Creating Technology for Social Change

From User to Citizen – Erhardt Graeff at TICTec 2016

This is a live-blog of Erhardt Graeff’s talk at the TICTeC 2016 conference. Any errors or omissions are the fault of the author, Rahul Bhargava, due to trying to type as quickly as Erhardt speaks!

Erhardt is evaluating online learning engagement as civic learning. He works a lot on case-studies for civic impact – to inform how we design these tools. Instead of focusing on specific problems, he is interested in growth of individuals to be able to effectively participate in democracy.

Lets think about how our research serves a purpose. Our current model is a debate about slacktivism or “actualizing citizens”. Morozov write about slacktivism as feeling good for doing something, versus having impact in the world. Micah White talks about clicktivism as distracting participants from doing real world important work to build social movements. Others suggest this digital engagement is “actualizing citizens” to work with others online, working with networks about an issue that matters to them.

This should be a core motivation question for all of us here at the conference. The participation gap (from Jenkins in 2006) is really important. Tons of folks are publishing media online, and that is where we are doing our civic work. If you don’t have the skills to publish and share, then you won’t be able to participate in 21st century democracy. This is very concerning.

What kind of citizens are we building? When you look back to education scholars, we can find models for civic educaton that create different types of citizens (Westheimer and Kahne 2004).

  • Personally Responsible – folks that are following rules
  • Participatory Citizens – the organizers that try to activate others
  • Justice Oriented – folks looking at systemic problems and how to solve them

While we do need all three types, we don’t need everyone to be all of these. We have to redefine what it mans to participate in society now – it is about getting the skills and experience participate and engage with others online and offline.

We need a definition of civic learning, so he uses Merrifield’s one from 2001 include knowledge, abilities and dispositions. Knowledge is about awareness of tools, theories of changes, and experiences to bring to bear. Abilities is broad – anything you can do to help bring about change. Dispositions are the values you bring and your sense of efficacy; we need to understand how youth thinks about this and how it grows. You need a combination of all three of these to get there. Merrifield says this is about linking to existing experience, practicing democracy, and solving problems. You have to engage with things in different ways, include scaffolding to on-board folks, and allow for deeper self-reflection to close the loop. This last bit is about how we learn. Have to participate in communities of practice, and more.

So you can map Civic Tech in multiple ways, but civic learning has to be at the center of it. Doing this well requires all methods to understand this well – longitudinal, psychometric surveys, ethnographic insights, and pre/post tests. This has to get deeper than if you feel efficacy today, to include the context and culture behind it. We have to built up a set of validated tools to assess learning. Erhardt admits he hasn’t done this – it is a shared challenge we need to work on. Shute’s Stealth Assessment approach about instrumenting video games is inspirational in how to determine learning over time.

Erhardt discussing Action Path

He pivots to talk about Action Path as an example, a tool he has been building with Rahul Bhargava (me) at the MIT Center for Civic Media. Imagine walking through your community and being alerted via a notification on your smart-phone to ask you for input on an issue up for public debate. This is attempt to lower the cost of engagement for participation. His goals including increasing quantity and quality of engagement, increase knowledge of city, and increase sense of efficacy. This is “design-based research”, where we try something new to see how it goes. He assessed this via ethnographic interviews with participants.

In partnerships with SeeClickFix in New Haven he found 14 people to work with. Every interaction with the app was logged with time and location, to assess if they are doing the behaviors designed into it. He starts with qualitative aspects to understand how it made people feel. At a high level, they said that they felt more connected. the vast majority said it changed how they viewed the city. This suggests that he is on the right track. Erhardt shared a number of quotes to highlight how people ended up feeling. There were about the folks around doing the work, and what role they felt in the process – all pieces of how connected each individual is.

So this is the challenge – how are our users evolving? To address these questions he started with, we have to figure out how to track this. We must create a framework for putting civic learning at the center of our design goals.

Audience Questions

One audience membe asks: Most of what you talked about is positive reinforcement loops, but mostly we have a lack or negative? You participate and it doesn’t work, or you participate and see nothing happen. Erhardt responds The center for civic media believes you can’t answer this in the tech itself; it relies on the partners and deployment in context. The community provides the opportunity to asses goals were actually achieved. This is quite a design challenge.

Another person asks about values as an element of disposition. As we think about impact, what are the values that are baked into the things we make? Does civic learning espouse a specific set of values that you see come up again and again? Erhardt responds that the core for the values question is that you have to be there to empower users vs. their potentially disempowering context they are in. This is about democratic participation. If you find that is uncomfortable, then the whole civic learning framing isn’t going to work for you. He hesitates to go beyond this, because tech isn’t neutral and the values baked in aren’t always easy to counteract. Designers need to reflect, as do organizations; and community it transparently.