(Challenges and opportunities of) documentation practices of self-organised urban initiatives

This chapter discusses the documentation practices of two citizen initiatives in Helsinki and the role of current social media infrastructures and artefact ecologies in supporting them. We point out how social media and other digital technologies are important catalysers in the initial steps of both endeavours, providing seeds for documentation practices to emerge. However, as practices stabilise and more information is accumulated, challenges related to access, effective archiving, reach and reuse, as well as the current business logic of social media platforms, start to appear. The chapter concludes with some implications for social media design and the structuring of participatory design processes, stating that reliance on social media is not enough, and that participatory design, if attuned to the notion of the construction of knowledge commons, offers interesting approaches to support the documentation challenges of self-organised urban initiatives.