Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities
Our Action Notebook (Chapter 10) is a practitioner-oriented summary of the book that you can download for free. It is couched as an “action notebook” in the sense that it summarizes dozens of practical steps you can take to support your community. With checklists, tables, and questions, it takes you through the steps of stewarding technology and outlines what to keep in mind at each step.
While a summary, this chapter does not follow the order of the book. In the body of the book chapters are introduced in an order that reflects conceptual prerequisites: which concepts need to be introduced first so that the rest of the text makes sense. Here we revisit what we have said, but it an order that approximates better the way in which these ideas can be put into practice:
- Preamble: reflection on the role of tech steward
- Step 1: understanding your community, its characteristics, orientation, and current configuration
- Step 2: providing technology: choosing a strategy, selecting a solution, and planning the change
- Step 3: stewarding technology in use, in the life of the community and at its closing
Of course, the actual work of stewarding technology for community is not quite that linear, but it is still useful to think about it in terms of these steps. For each heading, we provide the reference to the chapter(s) where the material is discussed.
