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Undone Computer Science

Conviviality for Digital Degrowth

Sophie Quinton et Jean-Bernard Stefani
p. 41-63

Résumés

Nos technologies numériques portent les marques de technologies non conviviales identifiées il y a plus de cinquante ans par Ivan Illich dans son ouvrage fondateur, La Convivialité (1973). Dans un contexte de crises écosystémiques et socio-économiques, la notion de convivialité apparaît non seulement comme une possibilité de critique de la technologie, mais aussi comme un élément clé de prise en compte du numérique dans une stratégie de décroissance. Après avoir montré comment l’analyse d’Illich aide à comprendre les effets négatifs des technologies numériques, nous argumentons en faveur du développement d’une conception conviviale, avec une approche normative et sensible aux valeurs de conception des artefacts et des systèmes numériques. À titre d’exemples, nous mettons en avant deux domaines de recherche en informatique en grand besoin de convivialité: les infrastructures numériques et la gestion des processus métiers.

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Texte intégral

This paper has benefitted from useful discussions within the ADN group at INRIA and LIG. Many thanks in particular to Antoine Hardy for his insightful comments and his help in articulating our ideas.

1 Introduction

  • 1 Illich uses the term “tool” in a very broad sense, similar to that of “technique” in Jacques Ellul’ (...)

1In Tools for Conviviality [1973], Ivan Illich laid down a strikingly prescient analysis of the woes that can plague a technological society and destroy what he called conviviality, that is, “the autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment” [Illich 1973, 24]. He advocated the development of convivial technologies, i.e., technologies consistent with the development of a convivial society, which would “guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favour of another member’s equal freedom” [Illich 1973, 25], and “allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others” [Illich 1973, 33].1

2Illich identified five main systemic threats to conviviality in technologies: (i) biological degradation, which refers to the negative eco-systemic impacts of the development, production and use of a technology; (ii) radical monopoly, which refers to the over-dependence on, and imposition of, the use of a technology, and to the way these in turn over-constrain solutions and human thinking in a problem domain; (iii) polarization, which refers to the imbalances of power created by the deployment and structure of a technology; (iv) over-programming, which refers to excessive specialization, constrained forms of learning and ensuing work alienation induced by a technology, to the detriment of human autonomy and human creativity; (v) obsolescence, which refers to the excessive and engineered rate of obsoleteness of a technology and of the associated human knowledge for its development, use and maintenance.

3For Illich, achieving conviviality in a technology is a balancing act. A convivial technology is one that is respectful of human freedom, autonomy and creativity, but it can cease to be convivial when it exceeds certain thresholds or limits—be that in terms of structure, functionality, usage, material imprint, etc.—, and activates one or several of the above threats. Conviviality can exist in complex technologies such as digital ones (Illich gives the example of the (1970s) telephone system which he deems to be convivial), but understanding their conviviality limits is an open question.

  • 2 It is worth quoting C. Mitcham in his critical analysis of Tools for Conviviality [Mitcham 1991]: “ (...)

4In this paper, we argue that, in spite of the large multi-disciplinary body of work that studies technologies and their transformative social, economical and political effects [Felt, Fouché et al. 2017], and the relative fall into oblivion of the radical critics of science and technology that emerged during the 1960s and the 1970s [Pessis & Angeli Aguiton 2015], Illich’s ideas remain remarkably relevant for a critical analysis of our technical societies and of digital technologies in particular. Firstly, because Illich’s framework provides a coherent and comprehensive grid of analysis of issues, often studied in isolation, which are created by the development, deployment, operation and use of digital technologies in our current societies. Secondly, because Illich’s framework provides an actionable basis for designers and developers to think about the systemic effects their technologies may imply, and the environmental, moral and social debts they may accrue.2 This could be useful in particular for research into the environmental impacts of digital technologies, which largely ignores the systemic dimension of the problem [Ekchajzer, Bornes et al. 2024]. Thirdly, because the conviviality concept could prove a key component for a degrowth strategy and thus help us understand the proper place of digital technologies in a degrowth society.

5Our objective is not to provide concrete answers to conviviality threats, but rather to propose a research agenda both for computer scientists and scholars from the social sciences and humanities, to study further the concept of conviviality and the notion of designing digital systems for conviviality.

6The rest of this paper is organized as follows. First, Section 2 shows in more detail why we find Illich’s analysis useful for understanding the negative effects of digital technologies. As computer scientists, we then propose in Section 3 the development of design for conviviality, a strongly normative value sensitive approach to the design of digital artifacts and systems. In the following sections of the paper, we flesh out a research agenda for designing digital technologies for conviviality. In Section 4, we suggest several directions for tackling key questions underpinning designing for conviviality. First, what is a convivial society and how does it align, or not, with a degrowth strategy? Second, what would an Illichean analysis of digital technologies look like? In the process, we highlight difficulties and paradoxes that arise with the notion of conviviality, which need to be confronted head on. In Sections 5 and 6 we present two examples of more concrete investigations into convivial digital technologies, revisiting digital infrastructures, and business process management.

2 Threats to digital conviviality

7Illich’s conviviality framework constitutes a comprehensive grid of analysis for the litany of issues created by the development, deployment, operation and use of digital technologies in our current (non-convivial) societies. Let us now discuss how the five main threats to conviviality in technologies identified by Illich resonate with current criticisms of digital technologies. In this section, we show how many issues linked to the development, deployment and use of digital technologies that have already been identified in the literature can indeed be understood as manifestations of the different threats to conviviality.

8Biological degradation. The disastrous ecological footprint of digital technologies is now widely documented [Ensmenger 2018], [Coroama & Mattern 2019], [Flipo 2021]. In particular, and despite exponential gains in energy efficiency (e.g., Koomey’s law [Koomey, Berard et al. 2011]), the energy demand of digital technologies is ever increasing [Freitag, Berners-Lee et al. 2021], with the rise of artificial intelligence aggravating this trend.

9Radical monopoly. The digitalization of all sectors of economy and of social life can be seen as inducing a radical monopoly on the handling of information. Indeed, digital technology has become a primary infrastructure on which all other critical infrastructures depend [Tipper 2017], with digitalization inducing a raft of new vulnerabilities [Rinaldi, Peerenboom et al. 2001] in all critical infrastructures. Furthermore, digital technologies have become a mandatory recourse for any information handling problem, subject to ideological, technical, and economic injunctions [Biagini, Carnino et al. 2007]. A radical monopoly is not merely market monopoly, but also brings an overbearing influence on ideas, mindsets and ideologies surrounding the development, use and deployment of a particular set of technologies. In that respect, the belief among technological libertarian circles of the Silicon Valley that wicked social problems are solvable merely by means of more digitalization and more powerful digital information processing is one illustration of the radical monopoly exercised by digital technologies on information processing. This is documented by E. Morozov who analyzes this Silicon Valley mindset:

Recasting all complex social situations either as neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized—if only the right algorithms are in place!—this quest is likely to have unexpected consequences that could eventually cause more damage than the problems they seek to address. [Morozov 2013, 5]

10Polarization. The advent of platform capitalism [Smicek 2017] and of surveillance capitalism [Zuboff 2019], the biases and negative feedback loops induced by decision algorithms [O’Neil 2016], further reinforced with the large scale deployment of machine learning technology and large language models, are flagrant examples of the unbalances and abuses of power made possible by digital infrastructures and automated decision making systems. The immense power shift at play with the rise of platform capitalism is well summarized by van Dijck et al. in the epilogue of their book The Platform Society, entitled “Geopolitics of platform societies”:

Large states are starting to compete and cooperate with globally operating platforms in a political arena where nothing less than a new world order is at stake—a world order where individual users are a collection of data points and where communities are fluid, temporary, and manipulable collections of individual users. In such a scenario, nation-states are decreasingly equipped to counterbalance what Saskia Sassen (2006, 185) calls the formation of “global assemblages” of capital and technologies that are—or consider themselves—more authoritative than states in providing public goods and services; she argues that we are past the “tipping point” that tilts the “private–public divide” toward data-driven high-tech companies, hence derailing the power of national governments and institutions. [van Dijck, Poell et al. 2018, 165]

11Over-programming. Our digital societies exploit and constrain human labor and energy on an often underestimated scale, from platform workers like Uber drivers, micro-workers in Amazon Mechanical Turk, to plain users on social networks such as Facebook [Casilli 2025], not mentioning workers in more traditional workplaces, subject to increasing digital supervision, monitoring and evaluation. Let us quote A. Casilli in the introduction of his book:

Contemporary anxieties about the disappearance of work are actually a symptom of what is really occurring today: work is going digital. Human productive acts, reduced to underpaid or unpaid micro-operations in this large-scale technological and social transformation, fuel an economy based on information. The latter is reliant essentially on data extraction, a process in which the productive tasks delegated to humans are massively devalued, considered to be too small, too inconspicuous, too much like play, and too menial to count. [Casilli 2025, 19]

12Obsolescence. The hardware and software obsolescence of digital technologies is manifest [e.g., Mosesso, Maudet et al. 2023], but obsolescence is not only for artifacts: the ever-increasing sophistication of digital technologies and their incessant evolutions, also produce cultural and educational obsolescence in their humans users and developers. One symptom of the latter is the digital divide, with its cultural, economic, generational and geographical aspects, that in turn further exacerbates social inequalities [van Dijk 2020].

3 Designing for conviviality

13Now that the threats to conviviality posed by digital technologies have been made clear, one way for computer scientists to contribute is to change the way they design computer systems to integrate conviviality as an overarching principle. Designing for conviviality is not a new idea in computer science. In the middle of the 1970s, personal computer pioneers such as Lee Felsenstein made explicit reference to Illich’s conviviality, touting the nascent personal computer as a more convivial contribution to information processing technology and insisting that “technology attains its highest purpose only when it becomes understandable, approachable, repairable and usable by ordinary people” [Felsenstein 1995, 2]. Since the 1980s, Illich’s conviviality has been invoked by HCI researchers in relation to questions of accessibility and inclusivity, in particular in work by Fischer & Lemke [1987]. But it has only recently been considered as a basis for the design of technical artifacts [Lizarralde & Tyl 2018], [Carrey, Lachaise et al. 2021], [Vetter 2018], [Voinea 2018]. As such, designing for conviviality can be considered an instance of an Ethics and Values in Design (EViD) approach, so let us briefly discuss related work. EViD approaches take many forms [see e.g., the recent survey Donia & Shaw 2021], addressing a wide range of values including human well-being and sustainability, but one that has received much attention in computer science is Value-Sensitive Design (VSD) [van den Hoven, Vermaas et al. 2015], which can be considered a good representative of the EViD field.

14VSD stems from the consideration that technologies and technological artifacts cannot be considered ethically neutral, but are inherently ambivalent—as Jacques Ellul made abundantly clear [2012]—and that they have moral and political bearings on humans and their environment. Ethical issues that arise when they are deployed are thus best avoided by making sure that relevant moral values are explicitly taken into account early on in their design. VSD has developed widely in the past three decades, by looking at particular moral values such as transparency, justice, democracy, human well-being, privacy, sustainability, and at specific technology areas such as defense, healthcare, biotechnology, ICT (Information and Communication Technology). In computer science, it was originally introduced by HCI experts in the 1990s with a strong emphasis on practical methodologies [Friedman & Hendry 2019].

15However VSD has been the subject of several criticisms, notably by [Manders-Huits 2011], which highlight its lack of an overarching ethical framework. More generally, along with most other EViD approaches surveyed in [Donia & Shaw 2021], VSD suffers from a lack of commitment to the “good society” [Coeckelbergh 2018] to which technology should contribute, and from an insufficient critical stance on technology, as we argue in the following.

16One can argue that an EViD approach typically exhibits, as VSD does, three main facets: a theoretical facet, to articulate the ethical and technical underpinnings of the approach; a methodological facet, to propose effective methods for applying the approach; and an empirical facet, to apply the approach in different contexts and case studies.

17We think the theoretical facet in VSD, and in most other EViD approaches, lack two important components: a teleological component (i.e., related to finality), which can be qualified as strongly normative in the terminology of the aforementioned survey [Donia & Shaw 2021], and whose aim is to articulate the vision of the good society it purports to contribute to; and a critical component, which identifies the threats that deploying a technology can pose to the emergence or the continued development of the good society. Illich’s convivial society provides this missing overarching commitment or teleological component, and Illich’s threats to conviviality constitute exactly the critical component that ought to be included in any design checklist for technical artifacts aiming for conviviality.

18The strong normativity of the teleological component of designing for conviviality seems to us inescapable for at least two reasons. Firstly, a non-normative stance ignores the large moral overhang that comes with present day societies, and runs the risk of falling prey to contradictory injunctions. In other terms, why pursue, for example, a VSD approach for the design of a technical artifact when the profit imperative and the extractivist mindset (and their unsavory moral and eco-systemic consequences), which form the context of its use and operation, are not questioned? A similar argument is made by Donia & Shaw [2021] in the conclusion of their survey:

If designers are to invest their time and energy in the difficult work of creating more meaningful spaces for designer agency, such work must be situated in a clear and more compelling vision about a morally positive future. [Donia & Shaw 2021, 29]

19Secondly, in the context of the existential eco-systemic crisis humanity is facing and the perfect moral storm it creates [Gardiner 2011], a normative approach favoring strong sustainability such as designing for conviviality (as we argue below) is a responsible choice, one which agrees with Hans Jonas’ responsibility imperative:

Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life. [Jonas 1984, 11]

4 Foundations of conviviality

20Let us now focus on the theoretical underpinnings of designing for conviviality, and in particular its teleological component. In later sections we will suggest two areas of computer science that seem very much in need of a convivial rethinking, digital infrastructures and business process management.

21What is a convivial society? In Tools for Conviviality and the rest of his work, Illich does not flesh out his vision of what a convivial society would be. Still, he ties conviviality to a deep respect for human autonomy and creativity, the absence of domination (“a society in which power—both political and physical—is bounded and spread by political decision” [Illich 1973, 30]), the awareness and the democratic management of eco-systemic limits (“a political process by which people decide how much of any scarce resource is the most any member of society can claim; a process in which they agree to keep limits relatively stationary over a long time, and by which they set a premium on the constant search for new ways to have an ever larger percentage of the population join in doing ever more with ever less” [Illich 1973, 116]), and distributive and participative justice (“In an age of scientific technology, the convivial structure of tools is a necessity for survival in full justice which is both distributive and participatory” [Illich 1973, 26]).

22To clarify the notion of “convivial society”, we need to question its ethical and political dimensions. We will now discuss a number of avenues for inquiry, pointing to potentially relevant related work.

23The notion of conviviality seems predicated on a fundamental ethos of balance and restraint which is clearly reminiscent of virtue ethics [Hursthouse & Pettigrove 2023], with the collective dimension of care that comes with a responsible society, in the spirit of H. Jonas’ responsibility imperative [1984]. We can go further and claim that an ethics of conviviality requires a combination of virtue ethics and ethics of care as can be found in the ethics of consideration developed by C. Pelluchon [2018]. Respect for human autonomy and creativity conjures up a definite appraisal of human dignity that seems congruent with dignitarianism, the philosophy of human dignity and human rights predicated on solidaristic empowerment developed, e.g., by P. Gilabert [2018]. The insistence on an absence of domination and a limitation of power resonates with C. Castoriadis’ conception of radical democracy that takes human autonomy to heart, and embodies “the following central political significations: self-management, self-organization, self-government, self-institution” [quoted from Castoriadis in Schismenos, Ioannou et al. 2020, 181]. Illich’s insights regarding a convivial society also resonate well with recent theories of distributive justice that deal explicitly with notions of limits on resource consumption and wealth such as sufficientarism [Shields 2016] and limitarianism [Robeyns 2024], although it should be noted that these embrace a view of global norms of fairness for access to resources and wealth, but omit any discussion of the autonomous collective instituting of those norms.

24A convivial society as envisaged by I. Illich—democratically achieved eco-systemic homeostasis in full distributive and participatory justice—is consistent with current visions of a degrowth society. This is no surprise as degrowth authors have long recognized I. Illich as a precursor [Kallis, Kostakis et al. 2018]. Characterizations of degrowth are still very much under debate but the synthesis developed by Schmelzer, Vetter et al. [2022] suffices to make the point that a convivial society is certainly a degrowth society:

A degrowth society [...] is one which in a democratic process of transformation: (i) enables global ecological justice—in other words, it transforms and reduces its material metabolism, and thus also production and consumption, in such a way that its way of life is ecologically sustainable in the long term and globally just; (ii) strengthens social justice and self-determination and strives for a good life for all under the conditions of this changed metabolism; and (iii) redesigns its institutions and infrastructure so that they are not dependent on growth and continuous expansion for their functioning. [Schmelzer, Vetter et al. 2022, 195]

25However, as rightly argued by S. Samerski, I. Illich’s critic of industrial society goes beyond just reflecting on the place of technology in a degrowth society but also questions “some undisputed assumptions of degrowth”:

The degrowth movement generally accepts goals such as health, mobility, and education, and their appertaining institutions; it thinks that a reformulation of economics will open a path towards social justice; and it relies on digital technologies to foster conviviality and a revived commons. But, as early as the 1970s, Illich exposed the idea of equity through economic growth as a dangerous illusion. And he also unmasked the illusion that there can be justice without a limit to tools. Illich forces us to consider degrowth in the technological sphere before we think of degrowth in the economic sphere. [Samerski 2018, 1638]

26A convivial society is a degrowth society, but the opposite is not necessarily true. I. Illich’s critic of technology invites us to radically rethink tools such as institutions of health, mobility, education, or government, themselves vectors of indefinite expansion of material and digital technologies with their attendant threats to a “genuine human life”, full of creativity and consideration.

27Convivial information processing. Let us now turn to a second key question: what is convivial information processing? The work of Illich questioned major technical systems of the industrialized world: medicine, education, transport. An Illichean analysis of information and communication technologies is lacking if we are to understand in particular the convivial balance in this field, the thresholds where information speed and automation threaten human creativity, autonomy and control (an example of what Illich calls counterfoil research [Illich 1973, 92]). Developing this analysis requires us first to confront a key potential criticism of the notion of conviviality, the question of autonomy vs heteronomy. In the words of J. Robert [2023], a long time collaborator of Illich, commenting on his work:

From a conceptual point of view, the industrial tool and the convivial tool are in opposition as are heteronomy (the submission to someone else’s law) and autonomy. [...] The industrial tool encourages heteronomy: its users are controlled by a (professional or administrative) power that is different from their own. Conversely, the convivial tool is strengthened by the autonomy of its users and allows for a positive synergy between autonomy and heteronomy. The industrial tool gets stuck in the negative synergy between what one can do on his own and what one has to ask others to do for him. [Robert 2023, 109]

28Now, as Illich critics have pointed out, by insisting on autonomy, convivial technologies run the risk of cutting themselves off from many useful and beneficial industrial technologies such as vaccines and computers, which require a large industrial base for their development and production. Furthermore, if we follow Robert’s understanding of the convivial tool, “one which would not exceed the appropriate measure, would require the contribution of its user’s physical force, and would reduce the consumption of exogenous energy”, it seems doubtful we can ever achieve a “positive synergy between autonomy and heteronomy” for digital technologies.

29Part of the problem here is that the reading of conviviality is too narrow. As C. Mitcham argues in [Mitcham 1991], Illich’s thought can extend to cybernetic devices and digital technologies which do not require a meaningful contribution of the user’s physical force, and where human guidance, as in controlled systems like automated weapon systems, can be far removed from the actual control and operation of a device. Still, understanding human autonomy in presence of cybernetic control is certainly an open question, further exacerbated by the rise of modern machine learning technology, and one which is crucial to the understanding of conviviality in digital technologies.

30As part of the heteronomy vs autonomy question, we need to confront paradoxes of complexity and scale in system design and construction, which are characteristic of industrial systems of production and which seem antithetic to conviviality: how can you attain conviviality in the digital world when the complexity of a technical system such as the Internet, and the planetary scale of the industrial processes that produce and operate it require extensive specialized knowledge, as well as colossal material, financial and social investments? Yet Illich himself notes that large, complex technical systems such as the telephone system (of the 1970s) can be convivial. Is conviviality merely tied to simplicity of purpose or explainability? And what to make of the industrial scale at which the production of ICT currently operates? Can conviviality be recovered at scale by alternative modes of productions consistent with a degrowth society [Kostakis, Niaros et al. 2015]?

31Focusing now on the design side, we need to identify principles of design for computer systems which are conducive to conviviality. Discussing designing for conviviality, Voinea highlights several design criteria, organized around the “axiological pillars identified by Illich, namely personal autonomy and social cohesion” [Voinea 2018]: flexibility, transparency, simplifiability and usability along the first one, sharedness, creativity and sociality along the second one. These constitute a useful initial set to analyze, but other criteria, long studied in computer science and software engineering, such as dependability, maintainability, compositionality, administrability, and auditability, together with software engineering and computer system design principles need to be (re)considered as well. The challenge here, noting that each of the above criteria are still the topic of active research in computer science and software engineering, is to understand how the adherence to these design criteria provides the necessary balance for conviviality, and in confronting apparent paradoxes once more. As an example of the latter, harking back to Illich’s telephone system example, one can argue that the telephone system of the 1970s is an example of a closed system, bearing none of the generative traits which Zittrain [2008] attributes to the Internet. Yet generativity (i.e., programmability and ability to create new applications and services) with the expresion of human creativity it affords, and the largely open source nature of the Internet software infrastructure, would seem more in line with Voinea’s creativity and transparency criteria. How then, do we reconcile this view of a convivial complex closed system? Is Illich plain wrong, or should we consider a convivial design landscape where closedness and lack of programmability is admissible for conviviality in presence of other criteria such as singularity and simplicity of service? Mapping this potential landscape remains an open question.

5 Digital infrastructures as polycentric commons

32Digital infrastructures, comprising hardware (computers, switches, routers, cables, etc.), system-level software (operating systems, runtimes, middleware, compilers, etc.), and distributed services (name resolution, identity management, search, etc.) are the cornerstone of our digital world. Thinking about the future of digital technologies in a convivial degrowth scenario must include in-depth considerations of the architecture and organization of the digital infrastructures intended to support them. One suggestion is to move away from the current oligopolistic, capitalistic and centralized forms of governance that characterizes the modern day digital infrastructures [Smicek 2017], [van Dijck, Poell et al. 2018], [Zuboff 2019], and toward more decentralized and more democratic forms of governance where digital infrastructures become publicly shared resources under the collective governance of multiple constituencies, i.e., polycentric commons.

33Commons, as a form of collective action for the autonomous handling of shared interests, goods, resources or activities [Dardot & Laval 2015], are an integral part of Illich’s vision of a convivial society [de Majo 2016]. As one can argue that digital infrastructures are as much institutions as classical forms of political or judicial institutions, and need to be developed in full view and control of the community they are serving, in our view, it is crucial to give back communities, at different scales, the opportunity to exercise control over their digital infrastructures and to decide for what intent and under what policies they should be developed, deployed and operated. In doing so, we stand a better chance of combating the different threats to conviviality identified above, and of allowing collective virtues of sobriety, modesty and temperance to exert their homeostatic influence in a degrowth strategy. Commons are an integral part of the reflections on degrowth and alternatives to capitalism. A significant example can be found in H. Gerhardt’s book From Capital to Commons [2023], which gathers elements of a commons-based strategy out of capitalism, called compeerism (combining commons with peer-to-peer ideas), and which highlights the role digital commons (in their many forms: infrastructures, data, services) can play in this strategy.

34Various proposals for revisiting digital infrastructure have already been made, in particular commons based on blockchain technology [Rozas, Tenorio-Fornés et al. 2021] or Distributed Hash Table (DHT) overlays [Harris-Braun, Brock et al. 2024], and several proposals to redesign key internet and web services—such as identity management and web search—to move towards greater decentralization (see e.g., [Xian, You et al. 2025], [Keizer, Ascigil et al. 2024]). But we are still missing (i) a thorough analysis of the forms digital infrastructures can take in all their complexity, comprising hardware resources, system level software, as well as key distributed services; and (ii) a study of the general design guidelines that can help in their development and operation, without enforcing a particular middleware technology such as a blockchain-based platform. The latter point is needed to avoid overconstraining the technical structure of a digital infrastructure common, and to allow different communities to make their own technical choices.

35For our analysis and design purposes, we have identified two major aspects to be considered: governance, to study principles and functions required for a polycentric governance of digital infrastructure commons; and architecture, to develop a reference architecture for digital infrastructures that can be used as a basis for polycentric governance and management.

  • 3 Polycentric governance is a form of governance that involves multiple semi-autonomous, interacting (...)

36Governance. Concerning governance, many studies in economy, political and management sciences have built in particular on the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom on principles for managing economical commons and polycentric governance [Ostrom 1990], [Thiel, Blomquist et al. 2019].3 The relevance of these principles for governing digital commons such as open source projects has already been noted in the literature, e.g., in the study of Wikipedia governance [Forte, Larco et al. 2009], or the development of digital platforms and communities based on blockchains [Van Vulpen & Jansen 2023], [Chen, Richter et al. 2020].

37We propose to build on these works and look for key features of digital infrastructures that influence their management and governance as commons. For instance, contrary to classical common pools of physical resources such as water basins or forests, digital infrastructures feature both physical components, with inherent spatiality, and virtual components that are only partially constrained by spatial considerations. As another example, resilience in digital infrastructures cannot be considered only within a single physical locale, but must involve the coordination of multiple locales, and thus requires a polycentric point of view.

38A second line of work would be on formalizing and making operational design principles for polycentric governance, which does not appear to have been the subject of much study in the literature so far. E. Ostrom’s principles for commons governance and their generalization [Wilson, Ostrom et al. 2013], as well as models for polycentric governance [Carlisle & Gruby 2017], are currently not actionable per se, and it would be interesting to complement them with programmable design guidelines and support. A recent proposal for developing a general-purpose framework for governance for online communities, called “Modular Politics” [Schneider, De Filippi et al. 2021], could be a stepping stone towards this.

39Architecture. Concerning architecture, a first goal would be to develop a reference architecture which can help identify common concepts and structures among potentially heterogeneous digital infrastructures, and serve as a basis for protocol and API standards for enabling polycentric management and governance. This reference architecture should focus on minimal concepts and functions required for enabling polycentric governance and management of digital infrastructures so as to least constrain the technical choices of different communities. We expect these should encompass resource and configuration management which are two key enablers for managing digital infrastructures. Resource management is indispensable to reflect the basic functions of low-level software in digital infrastructures (operating systems, middleware, etc.), whereas configuration management is the prime building block of system management functions in digital systems. The high heterogeneity, spatial diversity of resources and inherent decentralization incurred by polycentric infrastructures will definitely require a fresh look at these functions.

40We also expect the two properties of compositionality and auditability to be prime requirements on our reference model, as compositionality is an enabler for the definition of resource and configuration management, whereas auditability is required for the definition and enforcement of governance policies. Compositionality means that we expect a reference architecture to be primarily component-based and able to describe hardware and software structures in a modular fashion, with explicit component interfaces and component dependencies [Benveniste, Caillaud et al. 2018], [Lau & di Cola 2017]. This is key to enabling configuration management and system management functions in a systematic fashion. Auditability means that infrastructures conforming with the reference model we envision can be analyzed for compliance with given properties or policies [Weigand, Johannesson et al. 2013]. Such properties are essential for building trust in a polycentric environment but require a system architecture meeting key constraints or exploiting key patterns [Julisch, Suter et al. 2011]. It should be noted that, although both properties appear desirable to us, they should obviously be considered with a reflective critical stance, and in a convivial balancing act, because excessive compositionality can lead to undue complexity and excessive auditability can lead to major security vulnerabilities.

6 De-automating workflows

41A large part of the digital transformation of our societies involves the development of enterprise information systems dedicated to the digitalization and automation of the data manipulated, and activities carried out in for-profit or non-profit organizations, companies, associations, local and governmental administrations, etc. If we aim for a convivial digital society, to reduce the negative impact of digital technologies, including the digital divides which accompany the current accelerated digitalization of our societies, we should reconsider how these information systems are organized and developed, and reconsider the role and place humans have in these systems. The explicit goal would be to study in what respect one can do away with, reduce, or alleviate the complexity of the use of digital technologies in enterprise information systems. Humans using or operating these systems should not appear as mere information co-processors but be in a position to assume full control of digital activities, including stopping, disconnecting, or tinkering with them.

42When it comes to considering the role and place of humans in relation with digital systems, we already have several examples of striking dark patterns [Casilli 2025], such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. On a positive note, we also have examples of self-obviating systems [Tomlinson, Norton et al. 2015] where digital technologies are used initially—typically for learning purposes—and then progressively discarded in everyday use by humans, which can still rely on the persistent results of previous computation. It should be noted that this emphasis on human participation should not be construed as an instance of human computation, a computer science subfield that is concerned with the “design or analysis of information processing systems in which humans participate as computational elements” [HCJ 2025], according to the journal Human Computation. While some human computation tools can provide useful services for human cooperation, this field is very much focused on crowdsourcing, with the objective of harnessing crowd intelligence for information processing. The perspective we suggest consists in inverting the control exercised by digital tools, taking decision and control out of digital tools and placing them back into human hands.

43A good starting point to aim for convivial enterprise information systems is the well-established subfield of business process management, or workflow management for short. Workflow management aims to model and automate processes that arise in human enterprises (e.g., logistics and administrative tasks) with the overarching goal of increased productivity [Weske 2024]. They are well supported by industry consortia specifications such as OMG Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) [BPMN 2013].

44Supporting human activity is also the primary concern of case management systems, which provide a view of human activities in an organization through a more informal array of tasks and data needed to handle a given case (the notion of case management emerged initially in health care and has a consortium standard of its own, OMG Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) [CMMN 2016]) rather than well-defined processes. Recent developments in the workflow community have emphasized the need to combine process management and case management, as well as formal and informal forms of process descriptions [Hewelt & Weske 2016], [Gonzalez-Lopez, Pufahl et al. 2021].

45However business process management overwhelmingly takes a process-centric approach while case-management takes a data-centric approach. Shifting the emphasis of workflow tools to become worker-centric is clearly expressed as a necessity in a recent paper detailing key research challenges for the workflow community:

Workers interfacing with these [process-centric] tools are now dealing with overhead of duplicate work, mundane set of tasks, and inefficient processes that are tailored to the tools rather than the workers. This not only affects their productivity but leads to enterprise-wide inefficiencies and increased costs. Recent work focused on enhancing these BPM tools and expanding their scope to accommodate this changing work landscape. While that is encouraged, the main focus of these tools would still be the business process. [Beerepoot, Di Ciccio et al. 2021, 9]

46Yet despite this recognition, the fundamental stance is not altered: humans remain subservient to digital systems that encompass them as co-processors. A convivial approach to workflows suggests dropping this stance entirely, leaving human users in control of their own tasks and schedules, and conceiving of a digital support system for workflows centered around the needs of human workers as well as the needs of end-user beneficiaries of a workflow, up to the point where workflow systems can be disconnected and left out of the loop entirely, should the need arise, with no adverse consequences for human workers and end-users.

47A key area to consider for convivial workflows is the handling of exceptions and workflow flexibility. Dealing with exceptions has been known to occupy a large part of human work in office workflows [Suchman 1983] from the early 1980s, and is still the topic of active research [Lerner, Christov et al. 2010], [Marrella, Mecella et al. 2016], [Andree, Ihde et al. 2022]. The study of flexibility and adaptability in workflows is in large part motivated by the need to handle unforeseen situations arising during workflow execution, and is likewise a topic of active research [La Rosa, Aalst et al. 2017], [Kalibatiene & Vasilecas 2021], [Antunes, A. Pino et al. 2023]. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, the current state of the art is far from providing suitable support to deal with exceptional situations highlighted by Suchman [1983]. We can interpret the recent manifesto making the case for AI-augmented Business Process Management systems [Dumas, Fournier et al. 2023] as a digitally intensive effort to try and address similar and related difficult issues in business process management. Even though we agree with the limitations of current workflow systems highlighted in [Dumas, Fournier et al. 2023], we believe a convivial way forward does not necessarily lie in more digitally intensive systems, but in building workflow systems with built-in human-controlled flexibility so that humans can freely exercise their creativity for appraising and dealing with unforeseen situations.

48A possible path towards more convivial workflow systems would be to consider workflows that are simultaneously defeasible, learnable and explainable. Taking hints from the field of reversible computing [Aman, Ciobanu et al. 2020], a defeasible workflow would be one where any computation undertaken can easily be undone or interrupted, under solid and explainable semantical consistency guarantees for its human users. Defeasibility can be seen as a structural condition on workflows to ensure human users can exert meaningful control over workflow executions. A learnable workflow is one that would cease to be an automated set of tasks, occasionally interacting with human co-processors, to become a repository of procedural knowledge, which can be activated or not by a human, and is available for humans for self-learning, documenting and extending procedural knowledge held by humans. Finally, an explainable worflow is one which can be queried not only for the procedural knowledge it embeds but also for analysis of root causes and intentions behind events in possible executions, and motives behind documented tasks. Learnability and explainability are flagged as important topics for further research in [Dumas, Fournier et al. 2023], under the rubrics “situation-aware explainability”, “augmented process automation”, or “perspective agility”, but a convivial perspective shifts the emphasis substantially and suggests alternate technical pathways. For instance, instead of attempting to replace human problem solving in unforeseen circumstances, a convivial approach would focus instead on enhancing the store of situational and procedural knowledge for future reference and self-learning by humans.

7 Conclusion

  • 4 We borrow the concept of critical friends from C. Becker [2023].

49We are not the first computer scientists to ponder the relevance of Illich’s ideas around conviviality and convivial technologies, but as computer scientists concerned with strong sustainability and the design of responsible computer systems, we cannot but be struck by the cogency of his analyses in relation to the current state of our digital technologies and digital societies, and intrigued by the prospect of what he calls “counterfoil research” in relation with computer science to try and understand thresholds of conviviality that are routinely ignored in the current construction and deployment of digital technologies. We hope this paper can contribute to flesh out a research agenda on conviviality and convivial information processing for computer scientists and their “critical friends” in the Humanities and Science and Technology Studies.4 One can argue our digital societies and our discipline of computer science are in dire need of it.

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Notes

1 Illich uses the term “tool” in a very broad sense, similar to that of “technique” in Jacques Ellul’s writings, and consistent with our use of the term “technology”, i.e., as encompassing all forms of physical, virtual and social instruments, processes, systems, and institutions which humans can use to realize their goals.

2 It is worth quoting C. Mitcham in his critical analysis of Tools for Conviviality [Mitcham 1991]: “The essential insight of Tools for Conviviality remains that tools, as material objects, matter. It is not just intentions that count; it is also tools—not wholly independent of, but at least as an independent variable with end-user intentions. Different types of tools influence in morally and politically significant respects what end-users can and cannot do, and how they can and cannot do it. The social process of making and using tools reflects the tools used in the making and using as well as social contexts and processes. Indeed, the structure of the tools may well be the more fundamental issue.”

3 Polycentric governance is a form of governance that involves multiple semi-autonomous, interacting decision centers (a federation is an example of a polycentric form of governance).

4 We borrow the concept of critical friends from C. Becker [2023].

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Sophie Quinton

Université Grenoble-Alpes, INRIA, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LIG, Grenoble (France)

Jean-Bernard Stefani

Université Grenoble-Alpes, INRIA, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LIG, Grenoble (France)

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