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We introduce 9 guiding principles to integrate Participatory Design (PD) methods in the development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. The adoption of PD methods by NLP will help to alleviate issues concerning the development of more democratic, fairer, less-biased technologies to process natural language data. This short paper is the outcome of an ongoing dialogue between designers and NLP experts and adopts a non-standard format following previous work by Traum (2000); Bender (2013); Abzianidze and Bos (2019). Every section is a guiding principle. While principles 1–3 illustrate assumptions and methods that inform community-based PD practices, we used two fictional design scenarios (Encinas and Blythe, 2018), which build on top of situations familiar to the authors, to elicit the identification of the other 6. Principles 4–6 describes the impact of PD methods on the design of NLP systems, targeting two critical aspects: data collection & annotation, and the deployment & evaluation. Finally, principles 7–9 guide a new reflexivity of the NLP research with respect to its context, actors and participants, and aims. We hope this guide will offer inspiration and a road-map to develop a new generation of PD-inspired NLP. We introduce 9 guiding principles to integrate Participatory Design (PD) methods in the development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. The adoption of PD methods by NLP will help to alleviate issues concerning the development of more democratic, fairer, less-biased technologies to process natural language data. This short paper is the outcome of an ongoing dialogue between designers and NLP experts and adopts a non-standard format following previous work by Traum (2000); Bender (2013); Abzianidze and Bos (2019). Every section is a guiding principle. While principles 1–3 illustrate assumptions and methods that inform community-based PD practices, we used two fictional design scenarios (Encinas and Blythe, 2018), which build on top of situations familiar to the authors, to elicit the identification of the other 6. Principles 4–6 describes the impact of PD methods on the design of NLP systems, targeting two critical aspects: data collection & annotation, and the deployment & evaluation. Finally, principles 7–9 guide a new reflexivity of the NLP research with respect to its context, actors and participants, and aims. We hope this guide will offer inspiration and a road-map to develop a new generation of PD-inspired NLP

This document reports on the mid-term dissemination, exploitation and communication activities carried out in the PIE News project. The report accounts for the major changes that the communication identity of the project has undergone in order to respond to the multiple feedback provided through the participatory research activities conducted in the three pilot countries. Research findings have brought an understanding of the communication activities as aiming at informing people, promoting collective meaning-making, and building relations so as to build an inclusive and empathic online and offline environment for people who cope with conditions of precariousness and risks of social exclusion and material deprivation. Research results have also emphasised the importance of building and leveraging the power of offline relations in order to foster engagement and the formation of a recursive public around the digital platform commonfare.net. The document also provides a detailed account of the results of communication and dissemination work performed so far. Data and analytics are provided with regards to the project’s institutional website, Facebook page, newsletter, factsheet, press releases, flyers, posters and stickers. An account of external events is also provided along with a plan of future networking events. The conclusions highlight the organization of networking events and communication of bottom-up welfare good practices as the two main pillars on which to focus future public engagement activities.

This deliverable reports on the networking events organized by Consortium pilot partners BIN, CMS, and Dyne, as well as the local events aimed at sustainability throughout the project and particularly in the second Reporting Period (RP2 - M18-M36).

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.

Digital technologies have an increasing, often debated, role in our world: in this book we are concerned with the relation between technologies and the common, the ensemble of elements connecting human beings. Our motivation lies in the observation that the common is often dispossessed by platform capitalism. Can we, as scholars, help to identify and build digital technologies that nourish the common rather than dispossessing it? To answer this question, we look at Participatory Design (PD) as an inspiring example for other scholarship. In the light of designing viable alternatives, in this book we review and discuss the actual status of PD research taking into account a reinvigorated political perspective. Our goal is to understand, from the most recent literature in PD, how such field can contribute to socio-technical alternatives to platform capitalism. We also point to the limitations of actual PD, in terms of missing elements when looking at the political agenda on nourishing the common that we propose. More specifically, we look at PD literature trying to answer the following research question: “how could PD research contribute to a renewed political research practice in the age of platform capitalism?”. To answer this question, we engaged in a narrative literature review of the last years of activity in the field. This literature review is grounded on the framework, developed by us as a contribution to PD itself, of a Participatory Design promoting commoning practices, or nourishing the common, the ensemble of the material and symbolic elements tying together human beings. Such framework identifies four practical strategies for scholars, professionals, and activists in the field of PD interested in building a contemporary activist agenda: 1) to identify an arena of action that is potentially socially transformative; 2) to clarify how the social groups involved in a specific technological process can connect to commoning; 3) to promote and enact an open ended design process that is facilitated but not strongly lead by the designers themselves; and 4) to discuss and evaluate how people participating in a design project see their material conditions changed by the project itself (four themes we referred to, in our review, with the four labels Transformative; Agency; Open Ended; Gains). Starting from our four strategies framework we approached the literature review, searching for those works that adhere to one or more strategies. We complete the review with a discussion, based on the reviewed literature, on the strategies that can dialogue with other researchers engaging in an activist agenda aimed at social transformations that supports nourishing the common.

Participatory Design (PD) has recently seen efforts to reinvigorate its political capacity, including reflections on the relations between its practices and institutions and a renewed political agenda in the contemporary stage of capitalism, such as the one of nourishing the common. This paper addresses both of these directions, questioning how a renewed political agenda of PD intersects the processes of institutioning in which PD itself takes part. To do that, we refer to an European-funded project called Commonfare, aimed at designing a digital platform fostering the emergence of a new economic model in the domain of the institutions of the welfare state. We conclude by discussing how a PD political agenda based on the critique of the current forms of capitalism aligns with or challenges existing institutional frames, supporting the emergence of new institutions.