The Democracy Cube as a Framework for Guiding Participatory Planning for Community-based IT Initiatives

Literature suggests there is a need to build more theoretically-informed understandings of the social processes implicated in participatory IT planning and implementation (Jakku & Thorburn, 2010). In this study, we explore the value of Archon Fung’s (2006) “democracy cube” as a framework for qualitatively examining the process we undertook for planning a community-based IT strategy. Our planning process involved consultations with multiple stakeholder groups across five different communities, as well as from other entities involved in disaster management, with the aim of surfacing factors that shaped local communities’ abilities to participate in disaster management activities. These factors, drawn from qualitative interviews and categorized using a SWOT framework, were subsequently translated into an IT strategy. In this paper, we revisit this process and examine it using Fung’s (2006) three dimensions of democratic participation as a lens: participant selection (our use of multiple stakeholder groups); communication and decision (our consultation process); and authority and power (how participant input drove our strategy). We use the framework to identify the specific practices that made IT planning participative, as well as those that made it nonparticipative. We also use our empirical data to explore ways that the framework can be enhanced.