Social Networking Tools for Knowledge-Based Action Groups

Abstract

Urban bureaucrats are often overburdened, with limited time and little genuine knowledge relating to decisions they must make within their briefs that impact community members. Consequently, bureaucrats often work at what Herbert Simon called the bounds of their rationality. Community groups concerned with particular issues may emerge that have issue-related local knowledge; and probably also the time and effort to share and assemble such knowledge into practical and informative group proposals. This chapter considers knowledge-based roles and dynamics of community groups, looks at revolutionary socio-technical capabilities able to support and extend group aims effectiveness, and presents a template based on social computing technologies to demonstrate how the technology can be deployed. Properly used, the tools can connect bureaucrats with the power to decide and act with the local knowledge and motivation to make rational decisions about allocation of resources, etc. to deal with various kinds of situations. The template developed for this project demonstrates capabilities of the cloud computing tools.

Keywords: Sociotechnical Systems, Community action, networking, knowledge management, computer applications, bounded rationalilty, evolutionary epistemology, autopoiesis, emergence

JEL Classification: D23