HCI, Solidarity Movements and the Solidarity Economy

Abstract

The financial crisis and austerity politics in Europe has had a devastating impact on public services, social security and vulnerable populations. Greek civil society responded quickly by establishing solidarity structures aimed at helping vulnerable citizens to meet their basic needs and empower them to co-create an anti-austerity movement. While digital technology and social media played an important role in the initiation of the movement, it has a negligible role in the movement's ongoing practices. Through embedded work with several solidarity structures in Greece, we have begun to understand the 'solidarity economy' (SE) as an experiment in direct democracy and self-organization. Working with a range of solidarity structures we are developing a vision for a 'Solidarity HCI' committed to designing to support personal, social and institutional transformation through processes of agonistic pluralism and contestation, where the aims and objectives of the SE are continuously re-formulated and put into practice.

Between Grassroots and the Hierarchy

“…At a minimum, we can elicit and interpret community needs, to deliver to local governments, a more nuanced and reflective set of requirements for systems like the Local Offer website. We might also, through a continuous commitment to embedded research, begin to shift the dominant narratives of modernist and neo-liberal working within local governments, towards understanding digital technology as one means through which we can embrace broader and more meaningful participation [48].…”

The Platform Review Alliance Board: designing an organizational model to bring together producers and consumers in the review and commissioning of platform software

“…Further work by Marwell et al (1988) indicates the importance of centralization in the success of collective action, where organizers at the center of the network choose to allocate their resources in recruiting individuals who can make the largest contribution. The digital platform economy can potentially offer resources to enable collective action by enabling communication between a smaller group and a wider network of activists (Vlachokyriakos et al 2017), which could be particularly helpful to individuals who wish to take collective action. We define collective action in the digital platform economy as where a small group can unite based on common interests and then recruit a wider network of activists through the network.…”

Food Democracy in the Making

“…These informal associations, such as RA.ME, operate a solidarity network that organises the collection and distribution of food, directly from farmers to consumers below retail prices, while at the same time aiming at changing perceptions of liberal economies [69]. In this context, HCI has begun to explore more relational models of economies to inform the design of digital platforms that support ongoing transformation [77]. The OFN as an independent project then represents such a model of technology development that is produced to last long-term and is co-produced by the community that uses it.…”

“…However, the benefit of sharing platforms like AirBnB and Uber for deprived communities remains questionable and needs further investigation [21], with platform cooperativism being proposed as an alternative, more humane concept of doing peer-to-peer economy [74]. Recently, HCI has started to research and design socially just and human markets [47], and solidarity movements and economies [77]. In particular, social justice has been proposed for HCI as a design principle to address large scale societal issues [23,31] and the corporate food regime specifically [24].…”