I’m gearing up for being off work soon for about six months to get my first year (more or less) of a part-time DPhil in the anthropology of civic tech started. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to merge the professional practice of iterative delivery, show and tells and “responding to change over following a plan” with something as waterfall as the process of writing and researching a doctoral dissertation in a university that isn’t exactly renowned for flexibility and novelty.
So I thought I’d start with the show and tell aspect.
Details
I’m off from the start of October. I’ve got an academic year to attend seminars on research methods and write up a big plan for my actual research rather than responding vaguely with “it is about civic technology [pause to see if that phrase needs clarification] and the people who build it, the people who use it and its relationship to government”. I’m going to be in Oxford about three days a week (say hi) and Cambridge the rest.
Reading
I’ve read (most of) three books in the past fortnight: Commons and Lords for the Democracy Club Book Club (still time to join). It’s a summary of two of Emma Crewe’s other ethnographies on the different chambers of Parliament, acting as a nice and short introduction both to thinking about Parliament as something beyond just the members, and of approaching civic institutions through an anthropological lens.
Next, Bluffocracy by Andrew Greenway and James Ball. I’m relating it to the DPhil research because of the review it gives the civil service in terms of its background (a fair way off representative of the population) and its approach to problems and the feedback/incentive loops for that.
I’m also pushing on with Sorting Things Out. It is an anthropology book approaching the ICD as a subject. What forces create classifications? How are they socially mediated? Does the fact that they are largely Western systems of classification act as a colonialism of diseases (yes). I’ve been raving about this book for a few weeks, and was recently evangelising to Sym Roe who was raving about a book he’d been reading on a similar topic, only for us to realise it was the same authors. It has huge relevance for looking at data in government and for attempts to universalise schemas and ontologies into things bigger than they should be.
Thinking
I’m not thinking about Mastodon other than to say: all the critiques of twitter and all the critiques of mastodon are true.
This is relevant because one of the things I want to start by looking at is the networks that surround civic tech, open government, open data etc. and how they support an ecosystem of events, spaces and people that don’t work together but are definitely “colleagues”. So, lots of space to think about networks and the spaces where networks happen.
Planning
Next thing I want to do is start with a rough chapter outline (I did one for the funding application, but I’m pretty sure it is bollocks). I just want something to start looking at and thinking about (is it right, is it wrong?) and to think about the research dependencies to be able to answer some of the questions in there.
- What motivates someone to start a ‘civic tech’ project
- When do they stop/why do they fail
- What’s the boundary of ‘government’, especially in services that re-use governmenty things?
- Can we apply a material culture set of tools to the look and feel/UX of the internet?
The other thing I want to think about is stylistic: there seems to be an available choice in writing either in a narrative about the subject (“the community of civic technologists and the users of civic technology”) or instead to try a more vignette-y approach; looking at one issue per chapter and treat each chapter as a broadly self contained article unit (which potentially fits more with my experience of writing).
Misc
I’m writing these as a record for me to look back on, but I’m interested in feedback. Would anything I’m writing/reading about here be useful for you to read? Let me know. I’m trying to think of a way of sharing and communicating what I’m learning and doing because it is going to be about the community, so they should feel some benefit.
While I’m doing this I am not gainfully employed. Do you have odd jobs? Reports that need writing? Bits and bobs of user/desk research you could do with being covered? Let me know.
As ever, my thanks to Democracy Club and the AHRC for their support.
