Fostering commonfare. Strategies and tactics in a collaborative project

This paper contributes to the discourse on HCI and political economy, further developing theoretical concepts of strategies and tactics by drawing on the original work of French scholar Michel de Certeau. Strategies and tactics are developed and used as a lens to reflect and understand decisions made throughout an IT design process oriented toward infrastructuring social collaboration among people who are struggling financially. We demonstrate this by presenting the case of Commonfare, an EU funded project, and we focus, in particular, on the relationships between specific research and pilot project consortium partners. We explore decisions and actions that take place over four months between two milestones of the project - the first platform release, and a general assembly.