Workshop at CHI'23 on April 28th, 2023 in Hamburg, Germany

The workshop The design of civic tech is often confronted with impediments, barriers, and a lack of resources. These and other causes often lead to the discontinuation and even abandonment of initiatives. Workshops are a rare opportunity for academics and practitioners to exchange on discontinuation as seemingly imperfect, failed projects are much more difficult to publish as articles.

The goal of the workshop is to understand better why some civic tech initiatives fail and to ask whether, in discontinuation, some initiatives still somehow contribute to social change, design knowledge and growth of digital civics. A variety of sub-questions around discontinued civic tech will be addressed in the workshop, including matters of engagement and participation, liberation, citizen science, public management, power structures and biases, communication, and discourse.

To better understand and learn from discontinued civic tech, we invite submissions from researchers, designers, educators, and activists interested in sharing their experiences and knowledge about failed or discontinued civic tech initiatives. We do not see failure and discontinuation as necessarily negative outputs but as learning instances and, an essential part of the creative process in design practices driving civic tech projects. Some initiatives may seem to stop but exert influence in other ways, e.g., inspire other initiatives and create forms of agency that then spill over to other arenas. We would like to better understand what constitutes “failure” in the domain of civic tech. Why was the envisioned design for digital civics erroneous and the development didn’t work? Was it a missed momentum or lack of continued interests by the volunteers? We want to learn about the circumstances in which civic technologies lost support, community engagement, or became too contested to continue. The answers to such questions are key to generate design knowledge about the role of failure in design practices oriented to the civil society in the CHI community.

Our workshop has two goals:

to provide an open and inclusive space where researchers, designers, and practitioners can exchange on “failed” or discontinued civic tech initiatives which usually have scarce opportunity to be presented in academic conferences, and to connect people and networks in this domain to learn from past design experiences while identifying cases and design issues for future studies. Submission Submissions should address and will be selected based on relevance to the workshop topic. We ask applicants to include in their submission the following items:

Your civic tech “failure” story/ies: for example considering the lessons learned on unanticipated challenges, pleasant and unpleasant surprises, mistakes, gaps between intentions and outcomes, ‘drift’ in goals, lack of criteria for success, the relation between cultural contexts and admitting failure, but also stories on cases when longevity is not desirable; If applicable, introducing your case(s): name, size (e.g., estimated number of community members, data points, and/or local groups), geolocation, web link (if existing), addressed issue(s), civic tech tools developed by the initiative (if possible add a screenshot of available web apps), and other details which you may find important to mention. We welcome submissions in various formats, including video/audio recordings (max. 5 min), visual artifacts such as collage, photography, graphic stories, and illustrations, as well as position papers (max. 3 pages) including a brief bio of the applicant(s).