Public design of digital commons in urban places: A case study

Fostering Commonfare. Infrastructuring Autonomous Social Collaboration

“…In line with the suggestions to build new institutions while designing, the project is also seeing commonfare.net as a "digital commons" [46], and the research and design work done is questioning both the technologies and the social, economic, and political aspects of commonfare.net as the digital result of the infrastructuring process, with a particular focus on the concept of commonfare as a novel welfare model based on autonomous social collaboration.…”

“…The reference to publics shows how the self-organised group described by Bødker et al [4] could be one kind of social aggregates with which designers interact. This also raises the theme of what happens after design in terms of organisation and management, as discussed by Teli et al [46], foreseeing the possibility for newly aggregated publics to manage digital commons, intended as specific institutional forms. The difference between Bødker et al [4] and the "publics" lens points to different ways in which participation in the design and management of a digital artefact could be configured, and these differences are worth being exposed, as suggested by Vines et al [47].…”

“…Commonfare, as a novel model for welfare distribution of wealth, is indeed based on the three points raised by Ekbia and Nardi, a guaranteed income, access to education and healthcare, to which it adds free access to knowledge and the management of shared resources as commons (for the concept of commons, see Ostrom [33]). In fact, Ekbia and Nardi points to commons-based practices, like making, but they do not connect it to commons as alternative institutions, something argued for by scholars in social informatics [20], in HCI [46], and by the economists proposing "commonfare" as an alternative form of welfare provision [19]. Following this suggestion to contribute to the shaping of new institutions, we should stress how a focus on institutions goes hand-in-hand with the participatory design of digital technologies, in what has been called "institutioning" [23].…”

“…With the description of 'PIE News', the project proposal already included a goal of "fostering commonfare" as an alternative model of welfare provision. The project proposal, that strategically used the concept of public design [46,7] to describe the design process in order to open up the space for tactical appropriations of the design and implementation, has been approved in September 2015 (4). After the official approval, the EC defined the space for the approved project, requiring additional work through the grant agreement, to accommodate changes in the EC policies on research ethics (5).…”

Building a Maker Community Around an Open Hardware Platform

“…The motivations for people to voluntarily engage in a community has been discussed in several research fields [21,45]. Particularly relevant to this paper is the case of Open Source/Free Software (OS/FS) communities [2,17].…”