TY - JOUR
T1 - Processes of Proliferation
AU - Lampinen, Airi
AU - Light, Ann
AU - Rossitto, Chiara
AU - Fedosov, Anton
AU - Bassetti, Chiara
AU - Bernat, Aniko
AU - Travlou, Penny
AU - Avram, Gabriela
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 ACM.
PY - 2022/1/14
Y1 - 2022/1/14
N2 - While scalability and growth are key concerns for mainstream, venture-backed digital platforms, local and location-oriented collaborative economies are diverse in their approaches to evolving and achieving social change. Their aims and tactics differ when it comes to broadening their activities across contexts, spreading their concept, or seeking to make a bigger impact by promoting co-operation. This paper draws on three pairs of European, community-centred initiatives which reveal alternative views on scale, growth, and impact. We argue thatproliferation - a concept that emphasises how something gets started and then travels in perhaps unexpected ways - offers an alternative toscaling, which we understand as the use of digital networks in a monocultural way to capture an ever-growing number of participants. Considering proliferation is, thus, a way to reorient and enrich discussions on impact, ambitions, modes of organising, and the use of collaborative technologies. In illustrating how these aspects relate inprocesses of proliferation, we offer CSCW an alternative vision of technology use and development that can help us make sense of the impact of sharing and collaborative economies, and design socio-technical infrastructures to support their flourishing.
AB - While scalability and growth are key concerns for mainstream, venture-backed digital platforms, local and location-oriented collaborative economies are diverse in their approaches to evolving and achieving social change. Their aims and tactics differ when it comes to broadening their activities across contexts, spreading their concept, or seeking to make a bigger impact by promoting co-operation. This paper draws on three pairs of European, community-centred initiatives which reveal alternative views on scale, growth, and impact. We argue thatproliferation - a concept that emphasises how something gets started and then travels in perhaps unexpected ways - offers an alternative toscaling, which we understand as the use of digital networks in a monocultural way to capture an ever-growing number of participants. Considering proliferation is, thus, a way to reorient and enrich discussions on impact, ambitions, modes of organising, and the use of collaborative technologies. In illustrating how these aspects relate inprocesses of proliferation, we offer CSCW an alternative vision of technology use and development that can help us make sense of the impact of sharing and collaborative economies, and design socio-technical infrastructures to support their flourishing.
KW - collaborative economy
KW - impact
KW - local initiative
KW - proliferation
KW - scaling
KW - sharing economy
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85123293304&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3492860
DO - 10.1145/3492860
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85123293304
SN - 2573-0142
VL - 6
JO - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
JF - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
IS - GROUP
M1 - 3492860
ER -