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'A Farmer, a Place and at least 20 Members': The Development of Artifact Ecologies in Volunteer-based Communities

Published: 27 February 2016 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we present a case study of an urban organic food community and examine the way the community shapes its artifact ecology through a combination of appropriation of freely or cheaply available tools, and the long-term effort of building the community's own website. Based on participatory observation, content analysis of communication documents, and a series of interviews, we see how the collection of artifacts that a community uses to support their practice form what we refer to as their community artifact ecology. A community artifact ecology is multifaceted, dynamic and pending on what the members bring to the table, as well as on particular situations of use. The community artifact ecology concept is important for CSCW as it enables framing of the relationship between communities and technologies beyond the single artifact and beyond a static view of a dedicated technology.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '16: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing
February 2016
1866 pages
ISBN:9781450335928
DOI:10.1145/2818048
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: 27 February 2016

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  1. Community
  2. artifact ecology
  3. volunteering

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CSCW '16: Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
February 27 - March 2, 2016
California, San Francisco, USA

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  • (2024)Designing Multispecies Worlds for Robots, Cats, and HumansProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642115(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Utopian Design Space: Practical Concerns and Transformative AmbitionsInteracting with Computers10.1093/iwc/iwae055Online publication date: 13-Dec-2024
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