The Digital Public Health and Social Care theme responds to the role digital technologies can play in the delivery of new forms of public health and social care in the UK.

Traditionally, public health in the UK has focused on a ‘broadcast’ one-way approach to communicating health related information. Public health practitioners tend to adopt ‘upstream’ approaches, attempting to prevent disease before it happens and reduce the impact of illness when it occurs. Unlike much of clinical medicine, public health has traditionally been a population-level endeavor, responding to threats to health across society, rather than within individuals. Online public health initiatives, particularly in the USA, are starting to challenge this approach and are staring to embrace the multidirectional exchange of information and experience characterized by participation, collaboration, and openness. There is a growing recognition that user-generated health interventions are beginning to emerge in some segments of the population, and the grass-roots and bottom-up nature of such activities endows them with many of the long understood (but difficult to realize) qualities of effective interventions, such as being tailored and well adapted to an individuals social, economic and geographic context.

Social care in the UK is also undergoing radical changes, from centralized care provided to local authorities to new financially sustainable models of care that focus on keeping individuals in their home and within the community for as long as possible. This opens up new areas for discussion, such as examining the type of services older people and their carers want, how they can be provided in a way that is deemed acceptable and accessible, how informal carers can be supported, and how the wider community leveraged in a sustainable model of community social care. The role of digital technologies in underpinning these new models of social care, for example, through social media, telecare, and telehealth technologies, is now an active concern for both industry and government. Despite this, the design space for bottom-up solutions supported by technology which foreground partnership between carers, communities and statutory and other providers remains largely unexplored.

Our theme of Digital Public Health & Social Care will explore the diverse ways in which digital technology might support communities in developing and sharing their own expertise and resources in relation to health and social care. Public health and social care has the potential to become increasingly “user generated”, that is, driven, managed and adapted by the target communities. In this context, local government and service providers still have an important role to play in scaffolding appropriate activities through the provision of technologies, information and human resource. Researchers attached to this theme will explore this transformation in the nature of service commissioning and provision, addressing the methodological challenges in the design and evaluation that arise in the deliver of new public health and social care 2.0 initiatives.

Our theme of Digital Community Learning relates to how while the delivery of education services is local government’s single largest commitment, the delivery of education services in the UK rarely draws upon the resources of the communities in which nurseries, schools and colleges are located. At the same time, changes to education policy over the last 20 years has resulted in schools looking inwardly, rather than to their local communities or to other schools with whom they are interrelated with. Recent research has pointed to the potential benefits of working with a broader spectrum of stakeholders in the delivery of education, including local education authority employees and institutions, parents, families, communities, local businesses and the third sector.

In the Digital Community Learning theme we look at the ways in which digital platforms, tools and social media can support new forms of self-organised learning or leverage expertise that exists in the local community. This includes looking towards emerging forms of participatory media—such as the DIY, maker, citizen science movements—and developing long-term prospects for digitally enhanced learning and citizen engagement in education.

The Digital Local Democracy theme responds to the challenge of engaging citizens in the decision-making processes of local government. While national and local governments have attempted to engage citizens through such channels for formal and informal consultation processes, the impact of such activities has generally been low. Planning management and policy formulation in England is a good example of local democracy in action. But while there is a large amount of research around participatory planning and decision making, attempts by local government to deploy digital planning and consultation technologies has failed to make use of these ideas and tend to offer little more than websites into which citizens can deposit comments. Such approaches have consequently failed to scaffold genuine engagement by communities.

In our Digital Local Democracy theme we look towards the ways in which digital platforms and tools might embrace the grass-roots, bottom-up nature of social media and better support the exchange of opinion or the management of deliberation and decision making processes for all. This includes ensuring that such platforms do not exclude citizens that are not deeply engaged with digital technologies, and that the link between engagement and action is clear.

The technical challenges for digital civics are expected to revolve around three interrelated areas of human-computer interaction: ubiquitous computing, social computing and situated interaction.

Ubiquitous computing for Digital Civics refers to the confluence of mobile and embedded communications and sensor-based computing with web technologies. This includes the development of lightweight portable and rapidly deployable physical, environmental and social sensing technology including movement and activity sensors, handheld and wearable video recording and lifelogging systems, and other experience capture devices that can easily share data via mobile wireless broadband. In the context of Digital Civics, there is great potential for how these emerging forms of ubiquitous computing can be used to better support community monitoring of public health, provide social and health interventions tailored to individual’s social economic and geographical context, or how ‘DIY’ sensor technologies can be used to promote local activism to draw attention to social concerns and local issues such as anti-social behaviour and the condition of the built environment.

Social computing for Digital Civics relates to the wide scale development and uptake of participatory and social media. This includes the notions of digital platforms that make it possible for users to not only consume but also generate content, digitally networked publics that make it possible for any user to connect to like-minded individuals globally, and open data and open archives that provide citizens with access to institutional data and cultural archives, and for them to be able to connect and curate their own trajectories through this complex web of individual and public data. These characteristics of social computing and the idea of a digital public space provide the technical infrastructure for Digital Civics. Researchers developing these novel platforms could provide new ways to link local schools with citizens as part of a community-based learning initiative, or develop support networks for communities to seek help, advice and expertise to help them build or adapt off-the-shelf technologies, or platforms supporting deliberation, reflection, dialogue and voting on local political issues.

Situated interaction for Digital Civics relates to natural forms of interaction with digital technologies, such as gesture and touch, and which is sensitive to physical, social and cultural context. This may include developing new types of interaction with gesture-based interfaces (e.g. touchscreens) and natural-user interfaces (e.g., Microsoft Kinect) technologies, but also expands into developing lightweight and simple interactive display devices that might be more easily deployed in public locations. In the context of Digital Civics, there are opportunities here to develop deployable systems located in public places that support the polling of opinions or encourage social activism in relation to local authority decision making processes or service commissioning.

Central to the themes of the CDT is the Participatory and Human-centered design of Digital Civics. This means that researchers need to ensure that new systems are usable, acceptable, and provide citizens with a positive sense of engagement for all.

In the context of Digital Civics, we take a participatory approach of designing with users rather than just for them. This means involving users as co-researchers and co-designers from the start and developing prototypes iteratively to ensure that technology is understandable, trusted and usable. Therefore, a core principle of the Digital Civics CDT and the conducting of projects is the active involvement of potential users and stakeholders throughout the design and evaluation of new technologies. This raises a number of methodological challenges—such as how Digital Civics researchers undertake participatory activities with diverse and potentially large populations, how users are engaged in creative activities and decision making processes, how we ensure correct design decisions are made and enacted, and ensuring participation is meaningful and useful for all involved. Students will be trained in existing best practice for undertaking such participatory and collaborative research and design activities, and also contribute new knowledge in how such activities should be conducted with users, communities and organisations in the future.

Our CDT has an encomapassing set of challenges associated with Digital Security, Privacy and Trust theme responds to the challenge of ensuring data generated, shared and consumed through Digital Civics services and technologies are can be controlled, trusted and verified in ways sensitive to the ways in which citizens, users and stakeholders wish to use it.

In engaging in the production and consumption of participatory media, citizens must not only be comfortable putting data in the hands of local authorities and third sector bodies but in the hands of potentially transient grassroots organisations and other citizens. Similarly, the recipients of user generated content and data must be able, and capable, of consuming, repurposing and even rebroadcasting data and content with appropriate levels of certainty as to its provenance. Likewise, technologies for collaborative decision making must not only respect constructs of privacy and disclosure that reflect the sophisticated formal and informal relationships that exist between members of a community and the relationship of these to the decisions at hand, but must do so in a manner that is intelligible, usable and acceptable to even the most vulnerable and digitally marginal members of a community. In essence, it is the wide array of non-negotiable and unavoidable personal, familial, professional and community relationships and reputations that are “at stake” in Digital Civics; and these depend on appropriate lay perceptions of the usability and credibility of the technical frameworks for realising security, privacy and trust in Digital Civics systems.

Furthermore, it is expected that in a number of ways Digital Civics will provide opportunities to explore the fallibility and limitations of existing technical and conceptual paradigms of security, privacy and trust. For example, while Digital Local Democracy may involve aspects of e-voting, it is likely that the usability and trust requirements will be different and perhaps less stringent than those required for formal elections of political representatives. We expect Digital Civics researchers will both technically and conceptually explore the usability and experiential aspects of security systems, together with the contexts in which citizens live, cooperate and collaborate, in the development of technologies that are capable of underpinning a participatory civic society.