Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

From Facebook to the Neighbourhood: Infrastructuring of Hybrid Community Engagement

  • Published:
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In recent years, social media have increased the resources that individuals and organizations are able to mobilize for the development of socially innovative practices. In this article, we engage with a naturally occurring development in a Trentinian neighbourhood to examine the cooperative interactions amongst members of a local community. The first author and local residents of the neighbourhood participated in online discussions, decision making, and physical activities that led to material changes in the area. The interventions are motivated by and based on the concept of Social Street that combines online interactions in a closed Facebook group with face-to-face meetings seeking to practically engage the collective in accomplishing certain immediate or ongoing needs. Over the course of two years, we studied this local instantiation of Social Street in Trento, Italy by way of an action-oriented (digital) ethnography. Through this work, we demonstrate how urban neighbourhoods might benefit from hybrid forms of community engagement that are enacted through a constant back and forth between online and face-to-face interactions. We further argue that the infrastructuring of local urban collectives should follow strategies that pay attention to the multiple issues in urban neighbourhoods and people’s attachments to them. Overall, the paper reflects upon the challenges and configurations of participation that this form of community-work entails.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
Figure 8
Figure 9
Figure 10
Figure 11
Figure 12
Figure 13
Figure 14
Figure 15
Figure 16
Figure 17
Figure 18

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. http://www.socialstreet.it/international/info-english/

  2. See http://sociograph.io/

  3. See https://grytics.com/

  4. Gregorio Arena is the president of Labsus, an association that has as its purpose the promotion of the subsidiarity principle of art. 118, paragraph 4 of the Italian Constitution. Labsus’ research activities produced the “Cooperation Agreements for the Common Goods”, presented in Bologna in February 2014, that favors the inclusion of citizens in urban governance. Every municipality can decide autonomously to adopt this legal instrument. The municipality of Trento adopted it in March 2015.

References

  • Arnall, Timo (2014). Exploring “Immaterials”: Mediating Design’s Invisible Materials. International Journal of Design, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 101–117.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arnall, Timo; Jørn Knutsen; and Einar Sneve Martinussen (2013). Immaterials: Light painting WiFi. Significance, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 38–39.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Asad, Mariam; and Christopher A. Le Dantec (2015). Illegitimate civic participation: supporting community activists on the ground. In CSCW 2015: Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. New York: ACM, pp. 1694–1703.

  • Björgvinsson, Erling; Pelle Ehn; and Per-Anders Hillgren (2010). Participatory Design and “Democratizing Innovation.” In PDC 2010: Proceedings of the Biennial Participatory Design Conference. New York: ACM, pp. 41–50.

  • Blanchette, Jean-François (2011). A material history of bits. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, vol. 62, no. 6, pp. 1042–1057.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bohøj, Morten; Nikolaj G. Borchorst; Susanne Bødker; Matthias Korn; and Pär-Ola Zander (2011). Public deliberation in municipal planning: Supporting Action and Reflection with Mobile Technology. In C&T 2011: Proceedings of the International Conference on Communities and Technologies. New York, New York, USA: ACM, pp. 88–97.

  • Cabitza, Federico; Rosantonietta Scramaglia; Denise Cornetta; and Carla Simone (2016). When the web supports communities of place: The “Social Street” case in Italy. International Journal of Web Based Communities, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 216–237.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carroll, John M. (2012). The Neighborhood in the Internet: Design Research Projects in Community Informatics. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carroll, John M. (2014). The Neighborhood in the Internet: Design Research Projects in Community Informatics. New York: Routledge.

  • Carroll, John M.; and Mary Beth Rosson (1996). Developing the Blacksburg Electronic Village. Communications of the ACM, vol. 39, no. 12, pp. 69–74.

  • Carroll, John M.; Blaine Hoffman; Kyungsik Han; and Mary Beth Rosson (2015). Reviving Community Networks: Hyperlocality and Suprathresholding in Web 2.0 Designs. Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 477–491.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Crivellaro, Clara; Rob Comber; John Bowers; Peter Wright; and Patrick Olivier (2014). A Pool of Dreams: Facebook, Politics and the Emergence of a Social Movement. In CHI 2014: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Pages. New York: ACM, pp. 3573–3582.

  • Daly, Elizabeth, Sheena Erete; Rosta Farzan; Gary Hsieh; Cliff Lampe; Claudia Lopez; Andres Monroy-Hernandez; Daniele Quercia; Raz Schwartz; and Amy Voida (2015). Supporting Cities, Neighborhoods, and Local Communities with Information and Communication Technologies. In CSCW 2015: Proceedings of the Conference Companion on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW Companion). New York: ACM, pp. 277–281.

  • De Cindio, Fiorella; and Douglas Schuler (2012). Beyond Community Networks: From Local to Global, from Participation to Deliberation. The Journal of Community Informatics, vol. 8, no. 3.

  • de Lange, Michiel, and Martijn de Waal (2013). Owning the city: New media and citizen engagement in urban design. First Monday, vol. 18, no. 11.

  • de Souza e Silva, Adriana (2006). From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces. Space and Culture, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 261–278.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • DiSalvo, Carl; Andrew Clement; and Volkmar Pipek (2013). Communities Participatory Design for, with and by communities. In J. Simonsen and T. Robertson (eds): Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design. New York: Routledge, pp. 182–210.

  • Dittrich, Yvonne; Sara Eriksén; and Christina Hansson (2002). PD in the Wild: Evolving Practices of Design in Use. In PDC 2002: Proceedings of the 7th Biennial Participatory Design Conference. Palo Alto, CA: CPSR, pp. 124–134.

  • Dourish, Paul (2004). Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dourish, Paul (2015). Not The Internet, but This Internet: How Othernets Illuminate Our Feudal Internet. In AA 2015: Proceedings of The Fifth Decennial Aarhus Conference on Critical Alternatives. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, pp. 157–168

  • Dourish, Paul; and Genevieve Bell (2011). Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Foth, Marcus (2006). Facilitating social networking in inner-city neighborhoods. Computer, vol. 39, n. 9, pp. 44–50.

  • Fuchs, Christian (2008). Internet and Society. Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge.

  • Ganugi, Giulia (2014). Tecnologie e social network: nuovi strumenti per creare relazionalitá. Studio sulle social street e il loro valore social. Alma Mater Studiorum–Università di Bologna Scuola di Scienze Politiche.

  • Geertz, Clifford (1988). Works and Lives. The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

  • Golsteijn, Connie; Sarah Gallacher; Licia Capra; and Yvonne Rogers (2016). Sens-Us: Designing Innovative Civic Technology for the Public Good. In DIS 2016: Proceedings of the Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. New York: ACM, pp. 39–49.

  • Gurstein, M. (ed.) (2000). Community Informatics - Enabling Communities with Information and Communication Technologies. Hershey, PA: IDEA Group Publishing.

  • Hakken, David; Maurizio Teli; and Barbara Andrews (2016). Beyond Capital: Values, Commons, Computing, and the Search for a Viable Future. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hampton, Keith; and Barry Wellman (2003). Neighboring in Netville: How the Internet Supports Community and Social Capital in a Wired Suburb. City and Community, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 277–311.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hampton, Keith N.; Lauren Sessions Goulet; Lee Rainie; and Kristen Purcell (2011a). Social networking sites and our lives. Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, vol. 47, no. 9, 85 pages.

  • Hampton, Keith N.; Chul-joo Lee; and Eun Ja Her (2011b). How new media affords network diversity: Direct and mediated access to social capital through participation in local social settings. New Media and Society, vol. 13, no. 7, pp. 1031–1049.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Han, Kyungsik; Patrick C. Shih; and John M. Carroll (2014). Local News Chatter: Augmenting Community News by Aggregating Hyperlocal Microblog Content in a Tag Cloud. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 30, no. 12, pp. 1003–1014.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harrison, Steve; and Paul Dourish (1996). Re-place-ing space. In CSCW 1996: Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. New York: ACM, pp. 67–76.

  • Hearn, Gregory N.; Jo A. Tacchi; Marcus Foth; and June Lennie (2008). Action Research and New Media: Concepts, Methods and Cases. New York: Hampton Press.

  • Jenkins, Henry; Katie Clinton; Ravi Purushotma; Alice J. Robison; and Margaret Weigel (2006). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21 Century. (MacArthur Foundation Report, vol. 21). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  • Jungherr, Andreas; and Pascal Jurgens (2013). Through a Glass, Darkly: Tactical Support and Symbolic Association in Twitter Messages Commenting on Stuttgart 21. Social Science Computer Review, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 74–89.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jurgenson, Nathan (2012). When Atoms Meet Bits: Social Media, the Mobile Web and Augmented Revolution. Future Internet, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 83–91.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Karasti, Helena (2014). Infrastructuring in Participatory Design. In PDC 2014: Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference. New York: ACM, pp. 141–150.

  • Karasti, Helena; and Anna-Liisa Syrjänen (2004). Artful infrastructuring in two cases of community PD. In PDC 2004: Proceedings of the eighth conference on Participatory design: Artful integration: interweaving media, materials and practices, vol. 1. New York: ACM, pp. 20–30.

  • Kaufhold, Marc-André; and Christian Reuter (2016). The Self-Organization of Digital Volunteers across Social Media: The Case of the 2013 European Floods in Germany. Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management (JHSEM), vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 137–166.

    Google Scholar 

  • Khan, Omar; Trebor Scholz; and Mark Shepard (2012). The Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series. New York: The Architectural League of New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Korn, Matthias (2013). Situating Engagement: Ubiquitous Infrastructures for In-Situ Civic Engagement (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Aarhus, Denmark: Aahus Universitet.

    Google Scholar 

  • Korn, Matthias; and Jon Back (2012). Talking It Further: From Feelings and Memories to Civic Discussions in and About Places. In Proceedings of the 7th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Making Sense Through Design. New York: ACM, pp. 189–198.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Korn, Matthias; and Susanne Bødker (2012). Looking Ahead: How Field Trials Can Work in Iterative and Exploratory Design of Ubicomp Systems. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. New York: ACM, pp. 21–30.

  • Korn, Matthias; and Amy Voida (2015). Creating Friction: Infrastructuring Civic Engagement in Everyday Life. In AA 2015: Proceedings of the Fifth Decennial Aarhus Conference on Critical Aternatives. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, pp. 145–156.

  • Kostakis, Vasilis; and Michel Bauwens (2014). Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

  • Kuznetsov, Stacey; and Eric Paulos (2010). Participatory Sensing in Public Spaces: Activating Urban Surfaces with Sensor Probes. In DIS 2010: Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. New York: ACM, pp. 21–30.

  • Lave, Jean; and Etienne Wenger (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Le Dantec, Christopher A (2016). Designing Publics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Le Dantec, Christopher A.; and Carl DiSalvo (2013). Infrastructuring and the Formation of Publics in Participatory Design. Social Studies of Science, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 241–264.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ledoux, Yves (1981). Thèorie critique et recherche-action: l’héritage habermassien. Revue de l’Instutut de Sociologie, vol. 3.

  • López, Claudia; and Rosta Farzan (2015). From Community Networks to Hyper-local Social Media. In CSCW 2015: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference Companion on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW Companion). New York: ACM, pp. 239–242.

  • Ludwig, Thomas; Oliver Stickel; Alexander Boden; and Volkmar Pipek (2014). Towards sociable technologies: an empirical study on designing appropriation infrastructures for 3D printing. In DIS 2014: Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference. New York: ACM, pp. 835–844.

  • Ludwig, Thomas; Christian Reuter; and Volkmar Pipek (2016). From Publics to Communities: Researching the Path of Shared Issues Through ICT. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 25, no. 2–3, pp. 193–225.

  • Ludwig, Thomas; Christoph Kotthaus; Christian Reuter; Sören van Dongen; and Volkmar Pipek (2017). Situated crowdsourcing during disasters: Managing the tasks of spontaneous volunteers through public displays. International Journal on Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS), vol. 102, pp. 103–121.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Masden, Christina; Catherine Grevet; Rebecca Grinter; Eric Gilbert; and W. Keith Edwards (2014). Tensions in Scaling-up Community Social Media : A Multi-Neighborhood Study of Nextdoor. In CHI 2014: Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, pp. 3239–3248.

  • McMillan, David W.; and David M. Chavis (1986). Sense of community: A definition and theory. (Special Issue: Psychological sense of community, I: Theory and concepts). Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 6–23.

  • Minardi, Everardo; and Stefano Cifiello (2005). RICERCAZIONE. Teoria e metodo del lavoro sociologico. Milano: FrancoAngeli.

  • Monteiro, Eric; Neil Pollock; Ole Hanseth; and Robin Williams (2013). From Artefacts to Infrastructures. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 575–607.

  • Mörtberg, Christina; Tone Bratteteig; Ina Wagner; Dagny Stuedahl; and Andrew Morrison (2010). Methods that matter in digital design research. In I. Wagner, T. Bratteteig and D. Stuedahl (eds): Exploring Digital Design. London: Springer, pp. 105–144.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Murthy, Dhiraj (2011). Emergent digital ethnographic methods for social research. In Handbook of Emergent Technologies in Social Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 158–179.

  • Pipek, Volkmar; and Volker Wulf (2009). Infrastructuring: Toward an integrated Perspective on the Design and Use of Information Technology. Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS), vol. 10, no. 5, pp. 447–473.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rainie, Lee, and Barry Wellman (2012). Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reuter, Christian (2014). Emergent Collaboration Infrastructures: Technology Design for Inter-Organizational Crisis Management (Doctoral dissertation). Siegen, Germany: Springer Gabler.

  • Reuter, Christian; Oliver Heger; and Volkmar Pipek (2013). Combining Real and Virtual Volunteers through Social Media. In T. Comes, F. Fiedrich, S. Fortier, J. Geldermann and T. Müller (eds): Proceedings of the 10th international ISCRAM Conference. Baden-Baden, Germany, pp. 1–10.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rheingold, Howard (1993). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rogers, Everett M.; Lori Collins-Jarvis; and Joseph Schmitz (1994). The Pen Project in Santa-Monica - Interactive Communication, Equality, and Political-Action. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, vol. 45, no. 6, pp. 401–410.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schmidt, Kjeld; and Ina Wagner (2002). Coordinative artifacts in architectural practice. In COOP 2002: Cooperative Systems Design: A Challenge of the Mobility Age. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems. Amsterdam: IOS Press, pp. 257–274.

  • Schroeter, Ronald; Marcus Foth; and Christine Satchell (2012). People, content, location: sweet spotting urban screens for situated engagement. In DIS 2012: Proceedings of the designing Interactive Systems Conference. New York: ACM, pp. 146–155.

  • Star, Susan Leigh; and Geoffrey C. Bowker (2002). How to Infrastructure. In L. A. Lievrouw and S. Livingstone (eds): Handbook of New Media. London: Sage, pp. 151–162.

    Google Scholar 

  • Star, Susan Leigh; and Karen Ruhleder (1996). Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces. Information Systems Research, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 111–134.

  • Strauss, Anselm L.; and Juliet Corbin (1998). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tanenbaum, Joshua G.; Amanda M. Williams; Audrey Desjardins; and Karen Tanenbaum (2013). Democratizing Technology: Pleasure, Utility and Expressiveness in DIY and Maker Practice. In CHI 2013: Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, pp. 2603–2612.

  • Teli, Maurizio; Silvia Bordin; María Menéndez Blanco; Giusi Orabona; and Antonella De Angeli (2015). Public design of digital commons in urban places: A case study. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, vol. 81, pp. 17–30.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Varnelis, Kazys (2012). Networked Publics. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vlach, Eleonora (2011). Tra centro e periferia. Cambiare il destino di una parte urbana. A, attraverso un processo partecipato di riqualificazione. Il caso del quartiere San Pio X a Trento. Università degli studi di Trento.

  • Vlachokyriakos, Vasilis; Rob Comber; Karim Ladha; Nick Taylor; Paul Dunphy; Patrick McCorry; and Patrick Olivier (2014). PosterVote: Expanding the Action Repertoire for Local Political Activism. In DIS 2014: Proceedings of the Conference on Designing interactive systems. New York: ACM, pp. 795–804.

  • Wagenknecht, Susann; and Matthias Korn (2016). Hacking as Transgressive Infrastructuring: Mobile Phone Networks and the German Chaos Computer Club. In CSCW 2016: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. New York: ACM, pp. 1104–1117.

  • Wiberg, Mikael; Hiroshi Ishii; Paul Dourish; Anna Vallgårda; Kerridge Tobie; Petra Sundström; Daniela Rosner; and Mark Rolston (2013). Materiality Matters---experience Materials. Interactions, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 54–57.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wulf, Volker; Kaoru Misaki; Meryem Atam; David Randall; and Markus Rohde (2013). “On the Ground” in Sidi Bouzid: Investigating Social Media Use during the Tunisian Revolution. In CSCW 2013: Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. New York: ACM, pp. 1409–1418.

Download references

Acknowledgements

This research has been possible thanks to the contributions of many members of Social Street and inhabitants of the neighbourhood San Pio X, whom we whole-heartedly thank for their availability and interest in the initiative. Starting from July 2016, the research was partly funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research through the KOKOS project (No. 13 N13559).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany

    Gaia Mosconi, Matthias Korn, Christian Reuter, Peter Tolmie & Volkmar Pipek

  2. Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Funchal, Portugal

    Maurizio Teli

Authors
  1. Gaia Mosconi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Matthias Korn
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Christian Reuter
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Peter Tolmie
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Maurizio Teli
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Volkmar Pipek
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gaia Mosconi.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Mosconi, G., Korn, M., Reuter, C. et al. From Facebook to the Neighbourhood: Infrastructuring of Hybrid Community Engagement. Comput Supported Coop Work 26, 959–1003 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-017-9291-z

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-017-9291-z

Keywords

Search

Navigation