Tensions and trade-offs in community organisations' use of ICTs for 'commoning' during the Covid-19 pandemic.

There is currently a growing interest in PD and CSCW in ‘commoning practices’: the collective creation, management and sustaining of community resources for collective benefit. While the tensions that commoning processes entail are relatively well reported, the trade-offs that community organisations have to make to enable wider access to such resources is still not as well understood. This is particularly the case when resources or community services are accessed through ICTs. To more closely examine such questions of access, we worked with several types of community organisations engaging in commoning practices in one of the most deprived regions of the United Kingdom during the Covid-19 pandemic. Through semi-structured interviews and a participatory workshop, we uncovered how, during Covid-19, such organisations struggled to configure access to community resources in ways that maintained their participatory and inclusive character, while also protecting them from degradation. Additionally, our findings point to the trade-offs that community organisations had to make in selecting the ICTs to use for remote work during the pandemic. While open-source technologies would have been their preferred option as opposed to software from tech companies, which they perceived as ‘unethical’, adopting open-source tools presented additional barriers and ‘costs’, such as the lack of familiarity, the need for training and the lack of staff for configuration, maintenance and support. Such findings prompt us to critically re-examine the processes through which we can scaffold the use of open-source tools in values-driven organisations. This entails both the need to financially support these organisations exploring alternatives to proprietary technologies, and to design technologies that can support an easier transition to open-source adoption.