Understanding the digital city: Conflicting values, community and representation information
Daniel Steinmeier
The digital city (DDS) started in 1994 as the first community platform targeted to the general public in The Netherlands. DDS had as its mission to enable the general public to explore the possibilities of the then-new internet. As stated by the founders the interface was supposed to be user-friendly to such an extent that even people with no computer experience would be able to use it. But looking at the history of DDS, some of these initial values hardly came to fruition because others like innovation were prioritized. The ideological commitments of the founders arguably predetermined which values would win out in practice. In this article I will illustrate how DDS can be analysed as charismatic technology to explain how underlying values influenced the design and how this impacted the community. Understanding how conflicting values, ambiguity and doubt were handled by the management of this early online community is an important lesson for preservation. On a practical level we need to know how to inform our designated community about these conflicting values as available in the representation information on this important UNESCO-heritage collection. What do we want our users to understand about it? At a deeper level we can see parallels between the community of DDS and our own community: the designated community. Lessons learned through analyzing the historical struggles of trying to make the DDS-community more diverse might still be relevant if we aim to understand more about how to apply the concept of the designated community within our own institutions.
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