Abstract
This paper explores the space between municipal administrative systems and citizens' web use. It addresses the possibilities of drawing new boundaries between public administration and citizens' everyday lives through a shared planning and visualization artifact, embedded into Web 2.0. The case deals with planning, advising and control of parental leave. This process involves several citizens, the municipal office, employers, as well as the laws regulating parental leave, and the collective agreements supplementing this legislation. The municipal office controls that citizens and employers comply with the law. At the same time it is often the only reliable source of overview of the law, and of leave days recorded. This paper analyses the current situation, presents an exploratory design process and outcome, probing the boundaries between citizens and the municipal office. Focusing on boundaries and tribes, the paper discusses how new forms of web technologies may improve communication between citizen and government and facilitate collaborative user empowerment: Participatory citizenship. Where Web 2.0 technology is often thought of as tearing down boundaries between individuals, this case points to the importance of a focus beyond individual users, and a renegotiation of boundaries between citizens and caseworkers in the context of other groups of actors.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bannon, L. & Bødker, S. (1997). ‘Constructing Common Information Spaces’. In Hughes, J., Prinz, W., Rodden, T. & Schmidt, K. (Eds.). Proceedings of ECSCW97, Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 81–96.
Barth. F. (1969). Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Boston: Little, Brown.
Bias, R.G. (1994). ‘Pluralistic usability walkthrough: coordinated empathies’. In Nielsen, J. & Mack, R.L. (Eds.). Usability Inspection Methods. New York, NY: Wiley, pp. 63– 76.
Bødker, S. (2004). Status, tax authorities and citizen services in Aarhus. Status report, 2004.
Bødker, S., Kristensen, J. F., Nielsen, C. & Sperschneider, W. (2003). ‘Technology for Boundaries’. In Proceedings of GROUP'03, New York, NY: ACM Press, pp. 311– 320.
Bødker, S.(1999). Computer applications as mediators of design and use- a developmental perspective. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Computer Science, University of Aarhus, DAIMI PB-542.
Bohøj, M. & Bouvin, N.O. (2009). ‘Interacting with casework documents using time lines’, in press for Hypertext 2009.
Clement, A. & Wagner, I. (1995). ‘Fragmented Exchange: Disarticulation and the need for regionalized communication spaces’. In Marmolin, H., Sundblad, Y. & Schmidt, K. Proceedings of ECSCW' 95. pp.33– 49. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Gaver, W. W., Boucher, A., Pennington, S., & Walker, B. (2004). ‘Cultural probes and the value of uncertainty’. interactions 11, 5, 53– 56.
Greenbaum, J. & Kyng, M. (Eds.) (1991). Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Grudin, J. (2002). ‘Group Dynamics and Ubiquitous Computing’. CACM 45(12), 74– 78.
KL (2006). Kommunernes digitale strategi, http://www.kl.dk (Downloaded 03032009)
Lee, C. (2005). ‘Between Chaos and routine: Boundary negotiating artifacts in collaboration’. In Gellersen, H., Schmidt, K., Beaudouin- Lafon, M. & Mackay, W. (Eds.), Proceedings of ECSCW 2005, pp. 387– 406.
Luitjens, S. (2008). Learning by comparison. E- Government in the Netherlands, oral presentation at Forvaltning & Digitalisering, (http://cok.dk/default.asp?id=76458621810573504012008).
Maffesoli, Michel (1996). The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. London: Sage.
March, J. & Simon, H (1958). Organisations. New York, NY: John Wiley.
O'Reilly, T. (2005). ‘What Is Web 2.0’. O'Reilly Network. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html.
Plaisant, C., Milash, B., Rose, A., Widoff, S., & Schneiderman, B. (1996). ‘Lifelines: Visualizing personal histories’. In Proceedings of CHI' 96, New York, NY: ACM Press, pp. 221– 227.
Scaife, M. & Rogers, Y. (1998) ‘Kids as informants: telling us what we didn't know or confirming what we knew already?’. In A. Druin (ed.) The Design of Children's Technology: How We Design, What We Design, and Why. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufman, chapter 2.
Star, S.L. (1989). ‘The structure of Ill- Structured Solutions: Boundary Objects and Heterogeneous Distributed Problem solving’. Distributed Artificial Intelligence, volume II, chapter 3, San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 37– 54.
Star, S.L. & Griesemer, J.R. (1989). ‘Institutional ecology, ’ translations' and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley' s museum of vertebrate zoology'. Social Studies of Science, 19, 387– 420.
Wimmer, M.A. (2002). ‘Integrated service modeling for one-stop government.’ Electronic Markets, 12 (3), http://www.electronicmarkets.org/issues/volume- 12/volume-12-issue-3/.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag London Limited
About this paper
Cite this paper
Borchorst, N.G., Bødker, S., Zander, PO. (2009). The boundaries of participatory citizenship. In: Wagner, I., Tellioğlu, H., Balka, E., Simone, C., Ciolfi, L. (eds) ECSCW 2009. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-854-4_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-854-4_1
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-84882-853-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-84882-854-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)