Hi, I'm Ned Cooper from the Australian National University.
I want to start by acknowledging that I am recording this video on Ngunnawal and Ngambri
country in Australia and pay respects to elders past and present.
Our paper is called "A systematic review and thematic analysis of community-collaborative
approaches to computing research."
I am presenting this paper on behalf of my co-authors Tiffanie Horne, Courtney Heldreth,
Michal Lahav, Jess Holbrook and Lauren Wilcox from Google.
And also Gillian Hayes from UC Irvine.
So, what prompted our research?
Well, there is a long history of participatory approaches to computing research in HCI.
Over the last 20 years, there has been an increase in publications of “community-based”
approaches to computing research.
We use the term “community-collaborative approaches” to refer collectively to the
umbrella of work in HCI and computing, which includes Action Research, Community-Based
Participatory Research and related efforts that involve participation (as research team
members) of people from a community of interest throughout research and development.
We can see in the chart on this slide that this type of work has really accelerated over
the last five years.
What you see here is the number of computing research articles we identified referring
to “community-collaborative approaches” to developing a technological artefact or
system.
The publication of such projects has been accompanied by growing calls for computing
researchers to work more collaboratively with communities.
For example, in several recent talks by Mary Gray, in Sasha Costanza-Chock’s book ‘Design
Justice’, and at a recent ‘Participatory Approaches to ML’ workshop at ICML.
At the same time, others have noted that participation could go wrong or be misused if we don’t
pay attention to best practices and how people and communities have participated in computing
research to date.
So, we thought it was a good time to take the pulse - to ask how do computing researchers,
including HCI researchers, treat community participation?
What does this work say about us, as a research community, and how we work with others?
So, to do this we reviewed the discourse available in scholarly research about community collaborative
projects published over the last two decades.
As shown on the slide, the three research questions we used to guide our project were:
How do computing researchers describe their efforts to involve community stakeholders
as co-researchers throughout collaborative research projects?
And also, what elements of community collaboration are reported in computing research publications,
and what are the cultural and methodological implications of foregrounding those elements?
Finally we asked, how does the content in these publications align with or diverge from
the tenets of "community-collaborative approaches”?
This gave us insight into how projects have unfolded, which allowed us to learn from the
experiences of other researchers and to identify areas calling for the attention of future
HCI researchers (and computing research more broadly) to fulfil the aspirations of community-collaborative
approaches.
In the paper, we present seven themes generated from our inductive analysis of the articles,
which we have conceptualised as dimensions.
Dimensions are the elements or factors contributing to the holistic, participatory engagement
of researchers and communities in a project.
Within each dimension, we found that tensions can emerge relating to the power and position
of researchers and the computing research environment, relative to research participants
and community members.
Our intent is not to resolve these tensions through this review.
Rather we wanted to identify where our research community might need to pay attention to align
future practice with the tenets of community-collaborative approaches.
The themes presented on the slide and discussed in detail in the paper track the evolution
of a project: from establishing community partnerships to sustaining results.
Today I want to focus on two findings that relate to three of the themes highlighted
on the slide.
Those are: defining a community partner, integrating community knowledge and sharing control.
Firstly, the review found that most studies involved community stakeholders after a problem
was defined.
Researchers tended to rely on their own knowledge to conceptualize a project to be later delivered
in partnership with a community.
Community partners were then included in ideating solutions to the problem as conceptualized
by researchers.
Secondly, there were few examples of researchers sharing control of data analysis with communities.
Action Research practitioners argue these two stages---tat is, conceptualizing a research
problem and analyzing data---are the most critical to involve the community to achieve
the aims of Action Research.
So, the limited involvement of communities in these research stages across the articles
suggests a systemic disconnect between the theory and the practice of community-collaborative
approaches as reported in computing research.
This study is about taking a pulse on research to date, but –importantly–it is also an
invitation.
We want to invite the HCI community into a larger discussion about how to better support
community-collaborative approaches.
In the paper, we argue that structural reform to the research and publication of this type
of work in HCI is required to address the systemic disconnect discussed previously.
We ask:
How could resources for research support engagement with communities to conceptualize research
projects, rather than specifying an outcome for researchers to achieve from a project?
And also, how could publication processes encourage reporting on the development of
community members’ skills in data analysis and technology development, rather than the
validity and reliability of experimental results?
We think that we, as a field, need to catalyze a research agenda to study the systemic issues
that restrict HCI researchers, and computing more broadly, from achieving the goals of
this type work.
We present specific, methodological proposals in the paper to realize this agenda.
These include proposals:
to develop processes that facilitate contestability of HCI research and design practice
to draw on community practices to learn from them and improve our own practices,
and finally to bridge the gap between metrics relevant to researchers and those relevant
to communities.
We argue that these and other proposals in our paper will be essential to the survival
and success of this type of work in HCI and computing.
That said, we see our work as a conversation starter.
For those who are listening to this talk and have worked on community-collaborative projects
– we’d love to discuss your experiences doing this work in computing and start a larger
discourse around how to better support community-collaborative approaches to computing research.
Thank you very much