IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 71

management and collective action are developed with
transparency, support for diversity and responsible
engagement, and perceivable impact as primary system
requirements - can help deliver more pro-social and
less pathological socio-technical systems in support of
democratic institutions.

Summary, Conclusions, and Outlook
This paper has considered the advantages of communities in addressing individual and collective action problems, and the trade-off between individual freedoms
and collective interests that is required in return. It has
also discussed a number of pathologies that can perturb communities, in particular stemming from an
asymmetry of power, and then identified three defenses
against them: symmetric and comprehensible transparency; critical and responsible engagement; and perceptible impact of action. However, we then observed that
in socio-technical systems, or "digital communities," the
presence of current technologies could induce new
societal pathologies or magnify existing ones, leading
to a vicious cycle of diminishing responsibility and
accepted disempowerment.
To address this, we suggested that technology should
be (re)engineered so as to progressively move society
away from the vicious cycle and into a more humanistic
cycle, encouraging more diversity, richer knowledge representations, and responsible engagement, from where
collective action can perform incremental adaptations
to perceived pathologies. We have argued that specialpurpose technology that mediates collective action
needs to be specifically designed to ensure stronger
support for the previously identified defense mechanisms: transparency, responsible engagement, and perceptible action impacts. Critically, this needs to be
demanded and supported by a collective awareness in
the system users that they have to actively preserve
their shared values themselves.

Acknowledgment
This paper was partially written in the context of the
Dagstuhl Seminar 15482, "Social Concepts in SelfOrganising Systems." The second author was partially
supported by the Leverhulme Trust, Research Fellowship RF-2016-451.

Author Information
Ada Diaconescu is Assistant Professor (tenured) in the
Department of Computer Science and Networks at Telecom ParisTech, which is part of the Mines-Telecom Institute and of Paris-Saclay University, France.
Jeremy Pitt is Professor of Intelligent and Self-Organising Systems in the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at Imperial College, London, U.K.
SEPTEMBER 2017

∕

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