The labour of communicating publics : participatory platforms, socio-technical intermediaries and pluralistic expertise

Kolorob is a participatory platform connecting informal settlement communities with services and informal jobs in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Alongside technological systems, expertise from community, non-government, private-sector, volunteer and academic fields has been integral to the platform's development. These socio-technical connections and networks, manifest through participatory design, agile software development and collaborative knowledge practices, have become productively entangled in the labour of platform production. We introduce a framework, participatory platform analysis, through which distinct layers" in the form of audiences, intermediaries, interfaces and databases" of this labour can be distinguished and examined. Our analysis draws upon focus group discussions, conducted in Mirpur in 2016 with emergent experts: youth facilitators, field officers and developers. We argue that the interests and tensions of co-designing participatory platforms relating to matters of public concern in South Asian mega-cities are reflective of the rising hybridity of expertise, generated through both institutional training and grass-roots practice, in contemporary urban life. The 'narrative of expertise in the future' compels us to recode knowledge production in the here and now: how we are making participatory platforms, the role of socio-technical expertise and the labour of communicating publics.