While there is growing concern around justice and equity, they mean different things in different socio-political and cultural contexts. Additionally, it can be difficult to make sense of how to incorporate the more abstract concept of justice into our research practices. This paper discusses prefigurative design as a framework for more just research practices to challenge inequity, particularly in community-based collaborations. I draw from past fieldwork with activist organizations and radical organizing literature to explore opportunities for how to engage with justice as academics, identifying three main opportunities for intervention through research: social relationships, resource distribution, and counter-institutions. I offer these contributions in the spirit of generative critique, in hopes that other researchers with similar concerns will iterate on these practices to commit to more just and equitable scholarly impacts.
The participation of a large and varied group of people in the planning process has long been encouraged to increase the effectiveness and acceptability of plans. However, in practice, participation by affected stakeholders has often been limited to small groups, both because of the lack of reach on the part of planners and because of a sense of little or no ownership of the process on the part of citizens. Overcoming these challenges to stakeholder participation is particularly important for any transportation planning process because the success of the system depends primarily on its ability to cater to the requirements and preferences of the people whom the system serves. Crowdsourcing uses the collective wisdom of a crowd to achieve a solution to a problem that affects the crowd. This paper proposes the use of crowdsourcing as a possible mechanism to involve a large group of stakeholders in transportation planning and operations. Multiple case studies show that crowdsourcing was used to collect data from a wide range of stakeholders in transportation projects. Two distinct crowdsourcing usage types are identified: crowdsourcing for collecting normally sparse data on facilities such as bike routes and crowdsourcing for soliciting feedback on transit quality of service and real-time information quality. A final case study exemplifies the use of data quality auditors for ensuring the usability of crowd-sourced data, one of many potential issues in crowdsourcing presented in the paper. These case studies show that crowdsourcing has immense potential to replace or augment traditional ways of collecting data and feedback from a wider group of a transportation system's users without creating an additional financial burden.
One subclass of human computation applications are those directed at tasks that involve planning (e.g. tour planning) and scheduling (e.g. conference scheduling). Interestingly, work on these systems shows that even primitive forms of automated oversight on the human contributors helps in significantly improving the effectiveness of the humans/crowd. In this paper, we argue that the automated oversight used in these systems can be viewed as a primitive automated planner, and that there are several opportunities for more sophisticated automated planning in effectively steering crowdsourced planning. Straightforward adaptation of current planning technology is however hampered by the mismatch between the capabilities of human workers and automated planners. We identify and address two important challenges that need to be overcome before such adaptation of planning technology can occur: (i) interpreting inputs of the human workers (and the requester) and (ii) steering or critiquing plans produced by the human workers, armed only with incomplete domain and preference models. To these ends, we describe the implementation of AI-MIX, a plan generation system that uses automated checks and alerts to improve the quality of plans created by human workers.
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Social computing-or computing in a social context-has largely concerned itself with understanding social interaction among and between people. This paper asserts that ignoring material components-including computing itself-as social actors is a mistake. Computing has its own agenda and agencies, and including it as a member of the social milieu provides a means of producing design objects that attend to how technology use can extend beyond merely amplifying or augmenting human actions. In this paper, we offer examples of projects that utilize the capacity of object-oriented publics to both analyze the conditions and consequences around existing publics and engage with matters of concern inherent to emerging publics. Considering how computing as an actor contributes to the construction of publics provides insight into the design of computational systems that address issues. We end by introducing the idea of the object ecology as a way to coordinate design approaches to computational publics.
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