is typically low, despite many important aspects of our day-to-day lives being determined on a local level. Although there have been some recent attempts to design novel technologies in public spaces that engage citizens, many of these interventions have operated in a top-down fashion, being designed by researchers with content sourced from authorities.

This project will investigate how aspects of DIY and hacking cultures can empower citizens to design their own civic engagement technologies that fit their agendas, and to do so in a way that is both sustainable and replicable. We propose that this can be achieved through 'hackathon' events that bring together researchers, members of the public and technology enthusiasts to intensively imagine and prototype new technologies for civic engagement in public spaces and communities. Where hackathons have most frequently been used for developing software, we propose to appropriate this approach as a means for non-technical participants to design and co-create physical computing prototypes.

These events will serve dual purposes by 1) acting as a participatory design activity to bootstrap the development of civic engagement technologies that will be trialled and evaluated 'in the wild' with participants; and 2) encouraging further innovation by introducing participants to new technologies and skills and by producing documented tools and processes that other communities can replicate and build upon.

The intended outputs of this project will be: an understanding of the attributes of hackathons as a method for engaging community groups in design; an evaluation of situated civic engagement technologies generated through this method; and an exploration of methods for documenting hackathon outputs for other community groups and stakeholders.

We anticipate that this project will have potential impact in three broad areas: on the participant community; on the wider making and activist community; and on policy at a local and national level.

- Direct participants: for the Ardler community, this project represents a way to identify and take action on issues that affect their local area. While this can have a direct impact on these issues, by engaging disenfranchised members of the community we hope to have a continuing impact beyond the project. We also aim to create excitement around technology and making that might be sustained in the longer term. Through a combination of these factors, we hope to promote a sustainable community of making around local issues, capitalising on recent spike in engagement seen during the Scottish Independence referendum.

- Activism and makers: beyond direct beneficiaries, the findings of this project will help to inform a wider movement around technology-driven activism and making. Outputs from the project will be documented, allowing other communities to replicate and build upon our prototypes, and the methodological findings around hackathons will demonstrate the potential for these events to engage non-technical users in civic issues. The maker community, accessed through Dundee MakerSpace, will play a key role in this. For them, this project will identify methods of engaging broader cross-section of the population rather than just technology/making enthusiasts.

- Local and national policy: this work takes place against ongoing debates around localism, digital engagement in politics and evidence-based policy-making, and we expect this research has the potential to inform policy in all of these areas. The project will demonstrate how local communities can take a leading role in addressing their own issues, creating mechanisms for digital engagement and collecting data and evidence to support decision-making. It will also evaluate a new method of engaging members of the public in all of these activities. We have planned to organise or attend events both locally and nationally to support this.