Community networks offer possibilities for civic participation on an unprecedented scale, and offer us as social system designers unique historical opportunities for establishing appropriate venues for communication and information exchange. Numerous projects of broad civic support and human value have been fostered not only through the Internet, but through local and geographically-focused community networks. Projects ranging from educational communities, such as online local public libraries and educational networks, to civic news and participation networks have obvious appeal and significance. Particularly in an international environment of increasing corporate control of media channels, the significance of locally-controlled information and participation sources through community-based networks presents potential for promoting true local democratic participation in community life.

At least two very broad orientations can be pursued in the research context toward realizing community networks that meet these promises. One, to which the workshop themes point, encourages research in designing and evaluating the systems themselves, by researching effectiveness factors of existing networks, proposing guidelines for design, understanding the communities of use, and the use of CSCW applications in forwarding the potential of these networks. The second orientation is toward participatory design and planning methods appropriate for large-scale involvement. I find this notion less salient in the listed themes but it addresses some of the "critical issues" in community network design.

Participatory design practices discussed in the open literature tend to focus on smaller-scale applications and work practice design, at least smaller scale than design for entire communities. Although community participation projects have been used in PD projects, truly interactive CSCW systems designed using a PD process are not yet prevalent on scale of community. The question is, can we accomplish the participative design of large-scale communications environments purporting to support entire communities of stakeholders? What participatory planning and design processes are suitable for capturing, negotiating, and facilitating the multiple agendas and interests on the scale of community support?

Since we are, in my estimation, dealing with significant problems of scale and complexity, we might borrow design methodologies from other closely-related disciplines. Most PD planning and design methods have been used in cooperative prototyping and evolutionary design of work practice applications. These methods often require significant and close involvement with the stakeholders, and have been perceived to bypass management and project interests in favor of a strong user orientation. In community networks, a much broader diversity of stakeholders must be accommodated, and significant potential exists for contention. Although a hybrid of methods from PD, conflict resolution, and group facilitation might prove effective if focused on a compatible social system, there is an entire class of methods from Interactive Management (IM) that have been used in complex, multiple stakeholder design projects for over 30 years, very similar in stance to those we are addressing.

An IM methodology known as the CogniScope (Christakis, 1985) has been employed in very large design projects as a means of gaining full stakeholder participation in a democratic context, focused on intentional collaboration with consensus on action and design plans. Some of the projects involving this approach have included representation of the US Native American Nations, the U.S. Forest Service (land use in the spotted owl case), the National Marine Fisheries Service (water and environmental use), and other broad-base communities of interest. Over 400 articles have been published in IM practice, and nearly all projects have addressed social systems issues in the context of full stakeholder participation.

One of the challenges of scale when attempting to create participative teams from large and diverse stakeholder groups can be described by an empirical law familiar to IM practitioners, known as the Escalation of Complexity Law. Christakis (1997) proposed this law on the basis of extensive experience in the design and conduct of team-based work in a large variety of organizational situations:

"As organizations move towards the team-based, non-hierarchical, collaborative approach to problem-solving and design, the situational complexity escalates exponentially, with a concomitant exponential decrease in the capacity of the team members to engage in communicative action. (p. 9).

Another significant aspect of IM is the explicit proponency of democratic participation, with democratic process and values built-in to the methods. Democratic values for design participation must be proposed for buy-in to community networks, and should be made salient in the design method. These values might be proposed to include the following:

• Full and free communication, regardless of rank and power.
• A reliance on consensus rather than coercion or compromise to manage conflict.
• The idea that influence is based on technical competence and knowledge rather than on the vagaries of personal whims or prerogative of power.
• An atmosphere that permits and even encourages emotional expression as well as task-oriented behavior.
• A basically human bias, one that accepts the inevitability of conflict between the organization and the individual, but is willing to cope with and mediate this conflict on rational grounds.

The Habermasian notion of communicative action in the context of design represents a recent focus in IM theory developed by Christakis. The principles of communicative action denote communication within the stakeholder group as intentional action toward agreed purposes, and one of the purposes is considered emancipatory. In other words, the action research methods of Interactive Management, in particular the Cogniscope process, support emancipatory goals such as community governance, individual freedom, and appropriate representation through inclusive, open facilitated dialogue. For the design of community networks on a large scale, such values and processes might be offered within proposals, making the design process values clearly identified to the sponsors.

Although this position paper is rather preliminary, it provides the opportunity to present alternative methods and perspectives based in years of research that have significant implications to the subject, and have been unintentionally bypassed by the extant PD research community. I would welcome the opportunity to further ground these principles in a brief presentation of an applicable context wherein these methods have been proposed in system design for a community network of practice. Further discussion might also be continued regarding the use of the software associated with the Cogniscope process – known as the Cognisystem, a group-based application currently used in facilitated workshop environments, but is currently undergoing redesign as a CSCW application.

References:

Christakis, A.N. (1985). The National Forum on Non-industrial Private Forest Lands. Systems Research. 2, pp. 189-199.

Christakis, A.N. and Shearer, W.L. (1997). Collaboration through communicative action: Resolving the systems dilemma through the Cogniscope system approach. CWA report.