HCC: Small: Exploring the Emergent Dynamics Between Nonprofit Organizations and a Technologically-Enabled, Innovative Public

这项研究考察了公众如何以及为什么使用技术与非营利组织合作，并开始探索如何设计新技术来促进非营利组织和公众之间更有成效的伙伴关系。移动信息和通信技术从根本上改变了基层组织的性质，使公众能够迅速和灵活地组织起来，以实现各种目标。然而，非营利组织往往未能利用公众对技术的创新和公民参与的使用来造福于他们。这项研究将采取两条协同的研究路线来解决这些问题，一条是实证研究，另一条是制定设计原则。一项分三个阶段的实证研究将考察技术在促进公众和非营利组织之间的伙伴关系方面的作用。第一阶段将探讨利用社交媒体这一突出社会背景的技术进行在线宣传。第二部分将研究虚拟志愿服务的分布式工作技术，主要是突出时间背景。第三项研究将调查移动技术的使用，突出物理环境，进行移动捐赠。每个阶段都将受到相同的高水平研究问题的推动，允许跨阶段进行综合，并就技术在公共组织和非营利组织之间的桥梁作用进行概括。在设计调查中，将利用社会、物理和时间背景的新排列，开发一系列低保真和中保真原型，这些原型体现了从经验调查中得出的设计建议。一系列的焦点小组和设计研讨会将提供反馈，以帮助指导原型设计的迭代。这项研究将提供经验证据，说明用于在线倡导、虚拟志愿服务和移动捐赠的技术如何影响非营利组织和公众之间的动态。它将推进关于非营利组织在不断变化的公众公民参与技术格局中所扮演角色的理论知识。这项研究还将得出关于社会、物理和时间背景在公民参与的技术使用中的作用的理论。了解公众使用技术与非营利组织合作的方式，对于促进和设计支持富有成效的伙伴关系向前发展的技术至关重要。这项研究还为学生提供了参与公民参与奖学金的机会，这种奖学金已经被证明吸引了计算机学科的少数族裔的参与。

This research examines how and why members of the public are using technology to work with nonprofit organizations and begins to explore how new technologies might be designed to foster more productive partnerships between nonprofit organizations and the public. Mobile information and communication technologies have fundamentally changed the nature of grassroots organizing, enabling members of the public to rapidly and flexibly organize themselves in order to accomplish a variety of goals. However, nonprofit organizations have often failed to leverage the public's innovative and civically-engaged uses of technology for their benefit. This research will undertake two synergistic lines of inquiry to address such issues, one consisting of empirical research, and the other developing design principles. A three-phase empirical study will examine the role of technologies in fostering partnerships between the public and nonprofits. The first phase will explore the use of social media, a technology foregrounding social context, for online advocacy. The second will examine distributed work technologies, predominantly foregrounding temporal context, for virtual volunteering. The third will investigate the use of mobile technologies, foregrounding physical context, for mobile giving. Each phase will be motivated by the same high-level research questions, allowing synthesis across phases and generalization about the role of technology in bridging between the public and nonprofit organizations. In the design inquiry, a series of low-fidelity and medium-fidelity prototypes will be developed that embody design recommendations derived from the empirical inquiry, taking advantage of new permutations of social, physical and temporal contexts. A series of focus groups and design workshops will provide feedback to help guide iteration on the design of the prototypes. This research will provide empirical evidence of how technologies used for online advocacy, virtual volunteering and mobile giving influence the dynamics between nonprofit organizations and members of the public. It will advance theoretical knowledge about the role of nonprofits in a changing technological landscape of public civic engagement. This research will also derive theory about the roles of social, physical, and temporal contexts in civically-engaged technology use. Understanding the way that members of the public are using technology to work with nonprofit organizations is critical for fostering and designing technologies to support productive partnerships moving forward. This research also provides an opportunity for students to participate in civically engaged scholarship, the kind of scholarship that has been shown to attract the participation of minorities in computing disciplines.