Efficiency and Care in Community-led Initiatives

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This paper illustrates the multifaceted aspects of caring practices, and the ways they are entangled with the organizing work of community-driven initiatives. Seeking to highlight the situated inter-dependencies between concerns for care and efficiency, and considering caring practices as essential to the practical work that makes communities work, we reflect on how caring and efficiency rationalities frame the use, and scope the design of digital technologies. Drawing on two cases, the analysis addresses specific aspects of community organizing whereby concerns for care and efficiency are intertwined. It shows the ways existing, digital technologies oftentimes overshadow communities' key concerns for care, and how attempts to design for community settings often results in anti-designs, that is sociotechnical configurations that can disrupt caring practices. The contribution of the paper is twofold, an analysis of prominent examples of intertwined caring and efficiency, and a focus on caring in the design and appropriation of technologies into this space.