ABSTRACT
The Technology and Social Action project has represented a further shift in our thinking, away from the structural contexts of social movements or civil society, to a more practice-centred approach. This chapter is concerned with whether the agents of social justice and social change can be characterised as belonging to civil society, distinct from state or market. The main activities of the cluster were a series of workshops bringing together practitioners and researchers in open-ended discussion and design activities aimed at uncovering concerns, priorities and understandings with the hope of developing common ground for research discussions. Such a strongly sociotechnical view of design draws attention to the social and organisational arrangements in which technologies are designed and used. Free/Libre Open-Source Software means that the barriers to entry to making a business in software development are more concerned with technical rather than financial capacity.
