Research Plan

Background - why this research, why now

The UK has a long, rich, and uneven tradition of building, governing, and contesting digital technology in the service of democratic life and the public good. It runs across various civic platforms, through the cooperative tech movement, deliberative democracy practitioners, and collectives working on community technology. It also includes funders, academics, civil servants, and the loose meet-ups that hold much of it together.

This broad ecosystem is fragmented, underfunded, and unevenly mapped. People do parallel work without knowing one another exists; new entrants do not know where to start; funders cannot see the whole. Communities most affected by technology are often the least resourced to act on it, while communities most in need might be ignored.

In order to start addressing these issues, our research proposes to map the field with the people doing the work - the organisations, collectives, cooperatives, ad-hoc networks, and informal arrangements that constitute the UK landscape of civic tech, political tech, and tech for good. It recognises that the work of mapping is itself an intervention and it adopts an open and participatory approach to data gathering.

Scope - a contested, overlapping field

There is no settled name for what we are mapping. Practitioners use “civic tech,” “political tech,” “tech for good,” “community technology,” “public interest technology,” “tech for social justice,” “data for good,” and “post-billionaire technology,” among many others. The differences between these terms are real and politically meaningful, and the research will respect them rather than collapse them into a single label. We decided to use “political technology network” as our starting website name for brevity. We were inspired by a Michel Foucault's understanding of technology as inherently political, given the power structures it enacts.

Our deliberately wide initial frame is: organisations and informal arrangements based in or substantially active in the UK that build, use, govern, fund, study, or critique digital technology in service of democratic life, the public good, or community power. In practice, this includes people and organisations aiming to:

• Use digital technology to shape, study, and transform political processes at group, local, regional, national, and transnational levels
• Advance transparency, accountability and public oversight of government and corporations by using digital technology
• Experiment with and critically examine how digital tools can interact with democratic practices such as participation, deliberation, representation, and collective decision-making, both within and beyond formal institutions
• Influence policy decisions that enable any of the above areas

This list is open as we expect the boundaries - and the language used to describe them - to shift through the research, in conversation with participants.

Research questions

Provisional, to be reviewed and refined with the first cohort of participants:

• Who is doing this work in the UK, in what forms?
• How do practitioners describe themselves, and where do they see meaningful boundaries between fields?
• What infrastructure already connects them - events, platforms, mailing lists, funders - and what is missing?
• What support, resources, and connections do organisations and individuals say they need?
• What models are working, what models are failing, and why?
• What would a healthier ecosystem look like, in the words of the people in it?

Methods - a participatory research approach

Participatory Research treats research participants as co-researchers rather than as data sources. In this context, it will allow practitioners to shape the research questions, sampling, analysis, and outputs through iterations: each phase will inform the next, and the design changes as new voices join.

Concretely, this project commits to the following:

Research design decisions are open. We will start interviewing people and develop a semi-structured interview guide to cover our initial research questions. Participants will be asked which other research questions are worth pursuing, who else they would like to talk with, how they would like to be involved, and which outputs would be most beneficial to them. A research participant review and advisory group will be created, and the next steps will be decided collectively.

Reflexive, ongoing consent. Participants choose what is recorded, anonymised, and shared. They retain the right to withdraw and to challenge interpretations and any time during the research process.

Restitution and member-checking are part of the method. All participants will have access to regular debriefs and will be invited to contribute if they wish to analyze and synthesize. Any outputs will be shared in draft form before publication. They will be openly licensed and hosted in a way that allows the field to continue using them.

The mapping is a living thing. Any infrastructure created should remain useful long after a report is written.

Phases of work

We have designed the research in phases where each phase aims to contribute to our further understanding of the network as well as contributing to the development of that network. Each phase builds upon the previous one and will only be undertaken if there is suitable capacity and interest within the network.

Phase 1: Seed interviews and co-design

Conduct 20 semi-structured interviews with practitioners representing different framings, geographies, and organisational forms working in this ecosystem. The interviews will allow for refining the research questions, the interview guide, the sampling plan, and ethics, and will contribute to creating a light governance structure (e.g., an advisory circle).

Phase 2: Open convening

Share main findings openly. Host an online and in-person workshop to share them, test interpretations, and decide plans and governance structure for next steps.

Phase 3: Wider listening

Drawing on the learnings from Phase 1 and Phase 2, if there is a collective decision to do so , we can expand the research to include more participants (methods to be decided based on initial input). Build a structured directory of organisations and a draft social graph.

Phase 4: Co-analysis and outputs

Working with a research participants review group, analyse findings, draft outputs, circulate for comment, and revise. Plan the handover of the research and network artifacts (e.g. directory, mailing list, and social graph) to a sustainable host.

Phase 5: Public launch and onward

Publish openly. Resource a small ongoing maintenance function. Convene an open gathering to discuss findings and decide next steps with the field.

What we will produce

Provisional, to be reviewed in light of feedback from research participants.

• A narrative report on the state of the UK civic / political / tech-for-good field, written for and with the people in it.
• A practitioner directory of UK organisations and informal arrangements, openly licensed and editable.
• A draft social graph of relationships between organisations, with method notes so others can re-run it.
• A glossary of contested terms, recording what people mean and where they disagree.
• Recommendations for funders, infrastructure organisations, and the field itself.
• Open methodology notes, so the research can be repeated, criticised, or extended.