Civic Engagement & Community Stewardship
Understanding what drives people to participate in civic life and care for their communities. This research area explores the conditions, frameworks, and practices that foster engaged citizenship at the local level.
Core focus areas:
- Drivers of civic participation: What motivates people to attend local meetings, volunteer, vote in local elections, or organize around neighborhood issues?
- Livability frameworks: Global indices measure city livability (EIU, Mercer, Monocle), but what makes a neighborhood feel livable to its residents? How can these frameworks be adapted to hyperlocal scale?
- Social and cultural factors: The informal networks, institutions, and practices that create civic sense - from neighborhood associations to religious communities to informal gathering spaces
- Participatory governance models: How residents can meaningfully participate in decisions that affect their communities beyond periodic voting
- Community technology & digital infrastructure: How communities can build, govern, and sustain their own digital tools and shared data. This includes investigating what makes community tech projects last (10+ years vs. fading after initial funding), exploring shared data layers that allow lightweight tools to be built on community-controlled foundations, and developing practical tools for knowledge preservation, neighborhood coordination, and creative workflows. The goal is infrastructure that communities genuinely own—where they control what's stored, how it's used, and can adapt tools to their needs through malleable interfaces that support direct manipulation and intuitive controls.
Research questions:
- What distinguishes technology projects that last 10+ years in communities vs. those that fade after initial funding?
- What governance models work for community-controlled digital infrastructure?
- How do we balance ease-of-use with genuine community ownership of technology systems?
- What technical architectures support community sovereignty rather than platform dependence (e.g., shared data layers that enable ephemeral, task-specific tools)?
- How can technical complexity be managed by communities rather than requiring external expertise?
- What tools actually help community researchers, knowledge keepers, and traditional craftspeople in their daily work?
- How can media deconstruction techniques help in the analysis, preservation, and creative remixing of local archival material (oral histories, old photographs, community-generated media)?
- How can interfaces be designed to give community members direct control—through sliders, brushes, direct manipulation—over computational tools (including AI) rather than treating them as black boxes?
Key Research Connections & References
- UN-Habitat: For global frameworks on sustainable urban development and participatory planning
- CoREStack
- Participatory Budgeting Project: Models for direct democratic participation in local resource allocation
- Citizen science - Wikipedia
- NASA Citizen Science