DIGITAL Citizenship

CHI21 WOrkshop

In search of the alternative future

Developing participatory digital citizenship to address the crisis of democracy

Date and time of workshop

The workshop is held online on Friday May 7, EST 9:00-13:00 / CET 15:00-19:00

(the time slot may change slightly due to the conference organization: the correct time will updated at the workshop website)

Background

The workshop is based on a notion that democratic digital societies require a new form of citizenship, namely digital citizenship. We aim to expand the conventional notions of the term, often linked with proper and respectful behavior in digital environments as well as having an active role in those environments. Considering our contemporary, highly digitalized lives, we argue that digital citizenship should be understood as entailing many other aspects too, such as enhancing everybody’s capability to understand the profound consequences of digitalization of societies. We begin with the definition given by Hintz et al. (2017) “An ideal configuration of digital citizenship would therefore be based on the possibility of comprehensive self-determination in a datafied environment, provided by secure infrastructure, an enabling regulatory environment, adequate public knowledge, and an informed use of the relevant platforms and applications.”

Goal

In this workshop, we strive to formulate a working definition of participatory digital citizenship, and to share issues, challenges, opportunities, methods and empirical examples pertaining to this as a goal. This is necessary to address the current crisis of democracy fueled by social media, big data and AI in the service of surveillance capitalism. Moving towards truly participatory digital citizenship would require, among other things, more transparent and understandable technological systems. Furthermore, it will require the development and implementation of democratic and participatory methods to co-create better applications, policies and regulation, to improve digital literacy in practice, and to empower citizens.

We invite those interested to submit a position paper (3–4 pages) in the SIGCHI Full paper format. These contributions may address, for example:

Theoretical considerations; e.g., utilising key theoretical concepts from various fields
Case studies; empirical works that explore different aspects of digital citizenship in datafied environment or that can contribute to our understanding of the concept
Design-based explorations in real-world settings, e.g. implementation of participatory approaches into the design of societally relevant technology systems, or FabLab or DIY based projects among different populations
Methods: Methodologies that can contribute towards understanding and developing participatory digital citizenship, such as participatory design, speculative design, citizen science, ethnography, research through design, etc.
Thematic issues; e.g. ethical dilemmas; data privacy and surveillance; emerging geographies of digital inequalities; design thinking; wellbeing; sustainability; global perspectives, etc.

Please note that at least one author of each accepted position paper must attend the workshop and all participants must register for both the workshop and for at least one day of the conference.

Important dates

Deadline of the position papers: March 1, 2021 (N.B! Extended)

Notification of acceptance: March 14, 2021

Papers should be sent to: johanna.ylipulli [ a t ] aalto.fi and aale.luusua [ a t ] oulu.fi

Workshop website: https://tinyurl.com/yay7zon5

Conference website: https://chi2021.acm.org/

Participation

We invite those interested to submit a position paper (3–4 pages) in the SIGCHI Full paper format:https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/publications/taps/acm_submission_template.docx

Please note that at least one author of each accepted position paper must attend the workshop and all participants must register for both the workshop ($30) and for at least one day of the CHI 2021 conference (Early Bird $100-140). Information on registration rates for CHI can be found here: https://chi2021.acm.org/information/4702.html

Preliminary schedule:

9:00am–9:30am Welcome and hosts’ presentations on Digital Citizenship and Participation

9:30am–10:00am Keynote lecture by visitor and Q&A

10:00am–10:15am Coffee break

10:15am–11:15pm Session 1: Pre-prepared individual presentations

11:15pm–12:00pm Session 2: Group assignment

Voluntary lunch/coffee break as needed

12:00pm–12:45 pm Session 3: Group presentations

12:45pm–1.00 pm Session 4: Closing panel

1:00 pm Closing the workshop: Feedback, plans for the future

Literature

Arne Hintz, Lina Dencik, and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen. 2017. Digital citizenship and surveillance. Digital citizenship and surveillance society - introduction. International Journal of Communication 11, 9.

Canda Putri Anggini and Rojab Siti Rodliyah. 2020. ESP Students’ Digital Literacy Needs: The Teachers’ Perspectives. In 2020 The 4th International Conference on Education and Multimedia Technology (ICEMT 2020). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 69–72. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3416797.3416846

Paul Chilsen. 2015. Making It for the Screen: Creating Digital Media Literacy. Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Creative Technologies. IGI Global, 2015. 249-264.

Ayona Datta. 2015. New urban utopias of postcolonial India: ‘Entrepreneurial urbanization’ in Dholera smart city, Gujarat. Dialogues in Human Geography, 5, 1, 3-22.

Steven Feldstein. 2019. The Road to Digital Unfreedom: How Artificial Intelligence is Reshaping Repression. Journal of Democracy, 30, 1, 40-52.

Lisa M. Jones and Kimberly J. Mitchell. 2016. Defining and measuring youth digital citizenship. New media & society 18, 9, 2063-2079.

Nicole Kobie. 2019. Jan 21. The complicated truth about China's social credit system. Retrieved Tue 13, 2020 from https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-explained

Deborah Kozdras, Christine Joseph, and Karen Kozdras. 2015. Cross-cultural affordances of digital storytelling: Results from cases in the USA and Canada. Handbook of research on cross-cultural approaches to language and literacy development. IGI Global. 184-208.

Clifford Lynch. 1998. Information literacy and information technology literacy: new components in the curriculum for a digital culture. Coalition for networked information, 5.

Cathy O'Neil. 2016. Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Broadway Books.

Ana Pérez-Escoda and Ma José Rodríguez-Conde. 2015. Digital literacy and digital competences in the educational evaluation: USA and IEA contexts. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality (TEEM '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 355–360. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2808580.2808633

Ben Williamson. 2015. Educating the smart city: Schooling smart citizens through computational urbanism. Big Data & Society, 2, 2.

Johanna Ylipulli and Aale Luusua. 2020. Smart cities with a Nordic twist? Public sector digitalization in Finnish data-rich cities. Telematics and Informatics 55, Dec 2020, 101457.

Johanna Ylipulli and Aale Luusua. 2019. “Without libraries what have we." Public libraries as nodes for technological empowerment in the era of smart cities, AI and big data. In Proc. C&T’19. ACM, New York, 92-101.

Soshana Zuboff. 2015. Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. Journal of Information Technology, 30,1, 75-89.

Soshana Zuboff. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books.