Thinking about Jenkins’ approach to a participatory culture, which involves some skills for a full involvement, such as negotiation, collective intelligence, appropriation, among others, and the five forms of inequality identified by DiMaggio and Hargittai (2001), an inclusive civic technology should be able to foster these skills, since they are not found in many communities. It has more to do with education and cultural environment… According to Edgar Morin, for instance, a revolution of the educational system would involve thinking in a transdisciplinary way and reforming the teachers’ education in order to promote the connection between the fields of knowledge (it may take at least one generation… but I tend to be optimistic).

An inclusive technology would be one that the community creates it from the concept (like a bottom-up creation), considering its goals, and collectively design the system and then interpret the results in order to take action. However, the understanding of a problem continues to evolve during an experiment. Even the definition of a common goal is a hard task, considering the variation of individual views about a problem. So the methods of creation (co-creation) of this system should be evolutionary, like a living system (I just need more time to develop this idea in a comprehensive way 🙂 ).

About being bottom-up: actually, it may not be possible that this process of creation is really bottom-up, since the government sets some rules/policies (government as a platform). This is why I think that all these discussions about distributed governance is SO important nowadays.

An example from the real world:
I’m currently negotiating and evaluating the possibility of using a tool originally developed at MIT Media Lab, called “What’s Up System”, to adapt to the ZL Vortice Project (translations here). I’ll explain briefly about how the ZLV project team envisions the ZL Vortice platform first, an then I’ll talk about What’s Up System.

ZL Vortice Platform is a kind of a mapping that allows for an apprehension and understanding of the complexities of the territory (East Zone of Sao Paulo). It is not just about locating events and communities, pointing events on maps, but making the general urban context reveal the characteristics and the potential of local situations.

The platform will serve to indicate the most relevant cultural actors and creative processes in the region, and help local artists and creators to articulate networks and explore possible synergies.

It will also empower people to locate the proposed projects in infrastructure and redevelopment for the region, assess their design and monitor their implementation. It aims to provide everyone – from the technicians in charge of infrastructure and redevelopment to the communities affected by them – a tool that allows one to track / participate in the definition and implementation of urban interventions and public policy.

PLATFORM FUNCTIONS
1. To provide the urban and socio-economic survey of the East Zone, allowing users to view the urban and economic dynamics of the region, linking them to local situations and activities;
2. To make the sociocultural survey available, mapping the cultural activities, experiences, pictures and memories of local communities – a record of the ways of working, predominant materials and creative vocations of each area, assisting in the preparation of workshops with local creators and communities;
3. Regarding the construction of the informational device, it is aimed to co-develop technologies, procedures and design in partnership with the communities, teachers, students and international research institutions.

PLATFORM GOALS
1. To equip citizens and communities to participate in the design and implementation of public policies;
2. To empower local creators and communities to participate in innovative processes of design and production, articulating networks with companies and research centers;
3. To mobilize local creators and communities to participate in artistic interventions to update the aesthetic and operational repertoire of actions in urban areas and to contribute to the perception and renovation of places.

The What’s Up System is an open source city-wide information system that disseminates locally-relevant web content through a variety of “offline” channels that are easily accessible to everyone. Supported channels include digital signs, customized flyers and posters, SMS messages and a voice-based community hotline that is usable with the lowest-end mobile and touch tone phones. With the What’s Up system, one does not need to be connected to the Internet in order to benefit from the power of the Web (the figure below indicates an app, but it wasn’t developed yet).

 (picture taken from this presentation)

For Zona Leste, it is important to do participatory design experimentations in order to adapt the What´s Up System to the needs of this community. It is envisioned the development of the mobile application, since the use of smartphones has been popularized in region.

Now it is important to identify how it could evolve to achieve the goals that were envisioned by the project team, not only from the perspective of the tool, but considering the actions that the project team will have to take regarding the different forms of inequality that exist in that community.