Exquisite variety: computer as mirror to community

Interacting with Computers 14 (2002) 643–662 www.elsevier.com/locate/intcom

Exquisite variety: computer as mirror to community Ian Beeson* Community Information Systems Centre, Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, University of the West of England, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK Received 30 April 2001; revised 28 January 2002; accepted 15 March 2002

Abstract An approach is developed to building information systems whose purpose is to express (rather than regulate) the life of a community group. The story of a community group, as understood and told by its members, is taken as the basis for building a computer system which reflects the life of the community. Development of the system is seen as an open-ended process of discovery, collaboration and experiential learning. Engagement with the technology is understood as a ‘tactical’ practice on the part of the users. A fieldwork exercise conducted along these lines with one community group, in which the group used hypermedia technology to make a shared story, is described. Aspects of process and form in story making on a computer, in this project and more generally, are discussed. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Variety; Story; Hypermedia; Community; Collage

1. Summary Now that information technology is cheap, powerful, and plentiful, and now moreover that it has escaped the confines of formal organizations into the home and into society at large, new kinds of interactions are developing between computer systems and their users. While information systems in formal organizations have normally been used to rationalize or control operations, it is now also possible to build systems, which allow the variety of users’ experience and imagination to be expressed. An approach to developing information systems for community groups is suggested which seeks to support expressive variety by giving a central place to story. The approach is developed from Ricoeur’s account of the connections between * Tel.: þ44-117-344-3165; fax: þ44-117-344-3155. E-mail address: [email protected] (I. Beeson). 0953-5438/02/$ - see front matter q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 9 5 3 - 5 4 3 8 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 2 0 - 6

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imagination, narrative, and community action. What starts in the imagination of individuals is focused through stories and similar means towards community projects. The story of a community group must be told by the group itself. If a group is willing to try to tell a story on a computer, it may need help to do so, but that help must not become directive or editorial in nature. For a community group, telling a story on a computer is likely to involve an encounter with an unfamiliar technology. Certeau’s account of users’ practice in alien territory is used to prepare for an entry into a community group to assist in a story-telling project. The research project True Stories is introduced. In this, we are investigating how community groups might (and, in fact, do) use hypermedia technology to tell their own story. We believe this technology, which allows combination of different media (text, sound, pictures) and an arbitrary interconnection of elements to form ‘hypertexts’, has properties rich enough to support the construction of a community’s story. The main piece of fieldwork in True Stories so far, with the St Paul’s Carnival Association in Bristol, is described, and observations from it are presented and discussed. Some of the points emerging from the discussion are: † Setting up a story-telling project with a community group is hard and takes time. It is essential that a core group forms within the community to give the project momentum and continuity. † It is also hard to get the facilitator’s role established. Too much reliance is at first put on the facilitator, and it takes time to arrive at a working practice close to the ideal of ‘coproduction’. † A community group can make a story using this technology, and provide all its key form and content. Different contributions can be combined and different voices heard. No editorial control is required other than that agreed by the collaborators themselves. † There is some tension between making a product from such a project (e.g. a CD-ROM) and carrying the project forward as a continuing mirror to the community. † The form of a story emerging from a group, and using this technology, is more similar to a collage than to a linear narrative. Whether such stories are sufficiently coherent to serve as a basis for uniting and mobilizing a community group (or a community) remains an open question.

2. Variety The discipline of information systems has inherited from cybernetics and general systems theory a conceptual framework in which notions of regulation, control, balance, system and boundary occupy a central place. In particular, an open system (such as a business organization) is held to maintain itself in balance with its environment through a process of regulation which depends upon comparing actual states of the system and environment with desired states, and acting to reduce any discrepancy. For this to be possible, the regulator must be able to detect relevant changes of state: to the variety of relevant states in the system and its environment there must correspond sufficient variety in the regulator itself, for it to be capable of responding. Beer reformulates Ashby’s earlier

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‘Law of Requisite Variety’ (Ashby, 1956; p. 207) as his own First Principle of Organization, namely that ‘only variety can absorb variety’. According to him, “Managerial, operational and environmental varieties, diffusing through an institutional system, tend to equate; they should be designed to do so with minimal damage to people and to cost”. (Beer, 1985; p. 30). Beer defines variety as a measure of complexity which counts the number of possible states in a system. He asserts that high variety is necessarily cut down (or attenuated) to the number of possible states that the receiving entity can actually handle (Beer, 1985; pp. 22– 23); and that low variety is necessarily enhanced (or amplified) to the number of possible states that the receiving entity needs if it is to remain regulated (Beer, 1985; p. 27). Building on this foundation, systems analysis has produced methods and practices for rationalizing organizational complexity and controlling variety through rules and programs. Information systems created in this way have often yielded significant organizational benefits, particularly in terms of efficiency, and will continue to do so. However, in contemporary circumstances, where information technology is a cheap and plentiful resource, and where applications have spread beyond the original military, governmental and commercial domains—as well as beyond organizational boundaries—it may be that the need for regulation and the need to balance or control variety is not always so strong. Now that the technology has ‘escaped’ into the community at large, the boundary between a system and its environment is less sharp than it is with a formal organization. Perhaps there are uses where variety does not have to be measured, managed, handled or designed at all. Could variety be understood, not as something finite, but as something which could be amplified indefinitely? Might it not be possible to make computer systems which, instead of following the logic of a limited, rationed, ‘requisite’ variety, reflected the actual variety and richness of users’ experience—to a degree of elaboration determined by the users themselves, within the limits only of their own engagement with the technology? The technology now appears sufficiently powerful and accessible for diverse communities of users, through their own skill and enthusiasm, to build applications which measure up to and reflect the exquisite variety of their lives. The suggestions made long ago by pioneers such as Engelbart (1988) and Kay and Goldberg (1977) that computer systems could be built which would enhance or augment the intelligence or creativity of the users, instead of limiting or controlling them, are now realizable. This possibility is more easily explored in, and perhaps more relevant to, looser contexts of use than found in formal organizations, which tend by their nature to be relatively highly rationalized and regulated. In a community group, or some other more voluntary association of people, the idea of using information technology to mirror the community’s life rather than to rationalize it, might seem more appealing. The technology to support such uses is becoming available. With the arrival of inexpensive multimedia systems, images, sound and animation can be integrated into texts. Furthermore, it is possible to create hypertexts with multiple threads running through them, so that texts can be produced which do not have to be linear, nor even finite, and can include many voices and styles. By integrating different media and supporting multiple voices, this technology appears to open up new avenues of self-expression and collaborative creativity. Here is a technology which looks to be of great potential use to community groups.

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Established methods of systems analysis and design, however, are not an ideal basis for bringing this technology into community groups. Our purpose here is not to render the work of an organization more efficient. It is not therefore appropriate to proceed by a functional analysis which extracts the essential logic of the work and then produces a design for automating, controlling, or supporting the flow of work. Our purpose is rather to express the work or life of a community of people, to reflect it in its particular detail back to the community, and leave it to the community to choose how to regard and work from that reflection. An approach to this which looks promising can be developed from Ricoeur’s account of the role of narrative in community life.

3. Rendering community through story Ricoeur develops a theory which makes a link from the work of the individual imagination through to practical collective action in society. Starting from a presentation of metaphor as involving semantic innovation, he sees new meaning emerging as the logical distance between normally remote semantic fields temporarily falls away. The individual imagination, engaging in a free play of possibilities momentarily away from the world of perception and action, organizes and schematizes metaphorical attribution, so providing the basis for a redescription of the world. Such a redescription is essentially a fiction, but a fiction which unfolds new dimensions of reality, and takes us towards new understandings and new possibilities (Ricoeur, 1994; p. 124). These fictions, which include poems and stories, can in fact transcend factual descriptions by getting to the essence of action. By the use of narrative techniques appreciated in a community of listeners, a storyteller can remake reality in a richer vein. In their telling and retelling, stories have the capacity to reflect, unite, and mobilize a community. Ricoeur continues by suggesting a move from narrative play to pragmatic play, which also involves moves from description to projection, and from past to future. This shift occurs whenever an actor borrows a story’s structuring capacity to form a project. Ricoeur sketches a progression from schematization of projects to the articulation of possible actions: There is thus a progression starting from the simple schematization of projects to the articulation of my projects, leading through the figurability of my desires, and ending in the imaginative variations of “I can”. (Ricoeur, 1991; p. 178). To move beyond individuals’ plans of action to intersubjective action, Ricoeur uses Schutz’s analysis of relations with contemporaries, predecessors and successors, simultaneously to embed the individual in the field of historical experience and to achieve the imaginative transfers characteristic of empathy (from me to you, us to them, here to there) (Schutz and Luckmann, 1974). In his examination of the more general imaginative practices that constitute the social imagination, Ricoeur singles out two opposed but interlocking practices for further analysis: ideology and utopia. The prime function of ideology is to integrate, recollect and reaffirm a society, and to legitimate a social order, though in its pathological form it can bring distortion, dissimulation and

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social stagnation. Utopia, on the other hand, has a subversive, challenging function, which can bring about social renewal but might raise impossible hopes or create schism. Ideology confirms the past, and utopia opens towards the future; the two are bound together in an irreducible tension and become pathological if separated. Ricoeur’s analysis of the condensing and mobilizing potential of narrative shows how actions can be projected out of descriptions and stories into the historical experience of a community, where they can become the basis for a remaking of the community. Although in ordinary usage, the word story has often a connotation of untruth, in the sense of story we want to pursue, a story ought rather to be true, or at least true enough to gain sufficient assent in the community to be credible and to provide a basis for realistic action. This fits with Ricoeur’s observation that: The domain of action is from an ontological perspective that of changing things and from an epistemological perspective that of verisimilitude, in the sense of what is plausible and probable. (Ricoeur, 1991; p. 199). Story, then, looks like a possible new base from which to approach the life and work of a community. Might it be possible to use computer systems to do imaginative work of the kind described in Ricoeur’s analysis, and to schematize invention in the direction of action? Current hypermedia technology does appear to allow the construction and sharing of rich narratives or stories and even the maintenance of multiple perspectives within a narrative. Such narratives can perhaps concentrate a community’s understanding and evaluation of itself, and give a community a resource from which to project future actions. Moreover, because the stories are stored on the computer, the community gains a cumulative repository which it can use to develop its larger imaginative practices. To reflect the life of the community fully, these stories must be the product of community members, not of a software designer (nor indeed of an artistic director or editor), and be built alongside and in parallel with the community’s action in the world. To frame a practical project for introducing into a community group a computer system which it might be able to use to make its story with, a different tack is needed from the usual model of technological intervention. A reductionist methodology and a rationalizing objective will not be adequate—not even if the participation of community members is invited. The task is not to introduce a technical support system for existing community activity, but rather to see what kind of stories can be told by community members with the technology. Stories not previously told or considered may emerge in the course of the project. New kinds of story might be tellable with this technology, or in the particular context of this project. If the introduction of this new technology is a new departure for the community in question, both the technology and an analyst or researcher that comes with it are likely to be experienced as intrusions into the community’s life (and story). The technology must not be allowed to dominate the life of the community but must as far as possible be absorbed into it. If a human agent accompanies the technology, that person must strive to facilitate the process of absorption, not direct it. To understand the reaction a community is likely to have to a technological intervention, so that something can be done to temper it to the community’s advantage, we now turn to Certeau’s analysis of users’ practice for assistance.

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4. Tactical engagement with technology Certeau is engaged in a continuing investigation of ‘…the ways in which users— commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules—operate’ (Certeau, 1984; p. xi). He calls attention to the need to determine the use made by groups or individuals, in their everyday lives, and within their ‘behaviour’, of the representations and productions made available in the society around them: For example, the analysis of the images broadcast by television (representation) and of the time spent watching television (behaviour) should be complemented by a study of what the cultural consumer ‘makes’ or ‘does’ during this time and with these images. The same goes for the use of urban space, the products purchased in the supermarket, the stories and legends distributed by the newspapers, and so on.The ‘making’ in question is a production, a poiesis—but a hidden one, because it is scattered over areas defined and occupied by systems of ‘production’ (television, urban development, commerce, etc.), and because the steadily increasing expansion of these systems no longer leaves ‘consumers’ any place in which they can indicate what they make or do with the products of these systems. To a rationalized, expansionist and at the same time centralized, clamorous, and spectacular production corresponds another production, called ‘consumption’. The latter is devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly, because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order. (Certeau, 1984; p. xii). Applied in our area of interest, Certeau’s analysis supports the idea that the use of a new technology (by people who did not invent it) should be studied as a production, an emergent process of making and doing. It also sheds light on the problematic nature of participation in the system development process: users’ involvement in the rationalized, spectacular production conducted under a project plan and a methodology is informal, tentative, and obscure. Certeau uses the terms strategy and tactics to distinguish between the respective situations and possibilities of system owners and users (Certeau, 1984; pp. 35 –37). A group with sufficient will and power to establish and hold a base for its operations can produce a strategy for maintaining its boundary, rationalizing its operations, and reproducing itself. Users, on the other hand, operating in a space which is not their own, can only produce tactics—isolated and opportunistic actions conducted ad hoc against the background of a dominant strategy. This useful distinction gives us insight both into relations between the relatively powerful and the relatively powerless, and into the logic of users’ practice. For Certeau there is always a possibility of a person achieving a measure of understanding and control, even of apparently monolithic apparatuses. Some tactical move, some act of subversion or resistance, will be possible. He uses the term ‘poaching’ to cover a range of marginal practices which we can use to enter another’s territory and take something for our gain. When we are confronted with a text or a procedure which we are unwilling or unable to comply with, he points to a number of ruses we can use to

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accommodate it or turn it to our advantage. For instance, we can maintain personal distance from the text or procedure and refuse to identify with it; or we can ‘re-employ’ elements of the text to make meanings other than those intended, or insinuate supplementary elements into it; or we can read the whole text or procedure metaphorically (for Certeau as for Ricoeur, metaphor lies at the heart of practice). One of the alienating aspects of living tactically may be that truth is seen to belong to others—to the dominant party. The more we move from consuming stories to making them, the more we move from a tactical towards a strategic position. As we move in that direction, we may be also moving in the direction of truth, since the need to dissemble diminishes. We should furthermore resist, Certeau advises (160), the notion that the true meaning of a story is unknown to the tellers and only available to certain skilled others (he calls this ‘folklorization’); if stories become objects for collectors, archivists, analysts and producers, the vital link in the community between imagination and action may be cut. Certeau’s analysis alerts us to the likelihood that users who feel themselves to be in someone else’s world when working with technology, will operate ‘tactically’. We should not expect particularly concerted or coherent efforts, but rather a patchwork of attempts, experiments, and withdrawals. The general mode of operation will not be design. At the beginning of an engagement with a daunting new technology, community members will be confronted with ‘unreadable writings’ on the screens, in the tutorial files, help systems, and manuals, and in the spoken advice of other people trying to help. If they persevere, they will by tactical operations begin to ‘colonize’ the system and make something of their own in it. What we might hope and look for is that the members of a community group, through the making of their own story, could evince a sense of ownership of their work and their situation, and so eventually proceed to ‘strategic’ engagement with the technology. If they are successful enough in this work to achieve a measure of strategic control of their own story, they can in turn make their own ‘unreadable writing’—that is to say, a realization of their story which is embedded in their own broader action and resistant to analytic reduction (folklorization), but is nevertheless open to interpretation by interested others also prepared to put in tactical effort. The subversive element in Certeau can be conjoined with Ricoeur’s view of the mobilizing potential of story for community to produce an argument in favour of pluralism. Lyotard advances an argument for a multiplicity of narratives—to undermine the dominance of powerful homogeneous stories. He welcomes the multiplication of little narratives (and the demise of grand narratives) in our ‘post-modern’ situation, because he sees justice as being achieved not by any grand system of rules, but by preserving each person’s power to deploy their narrative imagination. Left to themselves, the little narratives of different social groups and movements will resist absorption into any grand history, and will refer beyond themselves not to any more inclusive narrative, but to other little narratives (Lyotard, 1977; p. 34 quoted in Kearney, 1991; pp. 199 –200). Here then is a tactical slant on story. It fits well with the possibility of building multiple narratives in a hypermedia system. The set of narratives, as well as each of the individual narratives, constructed as hypertexts, will be naturally non-linear in form and have multiple threads running through them. This is a platform for a story with many voices—or for many stories, with links and echoes between them.

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5. Making a community story on a computer Whether and how community groups could use emergent hypermedia formations of information technology as a vehicle for developing together their community’s story is a question under investigation in our research project called True Stories. From the preceding analysis, we have taken into this project the idea from Ricoeur that story can provide a basis for community action, and an expectation—following Certeau—that a community group confronted with an unfamiliar technology will engage with it tactically. These insights give us as researchers a basis for a cautious and modest intervention. We want to find out what groups will do when presented with an opportunity to make their story on a computer. We avoid preconceptions about what constitutes a community group—or, indeed, what constitutes a story. We leave ‘community (group)’ broadly and loosely defined as a self-declaring body of people sharing a common interest or identity, and leave it to such a community to decide what counts as a story for them. We looked for partners among community organizations who would be interested in trying to tell their story with a hypermedia system. We would provide the initial system, and a facilitator, but they would have to commit themselves to learning the technology and trying to tell their story with it. This project has been described in more detail and at various stages in other publications (Beeson and Miskelly, 1998a –c, 2000). Our main piece of fieldwork within the project so far has been with a community organization in Bristol (UK) called the St Paul’s Carnival Association. The Association organizes an annual carnival in the St Paul’s area of Bristol. A local festival was established in 1967, primarily by a local vicar, in response to racial tensions. It has gradually been appropriated by the local Afro-Caribbean community, officially changing to a carnival in 1991. It has also become more formalized, with a paid full-time coordinator and funding for educational activities. The Association relies on student placements and volunteers to raise funds, and to plan and run the carnival day and events leading up to it. It is managed by a committee made up of local people. The focus is the annual carnival: two months of school based mas camps preparing the procession; and 2 weeks of cultural and sports events, leading up to Carnival Day in July, which attracts about 35,000 visitors. Because the Association wanted to have more yearround activities and were interested in exploring new media as one aspect of carnival events and workshops, it seemed appropriate to them to work with us in using hypermedia to tell the story of the St Paul’s Carnival. The remainder of this article is devoted to bringing out some salient aspects of the project and our findings so far from it, in order to be able to comment on the possibility that certain uses of computer technology might indeed do justice to the ‘exquisite variety’ of community life. The comments relate particularly to the main piece of fieldwork (St Paul’s Carnival). The aspects concentrated on are: 1. 2. 3. 4.

selection, location and use of equipment; working with community partners; the process of making the story; shape and texture of the emerging story.

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5.1. Selection, location and use of equipment The research orientation described above helped us decide what equipment to introduce to the story makers, and how to introduce it. We needed to have a system with sufficient power and versatility to support hypermedia work and a rich notion of story; but we did not want a system so complicated or expensive that it would provoke a negative tactical response. We wanted, if it were possible to achieve, a technological setup that was reasonably easy to use without extensive external assistance, and that would not overly limit, drive or distort the story that the users wanted to tell. We decided we would take the computer equipment to the community group and not bring the group to the equipment, so that the machinery would be in the community’s ‘territory’. We chose a mid-range multimedia PC of standard configuration., running under Windows. It came with speakers and built-in microphone, colour graphics display, a builtin photo scanner, and a CD-ROM drive and printer. We did not provide in the initial setup video input, an A4 scanner, or a CD writer. The main software packages we installed were the Adobe Photoshop image editor and the Macromedia Director authoring tool (see, for example, Weinmann and Lourekas, 1997, for Photoshop; and Allis et al., 1996, for Director ). At the time of the fieldwork, the Association already had a PC it used for ordinary office applications, but it was not connected to the Internet. If we were doing the work now we would probably also make use of web authoring tools (although we have some reservations about the use of the Internet for local project work). Photoshop is a powerful tool for manipulating pixel data in photographic images, but can only play a limited role within the overall process of putting together a story. Director, on the other hand, combines an authoring system capable of handling animation with a scripting language (Lingo), and so provides a full multimedia programming environment. Director works with a theatrical or film metaphor. It is used to create interactive ‘movies’ which consist of a sequence of frames, where each frame contains elements called ‘cast members’, which are rendered and composed frame by frame as the movie is played back. The layout and timing of all Director movie elements are specified in a two-dimensional grid structure called a score. Each frame is represented by a column of cells in the score, while rows of cells represent channels flowing forward in time from left to right. There are various kinds of channel—tempo, palette, transition, sound, script, and animation. The movie player interprets the score frame by frame, rendering the animation cells, and performing the actions specified in the other channels. Images are displayed in a ‘stage’ window (Gibbs and Tsichritzis, 1995; pp. 142 –145). These software packages are designed for professional users, and we had a concern that the powerful facilities and metaphors in them would be difficult to master (within and between packages), and might influence the shape and feel of an emerging story. Gibbs and Tsichritzis cite the presence of several competing metaphors in multimedia tools (they list document, movie, web, script, circuit ) as one factor blocking the emergence of a general multimedia programming environment which will support open combination and composition of diverse media (Gibbs and Tsichritzis, 1995; pp. 252– 255). It might have been more consistent of us to have opted for simpler, more restricted packages and pushed them to the limit before moving on to heavier software. We might indeed go that way in future fieldwork. In this case, we hoped that the powerful packages

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could be introduced gradually from the beginning, with the help of a few modest examples and at a pace governed by the users’ learning. This approach, as it turned out, worked quite well. The majority of participants had little or no experience of computers, and none had experience of the packages we were using. Only a few had a concept of what hypermedia was and in those cases it came from viewing CD-ROMs or using the World Wide Web. A great deal of one-to-one work between facilitator and individual participant was required to get people on to the system. Participants had to be ready and able to invest significant amounts of time into learning how to negotiate the Windows platform and the new software, and then into managing the file space and manipulating images in (and between) Photoshop and Director. Some participants persevered sufficiently to be able to make creative use of the software packages without assistance. The significant learning requirement impeded participation. Not everyone who might want to contribute to the story, or had something to offer, had the time or inclination to engage fully in making it on the machine. The PC platform itself impedes collaboration between learners and story makers—simply because only a couple of people can work at the machine at one time. Having to learn and follow exact procedures for creating story elements and manipulating images was seen by everyone as a block to creative engagement. Nevertheless, participants found ways round their difficulties. They developed small repertoires of procedures which worked for them and which they could use repeatedly. People who had not learned the software themselves could give photos or pieces of writing to someone else to add to the story, or could offer themselves for interview. Of the two main software packages used, Director proved particularly useful, partly because it is itself geared towards story. The fact that it can incorporate several media is important for a carnival story. It was possible to use a subset of the package, so avoiding having to deal with the more complicated scripting aspects. On the other hand, some of the design features of the package appeared to impede the creation of the story. For example, although Director supports both linear time-based material and hypertext nodes and links (and combinations of the two), all material has to be constructed and represented through the score window. While different nodes can be placed in different frames and connected by hypertext links using Lingo (the scripting language), these linked sections can only be plotted consecutively. The non-linear aspects of the story are thus subordinated to the linearity of the score. And since Director (unlike hypertext packages such as StorySpace ) has no provision for a map or overview of the nodes and links created, the structure of the hypertext being created is not readily visible. This makes collaborative construction of a hypertext difficult, at least on screen. 5.2. Working with community partners What model of participation is appropriate for this kind of project? The clear intention is for the ‘users’ to develop their story. The researcher’s role is not to direct the project but to facilitate it and provide some assistance and continuity. It would be detrimental to a project of this kind for the researcher/facilitator to act as an expert, either at the technical or the aesthetic level, since the work is essentially the community’s, and external direction

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would either distort the story or provoke a tactical withdrawal by the group members. The role needed here, it seemed to us, was one which combined participant observation with technical guidance when requested. The kind of relationship between researcher and community members, we were looking for is akin to that proposed by Freire, in his dialogical model of adult literacy education in Brazil. Freire advocates a problem-posing education based on exploring the context in which the students live—a learning process which ‘consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information’ (Freire, 1993; p. 60). This requires that the ‘teacher is no longer merely the one-who-teaches but one who himself is taught in dialogue with the students’ (Freire, 1993; p. 61). Freire’s concept implies joint responsibility and ownership for the educational process. Knowledge is developed through the process, in ‘a constant unveiling of reality’ (Freire, 1993; p. 62). In an echo of Certeau, there are no ‘consumers’ here, who may read a story and pass on, but only a community of co-producers. All the participants (including the teachers) have to become ‘partners in naming the world’ (Freire, 1993; pp. 69– 71). The initial role of the researcher/facilitator, as we saw it, would be to encourage participants to focus on their story, before they began their engagement with the technology. We wanted a group to form which would be conscious of, and committed to, the story it had to tell. When the group had gained sufficient momentum to move to making the story on the computer, the researcher/facilitator would be on hand to provide technical assistance and help the group avoid technological pitfalls. In due course, the researcher would become a co-producer of the community’s emerging story. In the St Paul’s project, things did not work out exactly this way. A first point to make here is the difficulty we had in finding a community group to work with. We tried several possible partners before finding the St Paul’s group. Some of the other groups might have agreed to participate in a project using video or photography, but were unclear about what a hypermedia story might be, or were nervous of the technology. Another problem we had was in disabusing groups of the idea that our project was about transferring IT skills through training. When we did eventually establish a partnership with the St Paul’s Carnival Association, we then encountered difficulties in forming and sustaining a group within the Association to take the project forward. It took 3 months (from a 7-month project) to establish a core group of contributors. Part of the problem here was one common in community groups— lack of time and resources, reliance on part-time workers and volunteers, and high staff turnover. In this particular case, the seasonal focus of the Association (around the Carnival) makes matters worse, from the point of view of continuity. Although the Carnival Coordinator is employed all year round to plan and fund-raise for the Carnival, most volunteers and committee members only get involved with the Association in the run up to the event itself. We were keen to form a core group to take the project forward. A number of people expressed an interest in the project but were unable to make any regular commitment to a more involved role. The Coordinator took a lead role in getting the project off the ground and started making his contribution early, but he found it difficult to set up a group. Some who said they wanted to be involved in a core group failed to show up to meetings. Eventually, as the project progressed, a core of participants did evolve, three of whom met regularly to discuss the story, while others who were unable to attend these meetings came

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in at other times to add to the story. As we had hoped, once a core group existed, the whole process became more focused, as the group began to provide the continuity the project needed. Another drag factor was the reluctance of the contributors to do any planning or any work on their story before the equipment was installed. Whatever we said or thought about getting into the story before the equipment arrived, the view was taken that the story was an activity to be done on the computer. The Coordinator said that the project would take off when people could see the equipment. Certainly not much progress was made before that point. The slowness and difficulties in establishing a group and in starting work on the story led to the facilitator’s taking on a more central role than intended. Instead of providing technical support and suggesting starting points for thinking about the story, it was the facilitator, not any core group, that provided such continuity as there was in the project in its early stages. Because they were unsure about the equipment (but saw it as central), and were also unsure about what a story about the Carnival should be like, to be interesting, the contributors looked to the researcher/facilitator not only for technical expertize and instruction but also for advice on what should be in the story and what would be the best way to say it. This unlooked for pivotal position was hard to escape from. Eventually, however, as the extent and diversity of contributions increased, participants began to exercise ownership of the material and control of the equipment. As elements of the story were created, and were linked together, a reflection of the community’s complexity and flexibility began to manifest itself in the story. Because it could now be seen and altered, and because the process was cumulative, a momentum was created whereby the community projected itself through (and into) the story it was making. The researcher/facilitator could then move towards the more comfortable role of co-producer. 5.3. The process of making the story The normal producer – consumer relation between analyst and user does not hold when we shift to a model of facilitation and co-production. Nor can we rely on the framework of the IS development cycle or the tools of IT project management to structure this kind of project—which is essentially a voyage of discovery, expression, and learning. There may be no end product in such a project, or even no definable end to the project itself. If the objective is to use a hypermedia system to tell the story of a community group, the story will emerge in the process of trying to tell it on a machine. It is partly told by making an application on the computer. The story and the application are not designed first and realized later, but rather produced in the telling and making, though there may be elements of design within the wider effort. The aim of this kind of project is not to design an artefact with specific functions, but to create an expression of the life of the community. A product, if there is one, will be seen as provisional, as one of a succession of interim products. The various contributions to the emerging story will come from different authors, and may be pieced together only loosely. For specific elements of the story, or to solve particular problems that arise, activity we would recognize as design may indeed occur—but within a broader, less formal creative endeavour of discovery and expression.

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In the St Paul’s project, there was a shared development of the story as the core group supplied a collaborative lead and as other contributors were drawn into the work. Contributors with more clearly defined roles in the Association—such as the Coordinator and the Emergency Planner—thought through what they wanted to say from what was already a clear position in the Association. They did some pre-planning of their parts of the story, and gained an initial understanding of the technology, before they tried to build the story on the machine. This puts them in a position to use the software with some confidence. Contributors with less defined roles took a more improvizational or tactical approach, experimenting with the technology and trying things out while they looked around for what it was they wanted to tell. Some of them became involved with the technology by helping others make elements of their story on the computer, or became drawn into the story by seeing what others were doing or by coming across materials that interested them in the office, or in the archives. Marginal contributors moved towards the centre of the process as their own sense of purpose and of a personal connection to the emerging story developed. An important part of the story making process occurred off the computer, in the drawing of diagrams and charts on paper. Contributors used this means to plan or record their work. Some of the diagrams were posted on the office walls, where—as well as helping bring together the various understandings of the story makers—they served to interest and attract less involved members of the Association. The diagrams helped participants see the overall form and the gaps in their story. They provided a good basis for collaborative working, making up for the restricted space round the PC and the limited interface of the software. An early sense of an overview of the Carnival story came from the Coordinator, who came up with the idea of representing the whole of Carnival as an island which would serve as an organizing principle for the whole story. He wanted to think of Carnival as place through which you could travel. The idea appealed to other participants, partly because of the reference to Caribbean islands and also to the St Paul’s area itself, an African –Caribbean ‘island’ within Bristol. The Coordinator drew a rough map of the island (on paper), writing on it text abbreviations for different aspects of carnival. He referred to this as a dictionary or encyclopaedia of the Carnival. Other people fed into and developed this initial idea. Another participant translated his map into a drawing of an island on the computer, with animated waves surrounding it, and with icons created from photos of Carnival replacing the original text annotations (Fig. 1). The island map became a central focus for the developing story. An early indication of this was when printouts of the island map (from the computer) began to be stuck on the wall beside the earlier maps, and to be referred to instead of the originals. It also became (at the facilitator’s suggestion) the centrepiece for the evolving Director application. Subsequent development of the story revolved around the island map, which was added to and altered as discussions around it and about individual work took the story forward. What had started as an organizing metaphor for a community event had become a framework both for the process of telling the story and for the structure of the associated application (and its interface) (Fig. 2). Icons were added to the island map on the computer to make connections to story elements about various aspects of the Carnival: a child and an inflatable for the children’s

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Fig. 1. The island interface.

Fig. 2. The map on the wall: the island interface as a focus for discussion and development.

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activities; a girl in costume for the mas camps and procession; a filing cabinet for planning and administration; a trophy for sports. Various icons were used at different times for music and food. A policeman’s helmet was at one time used to point to security/policing material. This was somewhat contentious. The helmet was first moved to a less prominent position on the island and eventually replaced altogether by a snowman icon leading to material on ‘Carnival in Winter’. Different people produced the various story elements— in mixed media—but all were organized within the island metaphor and interface. It was mentioned earlier in this paper that the software packages being used in the St Paul’s project embodied specific metaphors built into their interfaces and modes of operation. Community members, on the other hand, do not in general bring a ready-made and coherent set of metaphors of story and community which they can simply apply to the story making; rather they draw individually and collectively on a diverse and heterogeneous range of metaphors present in their own experience or in the general cultural background. While the system’s metaphors are blatant and fixed, the users’ are obscure and extemporized. What comes out of this clash of metaphors, and how it affects the shape and texture of the emerging story, is difficult to chart precisely. Although at first glance it might be expected that the strong metaphors in the software will shape the story unduly, the users, especially as they gain confidence, can (by ‘poaching’) appropriate the software metaphors and refashion them to serve their story. One particular area of difficulty arises with the representation of time in cumulative multilinear structures. This has partly to do with specific limitations in the handling of nonlinear hypertext structures in Director, but may apply more generally. It was not obvious in the St Paul’s application how to construct a clear representation of past, present and future in the story of the Carnival. An initial idea was to divide the island spatially into three layers, but this did not work, because there was no consistent way of separating past, present and future in the various story elements, and because the production of the story itself was moving through time. There clearly is a problem in combining time-based elements (e.g. video clips) and non-time-based elements (e.g. pieces of text), especially when the software enforces a dominant linear metaphor. But perhaps more importantly, it is not possible to fix in time a story, which is created to be indefinitely extensible. One creation which did break free of temporal constraints in the St Paul’s application was the ‘wormhole’—a spinning spiral icon at the centre of the island which, when selected, took the user through a tunnel to a random destination in the past or present or future of the Carnival. One product of the St Paul’s project was a CD-ROM of the story of the Carnival, which was produced in time for use at the 1998 Carnival (immediately following the fieldwork). It seemed simpler to think of the Story of St Paul’s Carnival from the vantage point of 1998 than of the story in general. This difficulty in handling time in a cumulative multilinear work may also be at the root of the reticence of participants to build comprehensive links across the story elements (below the top level interface). It could be that this reticence was due to difficulties in conceptualizing and building such links within the constraints of the software package. But it may also be that the endlessness and multilinearity of this form of story works against pulling ideas and materials together. The island glues the elements together at the top level, but below that it may be easier just to keep on adding in new pieces than to try to make a coherent structure. If this is so, it raises a question about

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whether a story of fragments can catalyse community action in the way Ricoeur says a (coherent) story can. This is an important area for further research and thought. 5.4. Shape and texture of the emerging story Hypermedia technology, because it can accommodate multiple texts (which may have different authors), and multiple paths through a collection of texts, offers a possible platform on which members of a community can tell all or many of their stories in an accessible and extensible manner. Hypermedia productions, unlike book or video productions, where—even in participatory community based contexts—linearity of form creates a push towards a unified coherent whole, do not naturally converge towards a finished version; rather, a cumulative process is set in train not only for adding new work but also for continually revising what has already been produced. A hypermedia system liberates the storyteller by enabling new ways of making connections and new ways of using shared conventions and themes; it also removes the necessity of achieving unity of time, space and action. The same story can be told in different ways, and many stories can be told at the same time, and connected to one another. Complementary stories can be linked together, but so can oppositional or contradictory stories. Because there is no need for a finished version, and because it is possible to make many voices heard, there is no need to cede control to an editor, no need to silence any of the voices, and no need to impose a harmonization not already achieved by the speakers/tellers. Is this too much freedom, though? Does it bring too much variety? In the St Paul’s Carnival Association project, the story that came out was to some extent historical, tracing the history of the Carnival partly through its successive programmes, but was more importantly thematic, covering music, food, stalls, processions and other typical Carnival subjects. The various parts of the story were by and largely created by different individuals working mainly separately. The parts of the story were not subjected to editing or stylistic control except by the individual authors, though the whole story was organized within an overriding metaphor of an island, proposed by one of the group and adopted by all. A story with multiple authors and with many ways to navigate through the material was in fact thus made, as had been hoped. It made use of pictures and sound as well as text, and was extensible. And it exhibited sufficient coherence to be producible and readable by others (in the CD-ROM version) as a single story, though it was clearly a story with a range of voices in it. It exhibited the kind of coherence you might get in an edited collection of articles, but, in this case, instead of an editor providing shape after the event, the participants agreed on the core metaphor, the top level interface and other matters, during the course of making the story. Even when the group made its CD-ROM, no contribution was edited out of this story. The CD-ROM holds an ambivalent position in the project. On one hand, it shows that a community group, largely by its own efforts, can make a version of its story on the computer, which gives expression to different voices. The story is thus in a sense realized and can be disseminated within and beyond the community. On the other hand, the CDROM, as an uneditable product, marks a finishing point, an end to the project. The story of the community of course moves on, but this artefact of the story recedes in the rear view mirror.

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The coherence achieved in the St Paul’s project came from the collaborative working of the participants (aided by the facilitator). Much of the shape of the story that emerged was determined not on the computer but on the office desks and walls as the group drew and shared their diagrams and maps. As remarked in Section 5.3, it may be that the very multilinearity and endlessness of hypermedia stories will limit their ability to bring a community together and catalyse community action. Perhaps stories that mobilize and unite communities cannot be as loose as these. Perhaps a multiplicity of Lyotardian little stories cannot serve as a good base for community. We are in interesting new territory here, which deserves further exploration. As for the Carnival Association, whether its project continues depends on whether community members can sustain their commitment to it—without a facilitator, and on their own equipment. They could regard their CD-ROM as the successful conclusion of an interesting project, or as an interim product of an ongoing process of co-production in which they continue to mirror their story on the computer. The kinds of stories that are produced with hypermedia technology have characteristics similar to collage (or montage ), as Landow has noted (Landow, 2000). The story elements (nodes) are mixed media creations which can be arbitrarily linked and juxtaposed. Describing hypertext as digital collage, Landow notes the following defining characteristics of digital words and images: (1) virtuality, (2) fluidity, (3) adaptability, (4) openness (or existing without borders), (5) processability, (6) infinite duplicability, (7) capacity for being moved about rapidly, and (8) networkability (Landow, 2000; p. 166). Landow argues that with hypertext, we are able to make connections between texts and between texts and images so easily that we are encouraged to think in terms of connections. He points out that hypertext shares certain characteristics with Cubist collage—juxtaposition, appropriation, assemblage, concatenation, blurring of limits, edges and borders, and blurring of the distinction between border and ground. A hypertext consists of elements which are linked together to bring out common qualities, meanings or relationships, but which at the same time remain as different nodes, and so retain a sense of separation (Landow, 2000; pp. 157 – 159). Likewise, in a community story produced in hypermedia, the possibility is presented of sharing concepts or aspects of a story, while at the same time expressing differences. The ability to add links into a hypertext arbitrarily and without explanation also tends to produce a collage-like quality to a story. Links can be inserted without the author giving a reason; the connection may be metaphorical or obscure. Different readers may interpret the connection differently. The whole hypertext may not have a worked out coherence in the mind of the author(s); it may be a loose and inconclusive accumulation of fragments out of which readers may nevertheless be able to achieve a reading which is coherent enough for them. In a community story, where there are several authors, it may be that the reader, charting a path through the hypertext, moves between contributions from different people without knowing it. Such a blurring of authorship emphasizes the looseness of the form. While this can undermine the consistency or integrity of the work, it also opens up

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the possibility of stories which contain different, even opposing, voices, and which can therefore be said to be stories of the community itself. Seen positively in this light, as a collage, a community story made in hypermedia— despite (or because of) its loose structure and lack of finish—does look like an appropriate vehicle for bringing together little stories and a plurality of voices, in a way which allows a sharing of experience and imagination without undue pressure to conform in content, style or structure.

6. Conclusion An approach to developing computer-based information systems for community groups has been suggested † The story of a community group is taken as the basis for building a computer system. Ricoeur’s analysis of story and community is drawn on. † Certeau’s ideas about users’ practices prepare the ground for a development process within which the story can emerge authentically from the community group, as the group itself learns how to make the story with the technology. † The relationship between community members and researcher/facilitator aspires towards a Freirean model of co-production † Hypermedia systems (combining multimedia and hypertext) are seen as a good platform for the construction of stories on the computer which can be multithreaded and multivoiced. The expectation is that an approach of this kind will allow expression of the richness and diversity (the ‘exquisite variety’) present in the life of community groups. Our research project True Stories, formulated from these ideas, was introduced, and the major piece of fieldwork—with the St Paul’s Carnival Association—was discussed. Some of the observations and questions from that fieldwork, which we are taking forward into further work within True Stories, are as follows. † It was not easy to find a community partner to do this kind of work with. Groups are short of resources and uncertain about the technology. Once a partner was found, it was difficult to establish a core group of participants to define their project and take it forward. † The facilitator role was difficult to establish. Participants were reluctant to start work before the computer arrived, and expected the facilitator to tell them not only how to use the equipment, but what to put into their story. This could be resisted, but it took time and patience to move towards facilitated collaborative working (in the direction of co-production). † PCs are not an ideal platform on which to build community stories. Much of the collaborative work was done off the computer and transferred on to it later. † Hypermedia software packages are complex and hard to learn. Some of the problems experienced in making a community story on a computer come directly from difficulty

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in using the software. Any software package contains presuppositions about use and embodies particular metaphors—but it might be possible to find easier packages of sufficient power. † When a core group was established, and sufficient mastery of the technology has been gained, a story was indeed produced. The story was assembled gradually as people made their individual contribution and agreed how to work them together. It was not subject to much design. The story did reflect different views and aspects of the community’s life, in different voices. The story on the computer reflected (in structure and interface) the degree of cohesiveness achieved by the core group in its collaboration. † The open nature of hypertext/hypermedia and the collage-like nature of the story produced posed some questions. Because the story was not linear, and because there is no natural sense in which a story of this kind is finished, it was difficult to frame the story temporally. Because the story elements were only loosely connected, the story could be experienced as fragmentary. One might say that such stories release too much variety. On the other hand, the open-endedness of the story parallels the openendedness of community life; one might say then that the story is true, but we don’t yet know fully how to read it. † Continuity is difficult to achieve in this kind of work, and can only be sustained if there is an ongoing core group which remains committed to the story project. The production of the CD-ROM for the St Paul’s Carnival in 1998 showed the project had succeeded, but it can also seen as marking the end of it. In our future work in True Stories, as well as confronting some of the questions raised here, we want particularly to explore what happens when the voices in the stories we make oppose one another. If stories made on the computer can help mobilize the life of a community, can they also assist in processes of dialogue and reconciliation?

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