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Unmanned and unwomaned aerial vehicles (UAV), or drones, are breaking and creating new boundaries of image-based communication. Using social network analysis and critical discourse analysis, we examine the 60 most popular question threads about drones on Zhihu, China’s largest social question answering platform. We trace how controversial issues around these supposedly novel tech products are mediated, domesticated, visualized, or marginalized via digital representational technology. Supported by Zhihu’s topic categorization algorithm, drone-related discussions form topic clusters. These topic clusters gain currency in the government-regulated cyberspace, where their meanings remain open to widely divergent interpretations and mediation by various agents. We find that the largest drone company DJI occupies a central and strongly interconnected position in the discussions. Drones are, moreover, represented as objects of consumption, technological advancement, national future, and uncertainty. At the same time, the sense-making process of drone-related discussions evokes emerging sets of narrative user identities with potential political effects. Users engage in digital representational technologies publicly and collectively to raise questions and represent their views on new technologies. Therefore, we argue that platforms like Zhihu are essential when studying views of the Chinese citizenry towards technological developments.

Edge Computing is a new distributed Cloud Computing paradigm in which computing and storage capabilities are pushed to the topological edge of a network. However, various standards and implementations are promoted by different initiatives. Lead by a reference architecture model for Edge Computing, current initiatives are analyzed by explorative content analysis. Providing two main contributions to the field, we present, first, how current initiatives are characterized, and second, a roadmap for sustainable Edge Computing relating three dimensions of sustainable development to four cross-concerns of Edge Computing. Findings show that most initiatives are internationally organized software development projects; important branches are currently telecom and industrial sectors; most addressed is the network virtualization layer. The roadmap reveals numerous chances and risks of Edge Computing related to sustainable development; such as the use of renewable energies, biases, new business models, increase and decrease of energy consumption, responsiveness, monitoring and traceability.

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This case study reveals how the Civic IoT project Luftdaten.info, though being organized within limits of technical equipment, resources, and academic knowledge, can contribute in multiple ways to more sustainable cities or communities: (1) People become aware and engaged for their local environment, and some change their behavior, (2) the project itself is managed in a sustainable way, (3) the publicly available data on particulate matter (PM) influences the local public sphere. Explored by a media content analysis and two expert interviews, the PM topic in Stuttgart can be characterized as a discursive long-term process. Nevertheless, a data map comparison shows how easily misunderstandings can occur caused by data analytical and visualization decisions. Finally, this study supports Meadows' idea that "[a]ll people and institutions play their role within the large system structure" but as Luftdaten.info shows, it is not only "industries, governments, environmentalists, and most especially economists [playing] essential roles in contributing to sustainability" it can also be ordinary, tech-savvy people making the first essential steps. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; Computer supported cooperative work; Visualization design and evaluation methods; • Applied computing → Sociology.

Data are essential for digital solutions and supporting citizens’ everyday behavior. Open data initiatives have expanded worldwide in the last decades, yet investigating the actual usage of open data and evaluating their impacts are insufficient. Thus, in this paper, we examine an exemplary use case of open data during the early stage of the Covid-19 pandemic and assess its impacts on citizens. Based on quasi-experimental methods, the study found that publishing local stores’ real-time face mask stock levels as open data may have influenced people’s purchase behaviors. Results indicate a reduced panic buying behavior as a consequence of the openly accessible information in the form of an online mask map. Furthermore, the results also suggested that such open-data-based countermeasures did not equally impact every citizen and rather varied among socioeconomic conditions, in particular the education level.

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