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A collection of pointers for the role of arts in cultural change. CreaTures and Happy Museum draw this analysis from combined learning over ten years of commissioned projects and peer learning in museums across the UK and 20 experimental projects across Europe led by artists, designers, cultural cooperatives, activists, art and design researchers., CreaTures/Happy Museum pointers to making change from the cultural sector

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.