Call for Participation

To apply, please upload your submission via this Google Form by October 17, 2022: https://forms.gle/6LtVGTa3iTZEsSfa9. We will also accept submissions by email.

We aim to bring together people who research, work with, or are impacted by public technologies. This may include researchers, non-profit workers, activists, government workers (such as social workers), or people who have been impacted by local governments, e.g. through policing, prisons, child protective services, employment services, or homelessness services. If you're interested in this work, please submit.

Furthermore, we strongly encourage you to make connections to one or more of the following workshop themes:

1. Taking Stock of Public Interest Technology: There has been a lot of work in HCI and CSCW related to local governments or "the public" labeled as public interest technology, public algorithms, public sector technology, civic technology, or digital civics. Though similar, these labels have different connotations. In this theme, we encourage participants to identify work that defines public interest technology and reflect on how we should design public sector technology. Questions related to this theme include: What counts as public interest technology? Who decides what is in "the public interest"? How do we center justice-oriented principles in public interest technology research? What methods are useful for studying public interest technology and uncovering systemic biases? What is missing from current or past work on public sector technology?

2. Centering Impacted Communities: Local governments around the world play a dual role of both harming and helping the public. Recently, some point out the breakdown of municipalities as caring platforms, arguing that austerity and deindustrialization have pushed local governments to primarily police, surveil, gatekeep resources, and extract wealth from poor, Black, and Brown communities. In response, many communities are organizing to abolish police, prisons, child protective services, and policing by any other name. Yet, local governments are still one of the only places that poor, houseless, or otherwise needy people can get assistance. This theme allows researchers to consider their own positionality, as well as overlapping systems of oppression that many communities impacted by local governments face. Questions related to this theme include: How should we center impacted communities that have been harmed by local governments? If we want to serve the public interest, (how) should we work with local governments? (How) should we work in solidarity with impacted communities directly, even to circumvent or oppose government agencies? How do we ethically engage with these communities without being extractive? What should justice-oriented work on public interest technologies look like under carceral capitalism?

3. Critical Reflections on Local Government Collaboration: The previous theme focused on how marginalized communities are being harmed by local governments. It may be tempting to say that researchers should simply stop working with these governments. However, if done properly, researchers might be able to work with governments in order to push them to be more supportive, or at least less harmful. Furthermore, some of the most pressing evidence of systemic injustices comes from working directly with street-level government officials in these systems. Researchers' discomfort and disturbing observations when engaging with public sector 'tech projects' can be turned into a resource for design. The goal of this theme is to reflect on tensions, difficulties, and problems that researchers face when working with local governments. To this end, we will ask: What value conflicts may arise when researchers work with local governments? (How) should we decenter governments in our work (and center communities instead)? When should we work against the government?
   

You can read our full proposal for more context about these themes.