Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land upon
which we work – the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin nation.
And I would like to pay my respects to their elders: past, present, and emerging.
In this paper co-authored with my colleagues Associate Professor Joanne Evans and Dr Han
Duy Phan, we describe an approach for designing information infrastructure.
Systems that enable people to exert their rights over information as it manifests and
changes through time over generational timescales.
This work was part of a larger program that is addressing the lifelong recordkeeping needs
for those caught up in the child protection sector.
In this study, we conducted a series of participatory design and prototyping workshops over an 18-month
period, with a core group of three academic and five community researchers.
Every information system is also a recordkeeping system for someone, in some context, at some
time.
A system that deals with authoritative information that may provide memory, identity, evidentiality,
and accountability beyond the immediate transactional context.
Information systems that lack these recordkeeping affordances often fail to uphold the recordkeeping
rights that underpin a raft of basic human rights.
Consequently, such systems often disproportionately disenfranchise the most marginalized in society.
More so, if the recordkeeping context involves traumatic experiences; as the making, keeping,
and control of these most personal and private records are entwined with issues of power,
trust, autonomy, surveillance, and accountability.
The challenge, then, is to understand how to design systems that enable people to exert
their recordkeeping rights as they manifest and change diachronically or through time.
Out-of-home Care is the term used in Australia to describe the living arrangements for children
and young people unable to stay in their parental home.
Our concern is with the role and impact of childhood recordkeeping within the Care system,
as we know that inadequate recordkeeping can contribute to neglect and abuse; with impacts
often extending far beyond childhood.
Recordkeeping problems in the Care sector are exacerbated by the complexity of the information
silos and consortia that have been designed and optimized from an organizational perspectives.
Consequently, recordkeeping access here is fragmented and problematic.
When those separated from family have turned to records to make sense of those experiences,
they have too-often found them "incomplete, insulting, incorrect, and incomprehensible".
In response, we envision a safe and secure, distributed and participatory recordkeeping
network, populated by children and young people, and by their caregivers, allied professionals,
communities, families, and so on.
Our goal is this design – in both the verb and noun senses: what architecture and affordances
should the design embody, and how should such a design be pursued?
Our work is grounded in Recordkeeping Informatics, the information science that comprises the
technologies and social practices of conceiving, creating, managing, and deriving utility from
authoritative information.
Also, we know that information infrastructure is value-laden, and inherently political.
For example the definition or even the inclusion (or not) of a data element is a statement
of allowable actions or viewpoints within a sociomaterial context.
In our research, we critically examine the role that ‘recordkeeping plays in the exercise
and abuse of power in society’.
So, we adopted a participatory research approach to bring together a range of living and professional
expertises.
We are sensitive to the symbolic power of the research context and the often-alienating
research experiences of those in Care as (often non-consensual) subjects of research.
We avoided extractive research techniques and instead took a more inclusive approach,
striving to build relationships of trust and mutuality as we explored the design space
of recordkeeping rights and needs.
We see consent as a process, rather than a one-time transaction, and constantly revisited
our jointly established protocols as our working relationship deepened.
So we endeavoured to break down the institutional research façade.
We signposted the (ever changing) on-campus workshop locations; provided food as a social
leveller; invited participants to bring their children to workshops; employed a range of
social communications platforms; handled jargon using a ‘red-card’ system to ensure mutual
understanding; and remunerated our community research participants;
We employed a DeBono-like approach, with seven “recordkeeping hats” that ensured we continually
considered various recordkeeping perspectives.
The Trajectory was a visual representation of the breadth of C01are experiences, interpersonal
relationships and living contexts, together with possible events and transitions.
It was derived from child protection documentation, tempered by the street knowledge of participants
with direct experience in child protection as children and/or parents.
We then mapped each record type in the trajectory against stakeholders and life stages to analyse
how records and recordkeeping manifests throughout their lives.
Finally, we derived a set of ‘dimensions’ of Care experience that we used to create
deep personas.
These detailed childhoods – from the very first interaction with Child protection Services,
through to after leaving Care included vignettes, events, and intervention points such as the
reasons for Care; placement moves; incidents; achievements and setbacks; relationship establishment
and breakdown; interests; and so on.
These deep personas helped us understand how our design could be used throughout childhood
and beyond.
They also gave us the basis for rich sets of test records.
We prototyped a loosely coupled, three-tier architecture.
At its core is a personal recordkeeping registry decoupled from the plurality of legacy record-holding
systems.
This is not an aggregation repository of records, but a platform for the management of records
that are usually held elsewhere.
We focused on defining architectural affordances and the minimum interoperability needed between
legacy systems and our proposed infrastructure.
We also arrived at a personalisable and offline-enabled browser-based client, decoupled from the registry
server.
The registry is based on an activity modelling paradigm that supports a complex knowledge
graph of activities, participants, mandates, and representations that can facilitate recordkeeping
under the control of those recorded.
The registry also serves as a point of creation and ongoing management for other personal
records – such as biographical information that constantly needs to be shared differentially
in a controlled manner.
Our design work itself, together with the outputs, reinforced and clarified a set of
Strong Concepts for the design of diachronic, trauma-sensitive systems.
These are: Diachronic Contingency – as design process
and outputs are context dependent and rooted in movement through time.
Individuality - rejecting ideas of a generic ‘user’ or research participant.
Transience – of service provision, access, and engagement.
Child/person Centredness - shifting from an organization/client framing of to one that
consciously privileges participants’ perspectives research, design, and systems.
Activity focus – where design becomes an end in itself, while information systems shift
from repositories to dynamic spaces for recordkeeping-related interaction.
Complexity – of ever-shifting networks of people, perspectives, and activities
Trust & Agency – as core elements of design.
So, in conclusion, I would like to thank our research participants, my co-authors Joanne
and Han and the other academic researchers in the Rights in Records by Design program.
For more information you can, of course, read our paper, but also follow these links to
read more about the program; our academic outputs; and find out more about the proof-of-concept
prototype.
Thank you!