Empowerment Approaches in Digital Civics

The pace and magnitude of recent advancements in digital technologies have set the scene for a complete transformation of our citizenship experience. In the past, HCI research has been concerned with aligning technological progress with top-down organizational models of government institutions or exploring the needs of individual bottom-up community initiatives. However, this approach has proved too rigid for systemic issues and HCI researchers have started to meet these wicked problems halfway, rather than from two opposing sides. This involves putting emphasis on how citizens and organizations can incorporate existing technologies and involve dialogue and co-creation in their process. In this paper we highlight several directions of HCI research that follow the trail towards civic empowerment. Based on these, we identify a set of strategies that might help researchers contribute to a more inclusive orientation of civic tech.