This was inspired by seeing @jcniala's presentation at the Oxford writing up seminar week or two ago. I was deeply struck by the parallels between our work and what people are working on in allotments and codebases.
This is also the first in a grand sweeping set of blogposts where I want to suggest a few frameworks for seeing the issues at the heart of the civic technology space.
https://twitter.com/blangry/status/1359928551051509767
To preface this: gardening and allotments are not my field site. You should read JC's work as soon (as soon) as you can because she's a fantastic thinker and writes very well. She also does a lot of work in museums that I think very highly of.
The word civic has, at its heart, a mood of purpose. It is something to do with the Latin I'm told. Civic is to be for the civilian. A vicus was the civil settlement that grew up around a (Roman) military town (a comparison that feels a little on the nose). I think it’s worth maintaining that tension between civic and the state. They are entirely linked, but they aren’t the same thing. Having said that, what we tend to use civic for now is more diffuse. One could be civic by gritting your neighbours drive in icy weather or by volunteering or sometimes by being visible and participatory. Civic, I think, comes with a value judgement or moral implication.
There are parallels with what projects we can do online.
In a lot of civic technology projects the work done is similar to the sorts of tending and preparation work in gardening and growing. In my work, I am comparing data cleaning to the processes for removing poisonous compounds from root vegetables in rainforest environments. Some of these processes are long, arduous and steeped in rituals. It reminds me of data cleansing on every level: the long process, the language of cleanliness and dirt (c.f. Mary Douglas) and the idea that the data you get at the end of the cleaning process is productive and generative, as in, something can be grown from it.
One of the points that was raised in the seminar was around people's reasoning for running an allotment: that it was almost never about growing food for self-sufficiency (or profit), that it was for personal satisfaction, community, ecology and to improve the local environment. I think this sounds like quite a lot of the rationale's for involvement. People don't make civic tech projects to be millionaires or have tech HQs in San Fransisco. They are to solve a specific problem (they probably won't solve it though, that's a bigger issue). They might be the digital equivalent of planting wildflowers for bees: making better data available. Making one bit of the state easier to navigate. Helping out one group, in one place, on one issue.
Guerrilla gardeners plant in spaces that they don't own. This is usually to work on beautification or to turn grass spaces into something more ecologically useful. These interventions aren't always welcomed (a comparable incident is Lou Downe's trouble with the council digging up their work https://blog.louisedowne.com/2019/03/08/hackney-council-destroyed-my-garden-heres-why/).
But sometimes these interventions can be more knowing, more playful and are more pointed. I was struggling to think of a comparator in civic tech, then I remembered the unofficial register to vote apps from a year or two ago. The provocation is that the government had not (and has not: there has been no significant iteration in the design, capabilities (for the citizen) and scope of the Register To Vote service in at least 8 years) made a register to vote service that could deal with non-Commonwealth EU citizens (as they had assumed by that point the UK would no longer have EU citizens on the books). This is comparable egregious to poor land management in a climate disaster. They were unofficial and when the Electoral Commission came knocking, the sites had to close. There was quite a good reason for this in that some councils were not accepting applications from the unofficial service and so people's right to vote was being cut off rather than insisting they took the more onerous route of in person registration.
It isn't a perfect analogue of course, but it is a perfect illustration of the civic existing outside the governmental. There are ideas of "proper" that are illustrated just as well from helping people to vote as from planting vegetables to give away or wildflowers for pollinators.
Both JC and one of my informants (who I talked to about this analogy) raised the point of archival practice. Allotments have records of occupiers, accounts and metadata about plants stretching back for decades. They preserve arguments about the rules of the patch (pesticides or organic?) in the same way that Slack, IRC, listservs and GitHub logs can do with civic tech projects. They are both able to keep arguments alive in archives and present something of a decision log (although nothing as deliberately designed).
Both civic technology and allotments have a strange relationship to both the state itself and civic institutions. Allotmentmenting as a practice has been promoted by government (especially in wartime) to improve food supply. In many cases, local government controls waiting lists for access to allotment patches. Civic tech gets co-opted by government to solve issues that are squarely within the government domain but, using New Public Mangagement-esque thinking, gets shunted out to “innovative” startups who can operate without the responsibility of joined up policy or the Daily Mail test of hiring technologists at a market rate.
Allotmenters and civic technologists also create institutions. Their work is like geology. Gradual building with the idea of the long term, of work continuing beyond the immediate, although throwing in the towel and letting weeds grow is equally possible.
In the next post I’m going to explore more ideas about what institutions are, how we build them, maintain them and how they can start to crumble.