“It’s like a GPS community tool”: Tactics to foster Digital Commons through Artifact Ecology

Digital Commons have been widely studied in HCI and co-design literature as an alternative to technologies produced by capitalistic corporations. In this paper, we present an action-research process that facilitates the use of digital commons among a group of participants. The process core aspect is understanding our participants’ interests and values to present multiple off-the-shelf tools fitting their needs. In doing so, we leveraged on Artifact Ecologies, using them as an action-research tool. The process is articulated in three main phases: 1) we engaged participants in a reflection on their Artifact Ecologies, connecting the artifacts in use to their values; 2) we used these results to selected valuable digital commons; 3) we presented these tools to the group, connecting them to participants’ ecologies. At the end of the process, we performed a collective interview to evaluate the process alongside assessing the adoption of the proposed technologies. Based on our findings, we developed five tactics to foster digital commoning.