This is the result of @Federico_Monaco @Ezio_Manzini and myself meeting last week. Feel free to edit or comment. For reference, see this thread.
Here you find the call for papers; the track we have chosen is: Mobilizations in the era of “doing together” and the commons
What the proposal should look like:
"The proposal, written in English or in French, will mention the research question, the used methodology and theoretical frame. It will highlight the scientific interest of the submitted article in regard with the existing literature and the call for paper. It can be accompanied by a short bibliography. We wish to draw the attention of the authors to the rubric « updating the classics », which aims to revisit classic authors and theories in social sciences through the prism of the Internet. "
Our work schedule:
- until Feb 15th any changes and adds (maybe also Alberto, @Yannick or who else might contribute according to the core of the abstract).
- 16th - 18th check publishing guidelines (Federico)
- 19th - 25th english proof - Is there anybody in Edgeryders who might be helpful to check the english?
- 26th-27th submission by Federico
bold = last adds by Federico
Title: OPENCARE: a space of possibilities as arena for daily life politics. From online conversations to on-site collaborations in caring-related activities
OpenCare is a research project delivered by a consortium of universities and SMEs, who assembled an online community with over 200 participants. Its main goal is prototyping a community-driven model for health and social care. The project’s approach is inspired by the increasing mobilization of global, heterogeneous DIY and hacker/hacker-like communities. They are characterized by a propensity to look for solutions, efficiency in action and radical openness in their practice. OpenCare reflects and is designed along those principles and constitutes itself as a bottom-up, digital, civic European arena about healthcare.
At this point in time, OpenCare has achieved half of its goals: the prototype of a care-oriented digital space is working at full scale, facilitating different kinds of care-related events, from stories of individual personal experiences, to conversations about how to improve existing health and political systems and ultimately collaborations between participants both on and offline.
The paper discusses these results in terms of the politics of everyday life: contributions to the platform are political actions taken by citizens who, while mobilizing to solve specific care-related problems (or creating preconditions for these solutions) make a political statement on the viability of an open, collaborative care system. The connections forged across sometimes disparate geographical locations and the knowledges shared through the online platform constitute new forms of online political engagement that translate into offline action. Story-sharing increases connectivity, facilitates the movement of new ideas across health and social care contexts, and leads to emergent creates new and unexpected political alliances.
We analyze this activity using an interpretative model that can be summarized in this way: the care-oriented digital space (i.e. the one realized in the OpenCare research framework) is considered as a space of possibilities. By this we mean, firstly, an environment where different care-oriented events take place and are generated by the self-driven “hacker mindset” of participants self-driven participants with a “hacker mindset”. Secondly, this space is characterised by the affordances that are embedded in it and influence the existence and evolution of events.
In this conceptual framework, the discussion on when and how this space of possibilities becomes an arena for the politics of everyday life is done by observing when and how people meet in it, share information, start conversations and collaborations, and move from the digital space to a physical one. In order to do so, the paper presents four steps:
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Prior events are analysed to give a general overview on how this space of possibilities has worked and is working. This happens in two steps. First, ethnographic coding of over 2,000 written contributions is performed: Next, the graph of relationships between ethnographic codes is examined by methods borrowed from graph theory. Specifically, we define a social network of interaction in the conversation. We then use the count and reach across the social network of co-occurrences of ethnographic codes as indicators of across-conversation convergence. This adds a quantitative dimension to the qualitative conclusions of our ethnography.
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Meaningful events, where online conversations evolve into potential collaboration and action
and their evolution from, are evaluated through the participants’ motivations and their specific background cultures. This will be done using ethnographic primary data (347 posts and 1590 comments) and secondary data (3300 annotations and codes), as well as design tools. -
Spaces of possibilities are considered to evaluate step by step the relationships between the events, their environment, and the different implicit and explicit affordances embedded in the platform.
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The data is then analyzed with a focus on the implications and potentialities of the interactions on Open Care for the participants’ politics of everyday life.
The article concludes by introducing threads of research to be developed in the coming months, inside OpenCare and after its conclusion.
(Short bibliography)
Akrich, Madeleine (2010). « From Communities of Practice to Epistemic Communities: Health Mobilizations on the Internet », Sociological Research Online, 15. https://hal-mines-paristech.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00517657
Manzini, Ezio (2015). Design, When Everybody Designs. An Introduction for Social Innovation, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press.
Nowotny, Helga (2003). « Democratising expertise and socially robust knowledge », Science and Public Policy, 30 (3), pp. 151–156.
Oudshoorn, Nelly & Pinch, Trevor (eds.) (2003). How Users Matter. The Co-construction of Users and Technology, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press.
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