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Do-it-yourself services and work-like chores: on civic duties and digital public services

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Abstract

Doing civic duties is neither paid work nor leisure: it is a private, work-like activity. Digital services enrol customers in doing work tasks. Also digital public services delegate work to citizens, but there are important differences between automation for citizens doing their civic duties and services that customers choose to use. In this paper, we discuss how digitally automated services remove some tasks but also introduce new work tasks for citizens and how citizens handle these. We present a study of citizens’ calls to a public service provider (the tax authorities) requesting help carrying out their civic duties. The analysis of citizens’ problems with doing their taxes is a basis for suggesting an alternative design of digital tax services that can increase citizens’ mastery and autonomy when doing their taxes. We suggest an approach for designing coherent tasks for the citizen, and how doing one’s civic duties can be seen as work—and as a part of life. We argue that designing for automated public services need to apply a citizen-centric perspective in order to maintain a basis for citizens to participate in democratic processes in society.

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Notes

  1. All names are pseudonyms.

  2. The Norwegian all-in-one public services portal for citizens.

  3. Automation also introduces new technical and managerial tasks for the Tax Administration: the work to make technology work [42], which is not discussed here. In this paper, the perspective is with the citizens.

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Acknowledgments

Funding for this research was provided for by the Research Council of Norway. The research is part of the “Automation and Autonomy” project at the University of Oslo where an overarching ambition has been to study how automated public services of various kinds influence human autonomy, and how better service and technology design can improve it. We thank the call centre for letting us in and the anonymous reviewers for constructive suggestions for improving this paper. A special thank goes to the workshop on “CSCW at the boundary of work and life” at ECSCW 2013 for an interesting discussion and constructive comments.

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  1. Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, PO. Box 1080, Blindern, 0316, Oslo, Norway

    Guri Verne & Tone Bratteteig

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  1. Guri Verne
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Correspondence to Guri Verne.

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Verne, G., Bratteteig, T. Do-it-yourself services and work-like chores: on civic duties and digital public services. Pers Ubiquit Comput 20, 517–532 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-016-0936-6

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