Design Challenges in Supporting Distributed Knowledge: An Examination of Organizing Elections

This paper identifies the design challenges for creating collaborative technologies supporting the practices of organizing elections. We ethnographically investigate the distributed nature of knowledge as enacted between heterogeneous groups over the course of three elections in Denmark. We 1) identify fundamental characteristics of elections, 2) provide a comprehensive account of the distributed nature of knowledge in organizing and executing elections, and 3) point to new challenging areas for human-computer interaction (HCI) design supporting distributed collaborative knowledge practices. We found that organizational pattern of elections complicates the embodiment of nomadic knowledge, which is crucial for managing the effective organization of an election. Thus, one of the relevant design challenges is finding out how to support the timely distribution of large amounts of information, while still ensuring it is appropriately divided and delivered to various groups participating in planning and executing elections.