Introduction

Overview

For a few years, I had been looking for a suitable dissertation project, only to have four of them fall through. It is useful to examine briefly why the projects failed, as their failure is related to a central idea of this dissertation. In the first project, the City of Seattle distributed a request for proposals to build an information highway. I worked with a coalition of citizen groups to help define how a public information highway should be designed and operated. However, after the proposals were received, the city cancelled the project, claiming that communications technologies were changing too rapidly, and it did not have the resources to manage such an undertaking.

Next, two projects arose with Catholic Community Services (CCS), the largest sponsor of social service agencies in Western Washington. The first was an internal technology project to revamp how services were delivered to clients of CCS. The second was an external project to create computer learning centers in CCS-sponsored housing projects. Neither project went forward until months or years after initial discussions because CCS did not have the resources or people to start the projects quickly.

Finally, a team from the University of Washington Graduate School of Public Affairs, in conjunction with local community activists, created a demonstration World Wide Web site called Welfare for Real. The site was developed as a way for welfare recipients to tell their own stories—their side of the welfare issue—in order to influence public policy. After two years, the project still had not been funded.

The failure of these projects to take off, despite popular support, demonstrates a key concept that I am examining in this dissertation: there are significant structural barriers to community participation in technology development.

I believe that organizations focused on improving the social good are going to be more amenable to the idea of community participation than organizations which have the maximization of profit as their primary goal. Although the goals do not need to be mutually exclusive, in practice they usually are. Community-oriented organizations don't focus much on technology, and when they do, they typically don't have the resources to pursue its development. Either they have to find funding from outside sources or take it from the little they have to work with. In other words, the organizations most concerned with people usually have the least ability to deal with technology.

The project which came to fruition is a case study evaluating citizen participation in the development of the Seattle Public Schools' Budget Builder World Wide Web site. This Web site was designed as a tool to simplify and explain the process of budgeting at the local school level. A team with members from the Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington (including my advisor, Andrew Gordon, and myself), the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform, and the Seattle Public Schools' budget office combined to produce the current system. As of this writing, the project is still continuing; however, this dissertation will cover the first stages of the development of the Web site, from the Fall of 1996 until the first official use of the web site in April, 1998.

Although this project has many of the same features as the first four projects I described—sponsoring organizations that have few resources and little technical expertise—in this case we were fortunate to receive funding from outside sources both early and later on in the project, allowing it to develop fully.

I had originally intended to evaluate methods by which members of a large community—in this case an entire city—could be included as participants in a technical design project. As the project proceeded, it became clear that community participation was going to be much more limited than I originally thought. Reevaluating the research aspect of the study, it became clear that it would be more interesting to analyze the nature of community participation in this project, particularly the ways in which it was obstructed, but also the ways in which it was facilitated, and the reasons for both.

Overview | Research Goals | Wider Context | Online Format

Contents | Introduction | Background | Methods | Description | Conclusion | References