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This workshop advances a CSCW-perspective on how scale and place relateand how we might better understand what role scale plays in the design of tools andcollaborative processes. This full-day workshop is designed for up to 20 participants, to beselected based on short position papers that relate to one or more of the workshopthemes: (1) the political and ethical challenges of scale, (2) modes of organizing,infrastructuring, and governing, (3) (inter)organizational aspects, and (4) place and care.The workshop builds upon the COST Action From Sharing to Caring: ExaminingSocio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy that played a key role in bringingresearchers together to address issues of care and scale, as well as recent workshopsand interests groups at CSCW and HCI venues that have focused on issues of scale,cooperation, and place-making. Our aim with this workshop is to provide a space for thecontinued unfolding of the discussions sparked through these prior activities, this time witha particular focus on the political and ethical challenges of scale.

When times change rapidly, the transformations around us ask us to consider whether our practices of research and scholarship are keeping abreast. Multiple crises are bearing down on us and only a change in Global North lifestyles and values will begin to address the world’s course towards major catastrophe. In this highly interactive panel, we unravel the ecological underpinnings of (E)CSCW to understand how it could contribute more fully to different sustainabilities and alternative futures. We consider (E)CSCW to offer a strength in its practice-oriented roots and its ecological understanding of socio-technical relations. We revisit these qualities in light of the need to embrace interdependence in all aspects of life and invite others to think with us about possible futures and the contributions (E)CSCW scholarship is poised to make in working toward them.

What makes the design of futures sufficiently transformative? Worldwide, people are aware of the need to change and keep changing to address eco-social challenges and their fall-out in an age of crises and transitions in climate, biodiversity, and health. Calls for climate justice and the development of eco-social sensibilities speak to the need for dynamic and provisional engagements. Such concerns raise age-old issues of inequality and colonialist destruction. Our designs carry the imprint of this current politics, wittingly or unwittingly, into worlds to come. This conversation asked how might we respond fluidly to coming uncertainties, questioning our own practices to sow the seeds of more radical trans-formation, while recognizing the structural forces that can limit or temper opportunities for design activism. It was organized in three quadrant exercises, which we also reflect upon.

While scalability and growth are key concerns for mainstream, venture-backed digital platforms, local and location-oriented collaborative economies are diverse in their approaches to evolving and achieving social change. Their aims and tactics differ when it comes to broadening their activities across contexts, spreading their concept, or seeking to make a bigger impact by promoting co-operation. This paper draws on three pairs of European, community-centred initiatives which reveal alternative views on scale, growth, and impact. We argue thatproliferation -- a concept that emphasises how something gets started and then travels in perhaps unexpected ways -- offers an alternative toscaling, which we understand as the use of digital networks in a monocultural way to capture an ever-growing number of participants. Considering proliferation is, thus, a way to reorient and enrich discussions on impact, ambitions, modes of organising, and the use of collaborative technologies. In illustrating how these aspects relate inprocesses of proliferation, we offer CSCW an alternative vision of technology use and development that can help us make sense of the impact of sharing and collaborative economies, and design socio-technical infrastructures to support their flourishing.

While scalability and growth are key concerns for mainstream, venture-backed digital platforms, local and location-oriented collaborative economies are diverse in their approaches to evolving and achieving social change. Their aims and tactics differ when it comes to broadening their activities across contexts, spreading their concept, or seeking to make a bigger impact by promoting co-operation. This paper draws on three pairs of European, community-centred initiatives which reveal alternative views on scale, growth, and impact. We argue thatproliferation -- a concept that emphasises how something gets started and then travels in perhaps unexpected ways -- offers an alternative toscaling, which we understand as the use of digital networks in a monocultural way to capture an ever-growing number of participants. Considering proliferation is, thus, a way to reorient and enrich discussions on impact, ambitions, modes of organising, and the use of collaborative technologies. In illustrating how these aspects relate inprocesses of proliferation, we offer CSCW an alternative vision of technology use and development that can help us make sense of the impact of sharing and collaborative economies, and design socio-technical infrastructures to support their flourishing.

In this chapter, we examine how five different, community, bottom-up initiatives across Europe use Facebook, the reasons for choosing this platform, and what kind of challenges arise from adopting it. Rejecting polarizing narratives – of social media as the sole instrument of social change, on the one hand, and pessimistic views of surveillance and mistrust, on the other – we draw attention to how these narratives do, or do not, play into use in practice. In doing so, we focus on the tensions that stem from using Facebook as a platform for community initiatives, not at the theoretical level of media studies, but by analysing the situated use of the platform on the ground.We do this through five empirical case studies: a network for self-organizing coworking days in homes in Sweden (Hoffice), migrant solidarity grassroots groups (Migration Aid) in Hungary, short-let accommodation for foreign volunteers in Greece (Athens Volunteers’ Accommodation and Ride-sharing), a neighborhoodcentered community group in England (Egg Club), and a cycling promotion group in Portugal (Cicloficina do Porto).With a strong emphasis on practices of care among those involved – both for oneself and others – the cases provide alternative visions to what have become mainstream examples of platforms, and platform use, in the collaborative economy. Rather than adopting bespoke digital technologies to advance their causes, all five cases rely primarily on Facebook.

The aim of this one-day workshop is to provide a forum for HCI researchers to discuss a wide range of issues at the intersection of philosophy and HCI. The participants will reflect on how philosophy influenced the development of HCI in the past, how philosophical insights are being utilized in current HCI research, and how philosophy can help HCI identify and address the emerging challenges facing the field. The main objectives of the workshop are to bring together HCI researchers interested in philosophy and produce an agenda for future research bringing HCI and philosophy closer together.

This special issue presents contributions interrogating how co-design is positioning itself in the age of ‘platform capitalism'. It brings together theoretical reflections on the position of co-design and empirical cases of co-design that can shed better light on these dynamics, with an accent on sharing and caring. A workshop co-located with the Communities and Technologies 2017 conference organised by the editors of this special issue constituted the starting point. The workshop, entitled ‘Collaborative Economies – From Sharing to Caring’ was an initiative of the ‘Sharing and Caring’ COST action and invited wide participation around the themes of digital social innovation, design for change, environmental sustainability and ecological concerns, as well as platform cooperativism. To follow up, the workshop ‘Collaborative Technologies on Strike’,a one day of collaboration between scholars, union members, and activists to discuss the possibilities for a technology design, development, and appropriation strategically aligned with the goals of industrial action, took place in Genk, Belgium, co-located with the Participatory Design Conference 2018. The Special Interest Group on ‘Cooperativism and Human-Computer Interaction’, another event in this series, had its inaugural meeting at the CHI 2019 conference. Such events have been revealing the limits of both practical and theoretical knowledge in these areas and, certainly, the gap in literature linking them. The call for papers for this special issue was launched in September 2017 and resulted in 30 abstract submissions involving approximately 70 authors. Full paper submissions were invited for 19 of these. In May 2018, we received 12 submissions; six of these papers were accepted for this special issue. The accepted papers cover a diverse range of topics – from data hacking, digital currency and learning, to more general topics such as theorising care, discussing the commons in the context of platforms, and creating a common ground for social welfare practices in Europe.

On a generic level, caring can be described as "everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible" (Fisher and Tronto, 1990). This paper asks how we as design researchers in Scandinavia come to care, for our world and more specifically for the local NORDES community. We do this by describing how we have maintained, continued and added (as a practice of repair) in relation to the most recent NORDES summer school (2018). The summer school invited students to work with tensions between despair, in a site marked and haunted (Tsing et al., 2017) by the aftermath of industrial design practices and hope, by making time for soil (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) in a community-supported agricultural scheme. The paper invites you to share some cruxes and insights that emerged, and to imagine teaching with care as a collective process that attempts to bring things together, not as oppositions, but as generative and productive relations.

As we rely upon increasingly complex sociotechnical systems to support ourselves and, by extension, the structures of society, it becomes yet more important to consider how ethics and values intertwine in design activity. Numerous methods that address issues related to ethics and value-centeredness in design activity exist, but it is unclear what role the design research and practice communities should play in shaping the future of these design approaches. Importantly, how might researchers and practitioners become more aware of the normative assumptions that underlie both their design activity and the design artifacts that result?

The poet George MacKay Brown (1921-1996) lived most of his life in Orkney and dedicated his life’s work to the poetry he saw in an island shaped by its people and a people shaped by their island. In his book An Orkney Tapestry, originally published in 1969, he returns, time and again, to the analogy of the loom and the tapestry to describe the islands. As in the quote above, where he describes the “different estates [...] stitched together in a single garment”, he also refers to the islands as a tapestry woven by history, people and things. The Orkney with which we concern ourselves in this paper is still Brown’s Orkney; it is still a place of almost indefinable integrity and its history still has an undeniable presence. In this paper, we look at the growth and impact of socio-material power infrastructures, in and around Orkney, over the past thirty years, based on two visits to observe, solicit diverse perspectives upon and study the development of “community energy” (Smith et al., 2016; Seyfang et al., 2013). We use onshore wind turbines as an inquiry into how the tapestry of Orkney is interwoven with the Scottish mainland, the UK and Westminster. By tracing the development of renewable energy here, we offer the reader an account of local control and agency, in response to the SHAPE ENERGY ‘control’ challenge. In bringing a historical socio-technical inquiry to bear on energy production and local control, we draw attention, also, to the language of our account and, indeed, any account that deals with power supplies. The word ‘power’ comes to English from the Latin, via Old French, meaning ‘ability to act or do’. ‘Energy’, ‘agency’ and ‘control’ also relate to the means to perform actions and alter states. In this account, we juxtapose the ethereality of electricity, with its technical power to enact change through chemistry in ways determined by physics, with the equally immaterial flows of power that arise in the socio-technical sphere of erecting wind turbines, seeing the history of control of energy in Orkney as a meeting – and intertwining – of these technical and socio-technical factors, playing through the material infrastructure of cables, turbines, batteries and the grid. Chapter in Report

In the last hours of CHI 2017, a group of researchers from universities and businesses across the northern hemisphere sat down together to consider “Taking Action in a Changing World”. The title of the special interest group (SIG) is significant; it speaks of having an impact, of the politics on which we wish to have an impact, and also the dynamism of the structures and systems around us. There is no special mention of technology. In other words, it is a departure from business-as-usual HCI.

With thanks to all SPICE participants, especially fellow investigators Steve Thompson and Clare Brand, and to the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/J501588/1).

In the last hours of CHI 2017, a group of researchers from universities and businesses across the northern hemisphere sat down together to consider “Taking Action in a Changing World”.\ud \ud The title of the special interest group (SIG) is significant; it speaks of having an impact, of the politics on which we wish to have an impact, and also the dynamism of the structures and systems around us. There is no special mention of technology. In other words, it is a departure from business-as-usual HCI.

In October 2015, we convened a workshop for 80 researchers and practitioners involved in makerspaces in Europe. Our aim was to explore how makerspaces can help cultivate sustainable developments. This paper reports workshop discussion and ideas on the topic, and illustrates interest in the deliberative potential for this kind of ‘citizen lab’. Interestingly, given the emphasis on tools and making practices in many makerspaces, discussion at our makerspace event focused much more on community development capabilities and skills for mobilising alliances for raising social awareness. Discussion problematized different kinds of sustainability, noting that social and economic ambitions can potentially align well with environmental goals at this level of activity, but are not always designed to do so. At heart, the workshop revealed the need for strategies that counter the incumbent social structures that influence ostensibly ‘open’ makerspaces, and thereby enable the tools and capacities available to work on more sustainable developments.

This essay argues there is value in considering participatory design as a form of generative anthropology at a time when we recognise that we need not only to understand cultures but to change them towards sustainable living. Holding up the democratically-oriented practices of some participatory design research to definitions of anthropology allows the essay to explore the role of intervention in social process. And, challenging definitional boundaries, the essay examines design as a participatory tool for cultural change, creating and interogating futures (and the idea of futures). In analysing how designing moves towards change in the world, the essay brings together design research and concepts from anthropology to help us better understand and operationalise our interventions and pursue them in a fair and sustainable manner.

The world machine is a new archetype for a socio-technical system drawing together a group of tools that combine computational powers with a social agenda of cross-world collaboration in resistance to dominant market rhetoric. Specifically, we look at how powers to connect, sense and infer can be combined and turned to crowd-sourcing public engagement with shared world issues - as an alternative to business-as-usual in the context of developing and deploying networked technology. We combine theoretical aspects of world machines, such as what a political entity of this kind might seek to do, and practical exercises that focus on design, with a view to exploring viability and examining what a related research agenda might involve.

In this paper we reflect on our experiences in a project where academic researchers and social change organizations are working together to explore how participatory and co-design practices can be disseminated and spread within the 'third sector'. The research project is itself co-designed and co-produced, but within various constraints arising from research funding models. We explore both our immediate outputs and our learning about successful co-research models for this challenge.

Interactive digital technologies pervade our shared spaces in personal, mobile, infrastructural and other embedded forms. These changes challenge the ways we understand and investigate the relationships between people, computing and settings. Responding to this situation—where ubiquitous computing is not only personal but also public, and where digital interactions may happen anywhere—this special issue explores how HCI research can use the strengths of an intersection of theory, practice and innovation in order to best address this conjunction of interactive technologies, public spaces and people interacting with or within both.

“When electricity prices prevent older people from heating their homes, and the River Thames is just down the road, why are we not using it to power our city?” was a question posed by a member of the Geezers Club at an AgeUK centre in East London. The Geezers are a group of older men aged from 55 to late 80’s, who meet weekly in Tower Hamlets. For the last five years they have been working with artist Loraine Leeson, engineer Toby Borland and others to realise their dream of using the River Thames to provide energy for London’s riverside communities.\ud \ud The project was initiated by an art commission responding to the Democratising Technology research project being carried out by Ann Light and others at Queen Mary University of London that questioned why the extensive life experience of older people was failing to inform new developments in technology. \ud \ud Members of the Geezers group were able to recollect developments in tidal and wave power from years earlier, many of which were brought to a premature end in the 1980’s. Though research into energy from wind turbines did re-commence, the power of the Thames remains relatively untapped to this day. During the life of the project Active Energy has involved a practical proposal for installing tidal turbines at the Thames Barrier, renewable energy workshops at a local school, a wind-driven public light-work for the roof of an Age UK centre, prototyping workshops at University of East London and art exhibitions in both the UK and USA that have brought these issues to public attention. \ud \ud The most recent phase of the project has been to create an ultra low-cost turbine to produce energy from the river and prompt a debate on the use of the River Thames as a source of energy for the city. The process of creative facilitation that has driven this work and fostered citizen-led innovation by older people has gained international attention, whilst the small scale turbine that has been designed specifically for slow moving tidal rivers is thought to be the first of its kind and capable of low-cost replication for developing nations overseas.