Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) © Springer Science+Business DOI 10.1007/s10606-016-9252-y Media Dordrecht 2016 From Publics to Communities: Researching the Path of Shared Issues Through ICT Thomas Ludwig, Christian Reuter & Volkmar Pipek Institute for Information Systems, University of Siegen, Kohlbettstr. 1557072 Siegen , Germany (Phone: +49 (0) 271/ 740-4070; E-mail: [email protected]) Abstract. In recent years, citizens’ movements such as the Arab Spring or Euromaidan protests have clearly shown that, whenever affected – whether negatively or positively – by the state and government decisions, citizens act to deal with the shared issues. Groups of people who organize themselves to address (mainly political) issues were defined as a ‘public’ by the philosopher John Dewey. He believed it is necessary to improve communication to create a ‘Great Community’ as a cohesive group of a public. Although information and communication technologies (ICT) lead to ambivalent effects on pursuing this goal and often distract the mass of people from discussing these issues, we argue that nowadays ICT can improve communication and has the potential to foster the detection of issues and therefore promote the (trans-)formation of a public into an issue-based community. As our foundation we took a literature study covering the formation of publics and their potential to evolve into communities, as well as their interplay with technology. This formed the basis for the development of our operational model that ‘follows the issues’ for capturing the (trans-)formation of a public. Based on our model, we outline different perspectives on detecting shared issues as early indicators for publics based on ICT and derive implications for researching this process from a practical perspective. Keywords: Publics, Communities, Mobile devices, Social media, Infrastructures, CSCW 1. Introduction A recent wave of citizen movements such as the Arab Spring (a series of revolu- tionary demonstrations in the Arab world aimed at a more participatory and repre- sentative political system and a fairer economic system), the Indignados (Spanish demonstrations demanding an improvement of the current social, economic and political situation) or the ‘Stop Watching Us’ protests (demanding the abolition of the NSA Bmass surveillance^ programs in the USA) clearly show that citizens – when affected by their state – will undertake actions towards solving their issues. This is not a novel insight. In 1927, John Dewey defined those groups of people who, when facing a similar (usually political) issue, recognize it as such and organize themselves so as to address it as a public (Dewey 1927). The term ‘public’ originates from the Latin ‘populus’ denoting a mass population in association with a matter of common shared interest. Dewey’s pragmatist view characterizes publics not as a single constituted mass of people, but rather as a particular configuration of individ- uals bound by a common cause in confronting a shared issue. Publics are socially constructed through their relations to issues. He points out that Bpolitical concerns Thomas Ludwig et al. [issues] have, of course, always had strong rivals^ (Dewey 1927) that concern people. He explains that those rivals are far more prevalent and bountiful in today’s society and cites technology as well as entertainment which are both numbing and distracting as the main perpetrators. Dewey believes that, to create a ‘Great Com- munity’ as a cohesive group of publics, the solution must be to improve communi- cation within the public. The importance of the ‘issue’ for applying Dewey’s approach to interpret societal developments has been further strengthened by Marres (2007). In contrast to publics, communities express their problems, issues and aspirations symbolically, thereby engendering a sense of a ‘general will’ (Stikkers 2010). Although Dewey argued that technology (such as mass media) can distract people from discussing issues and subsequently form forming a public will, he hoped that someday society would be able to use its existing technology to improve communi- cation. His hope was that this would encourage and augment citizen engagement as well as the (trans-)formation of publics (Dewey 1927). Today, formation processes of social groups in general have changed. Just a few decades ago, collaboration between individuals in work as well as private contexts was technically supported only by proprietary software. With the emergence of CSCW applications like groupware and social media as well as of new mobile devices this isolated software-based collaboration support changed. In particular, the global sales of smartphones and tablets continue to grow and both devices are currently both widespread and commonplace throughout the population. The func- tionalities of these devices stretch far beyond basic phone calls and messaging services. In many parts of the world, they have developed into individual personal- ized tools (Barkhuus and Polichar 2010) whose locations are implicitly determined by the dynamically changing locations of their owners (Fortunati 2005). As individ- uals tend to change location constantly, the mobile systems are also constantly subjected to changing places, conditions and situations. Mobile applications use the device’s integrated sensors to support their owners ‘in situ’ (in a situation). This led to John Urry’sargument(1999) that these devices are co-existent with new social ‘mobilities’, which he described as a Bmanifesto for a sociology that examines the diverse mobilities of people, objects, images, information and wastes; and of the complex interdependencies between, and social consequences of, these diverse mobilities^. Furthermore, he claimed that mobile devices as well as networks have become units of analysis. Justified by the emergence of these, and hand in hand with the development of other new technologies, new kinds of infrastructures arose. We base our understand- ing of the term Binfrastructure^ on Star and Ruhleder (1996), who defined its salient characteristics. Their definition emphasizes the ongoing design process, as directed towards the perception of something, as an infrastructure. These characteristics include the embeddedness into other structures; embodiment of standards; that they are built on an installed base; their links with conventions of practices; transparency in use; the taken-for-grantedness; a reach or scope beyond a single event, and their From Publics to Communities invisibility upon breakdown. Those infrastructures do not only cover official soft- ware systems, but the Bentirety of devices, tools, technologies, standards, conven- tions, and protocols on which the individual worker or the collective rely to carry out the tasks and achieve the goals assigned^ (Pipek and Wulf 2009). Star and Bowker (2002) also pointed out the importance of considering actors and change activities within an infrastructure. Taking the development of CSCW and its technologies seriously, the infrastruc- tures have grown from early forms of communication technology. Together with the infrastructures, the opportunities for citizens to collaborate, self‐organize and engage with issues, have also grown and evolved. Within this paper, we aim at researching how information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures can help to understand the formation of publics. Or to be more precise, we aim to develop a systematic approach of making use of recently developed ICT for tracing the way how (aware and active) publics (Grunig 1983) could turn into communities. We do this not by focusing on how publics are formed by or engage with design or technology. Rather we take the first step towards focusing on how the formation of publics – which face emergent shared issues – and their transformation into com- munities can be captured by modern ICT. We will first present the theoretical framing of publics and communities as cohesive groups of publics as well as focusing on the interplay between both groups and technologies (section 2). Afterwards we will present our research approach (section 3) and potential methodologies for detecting shared issues (section 4). Based on a systematic phase model of publics, we will then develop an operational model for the (trans-)formation of publics (section 5). This serves to outline directions for designing new socio-technical approaches that focus on discovering and capturing the (trans-)formation process of publics from the beginning by detecting and following shared issues. Neither in the theoretical exploration of our model of publics and communities nor in our exploration of socio-technical approaches and methods of tracking and mapping them do we include any qualitative analysis of these groups, or their actual impact or participation in deliberation. Based on the outlined socio-technical approaches, we further derive practical implications for supporting researchers when examining the (trans-)forma- tion of publics (section 6). 2. Theoretical background: publics, communities and CSCW In recent years a diverse research body has emerged in the fields of CSCW and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) which focuses on the interplay between tech- nology and the philosophical concept of publics. Most of the studies follow Dewey’s pragmatic notion of publics. Unsurprisingly, in CSCW the focus has been on the way in which a technology (and its design) impacts on the formation, maintenance and function of publics. We can typically identify two main directions