Abstract
The advent of civic tech on the African continent brought and enabled new imaginations of citizen engagement and democratic societies. Lessons learned since its inception framed key recommendations to structure and support the implementation of civic tech. Despite this, successful civic tech design and implementation is still limited and constrained in certain contexts. Using critical pragmatism and a qualitative ethnographic approach, this paper discusses how trust and power manifest and influence abstract actor systems associated with civic tech, and subsequently its success, sustainability, or failure. The MobiSAfAIDS project is explored as an interwoven discussion on power and trust theory, and empirical findings. Power ‘over’, and power ‘to’, can separate entities in their engagement towards implementing civic tech, influencing barriers to ‘knowing’ and access to ‘act’, in citizen engagement. Trust may be a key factor in enabling power ‘with’ (collaboration and learning), through access points associated with civic tech stakeholder systems – in the form of representatives, tasks, artefacts or objects, and governance/standards. Contexts will vary, and so will defined abstract systems in civic tech; nonetheless, conceptualizing these access points enable researchers and practitioners to explore how these exist in manifesting trust, and the gaps and barriers to their existence.
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Khene, C. (2023). Manifestations of Trust in the Implementation of Civic Tech in Southern Africa. In: Jones, M.R., Mukherjee, A.S., Thapa, D., Zheng, Y. (eds) After Latour: Globalisation, Inequity and Climate Change. IFIPJWC 2023. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 696. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50154-8_18
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