Uncommon Grace The Autobiography of Isaac Folorunso
Data power and Civic Hacking at mySociety
1. Civic hacking: Re-imagining civic
engagement in datafied publics
Stefan Baack (s.baack@rug.nl, @tweetbaack)
Tamara Witschge (t.a.c.witschge@rug.nl)
Centre for Media and Journalism Studies
University of Groningen
12. “If somebody is able to report a
problem with a pothole outside their
house and next week it’s fixed, they
have learned that engagement
with authority is not futile…
FixMyStreet is a gateway drug into
bigger civic engagement.”
19. Structured data?
Going through a webpage “and trying
to spot in that where the names of
speakers are, where eldest votes
is…to work out…which people
voted in which way”
24. Increasing legibility by reducing a
problem of scale?
“I reviewed those documents, you
couldn't – you were too busy trying to
pay the mortgage – so let me tell you
what they show” (Rosen 2013)
26. 1. Empowering citizens by giving
them a sense of agency
è Connecting local knowledge and
practices with centralized government
27. 2. Structured data a necessary
precondition for doing so
è Struggle for legibility
28. Thank you!
Stefan Baack (s.baack@rug.nl, @tweetbaack)
Tamara Witschge (t.a.c.witschge@rug.nl)
Centre for Media and Journalism Studies
University of Groningen
29. References
Rosen, J. (2013, September 3). The “awayness”
problem. Retrieved April 15, 2014, from
http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/
the_awayness_problem.php
Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: how certain
schemes to improve the human condition have
failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
