Last week, Benjamin Sugar, Adam Hasler, and I presented some of our work at the Connected Communities Symposium in Newcastle. We are currently compiling the work into a more camera-ready form, but until then, I have put together some links that outline our references.
In short, the Community Stack is a solution stack of existing technologies that when combined can empower individuals and communities to not only identify problems, but also collaborate and create projects to solve them. Its a way for communities to become more healthy, by encouraging creativity. What’s exciting is that most of the technologies exist, or are in development- but people don’t know about a lot of them because there isn’t really funding for PR for all of these projects.
A lot of the reading material for Design for Empowerment informed our understanding of the social and political context of design. In particular, the readings of
- N. Carr: The Big Switch
- Resnick, et Al. Piano’s are not stereos
- Eric Von Hippel’s work on Toolkits and Democratizing Innovation
- Schneiderman’s work, with emphasis on his book Leonardo’s Laptop
- Amy Smith‘s work at the D-Lab. I am good friends with several people at the D-lab and their work on creative capacity building is a huge influence
- Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and Next Industrial Revolution
- The work of S. Papert (another link of his work)
- Postcolonial Computing
There are several projects that were mentioned in the Community Stack.
Hardware
Data
Software
- HTML5/Javascript
- The Open Web, Browser based technology
- Drumbeat
- project VRM
- the mine! project
Now the remaining layers are mostly based on the readings we did, rather than existing technologies- since the design for user interfaces and community is much more high level. Here are a few references:
UX
- Principles from readings like the ones listed above: toolkits (Resnick, von Hippel), tussels, and creative support (Shneiderman)
- Collaborative design (d-lab influenced)
Commmunity
Thanks! Send me a message if you’d like me to keep you posted on when we get the rest of the material compiled. I will post it up on the site for sure.
