In this point of view I will position myself in relation to the current state of affairs in community technology. In particular I will look at how people at large participate in technology mediated activities and what this means for our understanding of such technology mediated communities, and our methods and roles as researchers when studying them (and as activists when engaging with them). This discussion is quite timely and fueled for example by the community-related sessions in the prestigious ACM CHI conference in 2015 (Begole et al., 2015).

I step back from community briefly, because I find it useful to start the discussion of'doing good'in participatory design. Participatory design in its classical form was about taking a stance for and with somebody, some groups of users/workers/people, at the cost of other groups, whether these were recognized or not. This is the place where my own research started, much before anybody talked about online communities and computer supported cooperative work. In the 1990s in particular, participatory design became something'good'in itself, no matter with whom researchers and designers collaborated. The arguments for participatory design were made in terms of the quality of products and in particular their usefulness to users as such. This development was questioned by many (Kyng, 2010, Beck, 2002, Bødker, 2003), at the same time as it led to many positive changes in human-computer interaction research and practices (Bødker 2006).