Exploring the Connection between Digital Communities, Sustainability and Citizen Science

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of the journal will focus on the connection that exists between digital communities, sustainability, and citizen science. The three way relationships between people, places (digital or physical) and means (tools) will be questioned and brought to the forefront.

Digital innovation has recently accelerated rapidly and is constantly creating new avenues of what we can call industrial revolutions through game changing opportunities and capabilities to transform industries, occupations, relationships, and social norms. Diverse communities are brought together by specific common interests, forming virtual groups at an unprecedented rate. This does naturally lead to more inclusive societies. Diversity, advances, and rapid change often from grassroots approaches but can also lead to challenges. These challenges manifest in the form of security, organizational inequality, privacy, scalability, and even politics, to name a few. Harnessing the knowledge of the past and cross-examining state of the art research producing a transparent principles-led approach can lead to responsible, scalable, and sustainable innovation.

Digital culture and communities will be brought to the forefront in this Special Issue. At the heart of the digital transformation is that of representation of the person and the people, their values, and the reasons why we do what we do. Without need or want for creating (Yana Boeva, Peter Troxler. Makers. Handb. Peer Prod., Wiley; 2020, p. 225–37. https://doi.org/10.100/9781119537151.ch17) there is nothing to sustain. We aim to call for work that examines techniques like digitally supported alternative modes of collaboration and commerce for planetary care and custodianship (Kate Raworth. Doughnut economics: seven ways to think like a 21st-century economist. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017). Technology, used within our digital communities, produces methods and tactics supporting community interaction (Chris Speed, Deborah Maxwell. Designing through value constellations. interactions 22.5 (2015): 38–43.) as well as giving our communities tremendous empowerment over traditional and established powerhouses. These empowerments produce disruptive abilities to communities that may influence sustainable trajections (André Betzer, Jan Philipp Harries. If He's Still in, I'm Still in! How Reddit Posts Affect Gamestop Retail Trading. 2021). These types of advances include technologies, methods and tactics to support alternatives to ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Shoshana Zuboff. Surveillance capitalism and the challenge of collective action. New labor forum. Vol. 28. No. 1. Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA, USA, SAGE Publications, 2019). Furthermore, communities that would have otherwise been neglected or powerless can now be ethically sustained by champions acting on their behalf through integration into their own digital communities (Marie Davidová, Shanu Sharma, Dermott McMeel, Fernando Loizides. Co-De|GT: The gamification and tokenization of more-than-human qualities and values. Sustainability 2022, 14, 3787.).

It is because there is considerable uncertainty and lack of direction about what digital innovation means for people’s lives and those of future generations that we invite a Special Issue of the Sustainability journal exploring, through applied and theoretical constructs, the people, the places, and the means by which digital communities interact to create a sustainable future.

Dr. Fernando Loizides
Dr. Marie Davidová
Dr. Dermott McMeel
Dr. Shanu Sharma
Dr. Kathryn Jones
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• citizen engagement
• active participation
• collaboration strategies
• human factors in digital communities
• gamification
• community involvements in tools for good
• ethical issues in digital communities
• security and privacy issues in digital communities
• citizen science methodologies
• advanced technologies for digital collaborations
• user incentivisation