HCC: Medium: Seamful Design: Prototyping and Evaluating Collaborative Tools for Civic Data

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This project will develop an innovative framework for designing civic data systems. The framework supports knowledge production, including policy, governance, and advocacy, and that allows for dynamic coalitions to collaborate and moderate boundaries over time. In the ecosystem of civic organizations there are distinct accountabilities or modes of actions. Mission-driven organizations act in their communities to address local issues. Municipal governments provide services and manage the operations of the city. Policy makers set goals and rules to achieve long-term priorities. Across this environment, data have become a crucial material in how knowledge is produced and shared. However, striving for integration and interoperability of data and data systems, often through a one-size-fits-app approach, is a fundamental mismatch for how civic work actually happens. There is a need to reexamine the base assumptions of what collaboration means in civic work. This research will develop a novel approach to designing civic data systems by advancing the notion of seamfulness as a foundation for understanding supporting the ecosystem of organizations, technology, people, and negotiated outcomes that comprise civic work. Seamfulness recognizes the reality of interruptions and misalignments in data sharing between very different organizations, and seams offer a way to articulate the fluid assertion of gaps and integration in ways that more readily map to how civic entities work together. This requires a distinct approach to civic data system design, different than the aspirations of seamlessness common to civic technology discourse where technical integration and interoperability obviate social and organizational boundaries. The research follows an iterative cycle over three core research strands (1) build an empirical foundation and initial prototype systems to answer core research questions, (2) situate individual tools across organizations, looking at how each manages action and accountability within the issue-focused coalition, and (3) focus on how to transfer and generalize the findings beyond the specific research sites of this project. The outcome of this research will result in a taxonomy of data contexts and knowledge production for civic data work, prototypes that link specific data system architecture and human-interaction techniques to enable coalition-based civic work across practice-based seams, and theoretical resolution to seamful design as a foundation for human-centered civic technologies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.