Holochain and Privacy paper

Hey, folks! I just got published! The reason I’m bringing this up here is that our paper is about Holochain and privacy from the perspective of app design – specifically the need to design for a multiplicity of cultural contexts (I’m thinking about @sidsthalekar 's Neighbourhoods) and the benefits of bringing participatory design into the process. I think it brings up some valuable things for hApp devs to think about.

https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=8036267

Anisha, the participatory design expert, talks about the Value-Sensitive Action-Reflection Model for participatory design. It’s a fairly simple model: designers and stakeholders give each other a prompt to think about; the response becomes a prompt for the other party to think about and respond to. AFAICT that’s it.

Here’s my tl;dr tweet thread summarising the paper: https://twitter.com/helioscomm/status/1435663461019705349

9 Likes

:heart_eyes: :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes:
This is so coool - thank you for writing and sharing Paul! (too new to the forum, can’t @ you :sob:) - that tl;dr thread is L33T! (Do people still use that term? Perhaps I’m ageing myself. Thanks also for introducing me to the IOW acronym - which I figured out WITHOUT googling :nerd_face:)

It’s this type of content that makes us excited about holochain. It feeds SO nicely into our current (nascent) stage of hApp dev ideation and community activation.

From the perspective of Living Systems Network, some of the core questions we’re asking ourselves about our role in the ecosystem dovetail very nicely with your paper and its central recommendation of participatory design. Questions like “what other tools, resources, events (or what have you) does the holochain community need to connect prospective users with the growing developer network? How can we leverage our current expertise to catalyze participatory design processes in our region and beyond? How can we tailor participatory design tools and methodologies to suit remote and/or rural use cases?”

Also woooohoo for publicly available academic publications! What a rush. Get a ResearchGate account already :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Welcome to the forum, @emilymcg!

If you’re thinking about how to develop hApps in a participatory way and connect users to developers, definitely check out Neighbourhoods Network and join us on the Discord. It’s a design philosophy for Holochain apps and the distributed web more generally, with the core proposition being that we need a shift away from apps and to neighbourhoods as the core organizing principle of technological infrastructure.

3 Likes

This is so on point “we need a shift away from apps and to(wards) neighbourhoods as the core organizing principle of technological infrastructure.”

I’ll see you on the Discord! Until the wishful day that Discord enables easy multi-login switching, I’ll be stuck showing up as my gamer pseudonym Kieer.

2 Likes

Oh hi @emilymcg ! I haven’t been checking the forum lately; thanks for coming by, and I really appreciate your reflections.

I’m excited to hear you folks at LSN are exploring participatory design – it seems like the only sensible way to go, really. I also realise that there are hurdles, like the fact that it takes more time, more education (of both user-designers and the dev team), which in this day translates to more money.

I like the questions you’re asking. Right now I don’t really have any answers to them… but I’m grateful that you’re asking how you could use your expertise to make participatory design happen in Vancouver. It seems to me that early experiments could lead to good case studies for other people who want to learn about participatory design.

2 Likes