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Design Challenges in Supporting Distributed Knowledge: An Examination of Organizing Elections

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

This paper identifies the design challenges for creating collaborative technologies supporting the practices of organizing elections. We ethnographically investigate the distributed nature of knowledge as enacted between heterogeneous groups over the course of three elections in Denmark. We 1) identify fundamental characteristics of elections, 2) provide a comprehensive account of the distributed nature of knowledge in organizing and executing elections, and 3) point to new challenging areas for human-computer interaction (HCI) design supporting distributed collaborative knowledge practices. We found that organizational pattern of elections complicates the embodiment of nomadic knowledge, which is crucial for managing the effective organization of an election. Thus, one of the relevant design challenges is finding out how to support the timely distribution of large amounts of information, while still ensuring it is appropriately divided and delivered to various groups participating in planning and executing elections.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2015
4290 pages
ISBN:9781450331456
DOI:10.1145/2702123
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 18 April 2015

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Author Tags

  1. denmark
  2. embodiment
  3. knowledge practice
  4. nomadic knowledge
  5. organizing election
  6. voting

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  • Research-article

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  • The Danish Council for Strategic Research, Programme Commission on Strategic Growth Technologies.

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CHI '15
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CHI '15: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 18 - 23, 2015
Seoul, Republic of Korea

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CHI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 486 of 2,120 submissions, 23%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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