Socio-digital Rural Resilience: An Exploration of Information Infrastructures Within and Across Rural Villages During Covid-19

Access to the internet and digital technology are reported determinants and enablers of social capital and community resilience. However, despite rural areas facing ecological, social, and economic uncertainties across the world, communication technologies and the design of civic technologies in HCI are not designed with the rural in mind. In this paper, we explore information infrastructures within and across rural villages in the UK focusing on the interplay between human, social, and technical infrastructures. We report on the existing communication practices, underlining the impacts of transitioning to digital communication technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings point to the fragility of information infrastructure, the "civic duty" of bridging information and skills gaps, and the role of technology as a threat to social norms and disrupter of the 'politics of the rural'. The work presented here has implications for Rural HCI researchers and designers interested in design from the rural.


INTRODUCTION
Scholars in CSCW and related computing and design fields have called for research and design to shift from a paradigm of designing for rural contexts to one of designing from the rural [50].Such an endeavour entails a change in the way HCI researchers and designers conceptualise the rural; (i) confronting biases and assumptions about rural experience, (ii) the development of methods to better understand the specific contextual factors of rural settings that are the focus of research and design [48], and (iii) an acceptance that computing is designed from an urban-centric (and capitalist [68]) standpoint which is incongruent with rurality and plurality of rural life [26,39,47,49,51].
Over the last few decades social scientists have studied and sought to better understand rurality and rural cultures [22,46,77,119,122] and have brought to the fore not only the plurality and diversity experiences, perceptions, and practices of rural dwellers [26,47].As such, we draw upon theories of rural identities [41,100,119] and culture [12,47,98,122] as a lens and use the Rural Computing agenda in HCI [48,49] as a point of departure to explore the contextual factors of rurality and how it is understood, experienced, and 'performed' [105,119].Using this as an underlying position, we bring work from community development on rural resilience and community capacity [38,80,86,96] in dialogue with HCI scholarship and design; specifically, drawing parallels and connections with HCI work on information infrastructures and digital civics.We contend that the work of information infrastructures are of particular relevance to the design and sustainability of technology, especially from the rural, highlighting a shared concern with developing processes and digital technologies to enable and support human activity and modes of cooperation [e.g., 67,88,114].

Relational Information Infrastructures
Information infrastructures and "infrastructuring" work can be understood as design practice used to designate the ongoing processes and activities required to support arrangements between people and material resources; how these bring diverse communities and "things" in connection with one another in the workplace [54], in community settings [3] and for the (co)production of services.
Within such an understanding of (technology) design as way of shaping information infrastructures, the agenda of Digital Civics [25,82,114] explores how digital technology might enable the (re)configuration of information infrastructures and services in more relational ways [5,6,36,93].Critical premises of this 'capacity building' agenda include how digital technology might help organisations deliver more resilient services (in the context of decreasing resources), how they may support the engagement of citizens and communities to co-create services that better respond to their specific needs, and how local solutions might be scaled up and out.Indicatively, work on digitally supported civic participation has explored: the design of in-place technologies for situated participation (e.g., [58,109,113]); the design of social media to support location-based interactions [84] (e.g., for city planning); the development of socio-digital processes for community deliberation [57,59]; the design of technologies for bottom-up advocacy [113] and other forms of digital civics.
Such work, in addition to contributing novel configurations of technologies, has underlined the difficulties of sustaining such community engagements through technology, specifically entering community contexts [8] or leaving "the wild" [108].Researchers have also been sensitive and responsive to the power relations between researchers and local communities [30,31,33,52], as well as among community members and between local authorities and citizens [6,23,24].In this regard, work in this space has also explored the governing processes within local communities and the governance of technologies that enable such work [28].In addition to acknowledging the importance of the researchers and other stakeholders in such projects, other work [108,114] has emphasised the technical difficulties of maintaining and keeping up-to-date devices and software that are bespoke for specific communities and contexts.As such, more recent work [65,66] has explored (creative) appropriations of already in-use and off-the-shelf technologies (both proprietary [65] and open source [4]) to reduce user onboarding challenges, training needs and long-term software and device maintenance.
Even though "civic technology" research within HCI has been active in exploring quite broadly the interplay between participation, digital technology, and community, in this paper we argue that such work has been heavily centred and informed by urban contexts and ways of living.This can be attributed to the origins of such agendas, arguably being heavily reactionary to engineering-led narratives of the "smart cities" (e.g., [82]), and the collaborations with primarily local communities and civil organisations operating in urban areas.We argue that this is the case even for work which took place in rural areas (e.g., [59,109]), as their research motivations, design methods and principles were informed by an urban understanding of place and technology in place.
In this section, we have outlined the goals and modus operandi of civically engaged HCI work surfacing key tenets, including helping communities to help themselves and developing civic technologies in relational ways that support capacity building.We have highlighted issues of sustainability of sociotechnical interventions and an awareness of the human infrastructure required to maintain projects beyond the scope of a study, as well as a need to be responsive to both the power relations in place and those between project stakeholders.In the next section, we discuss these key tenets in the context of rural settings.

Rurality, Community Capacity Building, and Resilience
HCI researchers have argued that rurality is incompatible with the neoliberal logic and economics of technology design [48,68], and that the 'deficit model' of understanding adopted in HCI restricts us to narrow and inappropriate assumptions about rural communities' technology needs [49].Such work highlights a need to better understand the specific contextual factors of rural settings that are the focus of research and design [75,90,106] and calls for a focus on identifying the existing capacities and resilience within rural areas [8,51].Much of the work on rural resilience is focused on crisis and disaster management.As Rashed et al. [89:315] illustrate, within HCI and CSCW scholarship, "community resilience research often comes under the hood of social sustainability" and is centred around crisis informatics and migration studies [e.g., 83,97,103,112].For example, in their study, Rashed et al. show how people in Bangladesh built resilience with limited resources during the pandemic, showing how people adapted to change through adoption of existing tools and collaborated on shared goals, creating communities of support, and sharing.
Despite the growing popularity of the concept of resilience in social sciences and HCI, questions over what makes one community more resilient than another (and importantly for HCI, what role does technology play) remain largely unanswered [74].Nonetheless, community resilience is an important indicator of social sustainability [70] in the context of inherent economic, ecological, and cultural vulnerabilities [53].
A theme across resilience scholarship is an emphasis on identifying the existing and underlying characteristics of resilience and capability within communities [91].Key to fostering resilience is to identify and build on existing strengths, positioning community members as best positioned to recognise the existing strengths and barriers, as well as knowledge of resources [38:132].A resilient community is one that can negotiate mutual concerns and discover shared values creating a 'sense of community' [85].Similarly, the concept of community capacity is broadly understood as multifaceted including: (i) structural components (e.g., connection to other geographic areas, local power structures); (ii) relational components (e.g., community leadership, cohesion); and (iii) community assets [see 38].In fact, almost all frameworks for community capacity emphasise the importance of relational components or other forms of social connection or cohesion as an essential element [42,86].For example, Goodman et al [43], suggest dimensions including participation and leadership, skills, resources, social and inter-organisational networks, sense of community, understanding of community history, community power, community values, and critical reflection as a point of focus to operationalise ways to assess capacity in communities.
Likewise, practice-based community development research advocates for strategies that foster 'social capital building' that can lead to resilience [32,94,99].Indeed, "communities with higher social capital not only exhibit greater cohesion and trust but also have access to a wider range of resources" [94:256].Key to fostering resilience, alongside building capacities for these, is to identify and build on existing human infrastructure, understanding community members as best positioned to recognise the existing strengths and barriers, as well as knowledge of resources [38:132].As such, it is important that social network systems, or information infrastructure systems build on situated knowledge and practices of community-making and maintenance in ways that might challenge urban-centric ideals such as scale and openness, which might have adverse effects on the ability for social participation and the maintenance and formation of strong community bonds.

Designing for Rural Resilience
Through the work we report in this paper, we draw parallels between the civic technology work of HCI that aims at designing technology to support and configure community capacities in the urban in a relational way [6,9,29,54,57,63,71,84], with work that aims to design technologies from the rural, supporting and configuring the social resilience of rural places.Both civic technology work in urban and rural contexts share the common goal of developing personal and collective capacity within communities [70]; with an emphasis on identifying the existing and underlying characteristics of resilience and capability within communities [91] acknowledging communities' capacity to do things for themselves [58].These characteristics are often cited as the availability of resources and social capital -as the social ties and 'collaborative action' that "empowers individuals and groups to come together to take collective action" [94:256].
Vital for collective action is the human and information infrastructures at play, and how these are supported or hindered by social and communication technologies.As such, it is important to understand how the rural area in which a participant lives affects their use [51:21], while also how their use affects the already existing human and information infrastructures.For example, rural residents "by definition, live in areas with lower population density" [38:126] and have "dense overlapping relationships" [11,51:21].This leads to reduced anonymity and privacy, a reluctance to express unpopular opinions publicly, and greater stigma for those who do not conform to social norms.This inability to escape the gaze of fellow community members is referred to as an issue 'publicness'.Elsewhere this phenomenon has been described as the 'goldfish bowl effect' [100 :10], and the smaller the population the more strongly the effects of this are felt.
Rural identities are an important aspect of the sociology and politics of the rural.Those that are symbolically local can take exclusionary and discriminatory actions against those identified as emigrants from urban areas, regardless of other descriptive definitions of identity such as how long someone has lived there or how much they contribute to community life [119].Sherman [95] discusses the way in-emigration causes tensions in rural communities between those symbolically from the village and newcomers, and that the very notion of the rural idyll that attracts in-emigrants to rural places is fragile in the face of ever more emigration and gentrification.Often this results in a 'defending' of rural space from new incomers, referred to as the 'preservationist paradox' [79] that asserts that in preserving and protecting rural areas they are deemed more attractive to urban migrants.
Within HCI scholarship, Robinson et al. [90], have introduced Gill's analysis of Island cultures as a way to understand rural contexts more broadly.Gill [41] theorised identity in rural islands as managed by the formation of four publics, each interlinked and acting as an audience for the other.Public One consists of people from the island (or rural village).Public Two comprises in-emigrants.Within our context of rural village identities, Public One are more likely to have local employment in industry, while Public Two are more likely to commute to urban areas or more commonly 'retired' to rural areas as a rejection of urban living.Public Three comprises some seasonal dwellers and relations of those on the island.While there are rivalries and tensions between Public One, Two and Three, they form one larger common public in the face of Public Four, tourists and visitors.The rules of interaction between these publics are both implicitly known and carefully observed, and an inability to respect such conditions comes with the risk of "ostracism and social sanction that limits reciprocal collaboration" [90].In addition, notions of family and belonging have been the subject of much work and can add to the social fabric in rural places.For example, Cynthia Duncan, in a study of an Appalachian village in the US, illustrates how family ties are enough to guarantee a bank loan without any other questions asked, and that notions of 'good' or 'bad' families persevere through generations [34].
In sum, access to the internet and digital technology are reported determinants and enablers of social capital and community resilience but technologies are not designed with the rural in mind and are not attentive to the specific sociocultural dimensions of rurality such as how the social norms formed around reduced anonymity and identity politics of place effect perceptions and use of technologies.In our study, we set out to investigate the effects of transitioning to digital communication technologies during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic using this as an opportunity to further our understanding of rural pluralities, and practices of engaging with and influencing information infrastructures.As such, our exploration took shape around following research questions: (i) How do rural communities use sociodigital infrastructure to engage in civic life, and how did the pandemic effect this? (ii) What is the impact of such civic technologies on social resilience?(iii) What is the potential for civic technology in rural communities to support civic life and social resilience?The issues set out above and guiding questions formed the basis of our investigations for this study, which we report on in the following sections).

CONTEXT
The study focuses on four rural villages in Northern England (UK) with a combined population of under 5,000 residents.The closest town to any of the villages is over 6km away and the nearest urban centre is over 30km away.However, there are no direct routes on public transport to the city and the nearest train station is 8km away (see Figure 1).Within the villages, there has been a decline in resources and services.Doctors' surgeries, shops, post offices, public libraries have been disrupted, gone completely, or been significantly reduced, such as in the case of the post office, where a shop with daily opening hours has been replaced by a 'mobile' service that visit the villages one a weekly basis.1), at the regional level the villages are covered by two County Councillors, and at the national level by are covered by two members of parliament (MP) constituencies; an MP from one political party that represents three of the villages (A,C &D), but village B is within the constituency area of an MP from a different political party.
The largest of the four villages (A) has just under 1,000 households and the smallest (B) is made up of fewer than 100 households but incorporates several second (or holiday) homes, and two holiday (caravan) sites.Village D has a large proportion of new housing developments that have brought an influx of relatively young families into the community and incorporates a large traveller site.Three of the villages (excluding the least populist village, B) are former mining villages and the people, buildings, and landscape in these three villages are in different ways relics of this industrial past.
Many families who reside in the villages are descendants of miners and the 'miners' houses have remained in the same families for generations, public buildings still carry names such as 'Miners Institute', and the landscape still shows signs of the mining industrial past.In the most populace village (A), house ownership is just over half compared to 100% in the smallest village (B), and over 90% in the other two -an indicator of economic development.Across three of the villages (B, C & D) there is a high proportion of in-emigrants who typically commute to urban areas or have 'retired to' rural areas (Gill's public 2 [41]).Fewer than 15% of residents have lived in the area for all their lives (Gill's public 1 who are considered symbolically from the village [41])-in the two smallest more affluent villages 55% (D) and 40% (B) of residents have lived in the village for less than a decade.Across all four villages there are fewer than 1% who identify as minority ethnic.
Each of the former mining villages has a Mining Institute building, which now function as community spaces for special events, community activities and clubs, as well as holding 'office space' for community charity organisations and in some cases house the Parish Council offices (in village B the Parish Council are housed in a dedicated building).The Institutes, which have other assets such as bowling greens, catering facilities, and gardens are managed by committees.They were originally built and owned by miner groups who gave a proportion of their wage into a communal fund to pay for the construction and running of the buildings, and although they receive public funding and often operate as charities now, committee membership is often a role that is passed down through mining families.Three of the villages (A, B & C) contain churches, also overseen by committees, which also host clubs and events within the villages.The committees for the institutes and churches have control over the way the public spaces are run, organised, what they are permitted to be used for, and how funds are allocated.
One of these buildings in each village has outside of it the village noticeboard (see Figure 2).Village noticeboards are managed by the Parish Councils and committees -membership of which invariably overlaps.The noticeboards are an integral aspect of information infrastructure in the villages for local and regional information, they are visible but managed by gatekeepers who decide and control what information is suitable to display.Shop windows act as an alternative space to share and access information -permission to share in these spaces while still managed by gatekeepers are generally more open to accepting postings from the community but are considerably less visible.
At the time of the study, there were around 30 Facebook groups or pages geographically bound to at least one of the villages representing organisations, communities of practice, or communities of interest -beyond those dedicated to one organisation or activity, there are five online spaces that act as community spaces for information sharing, access, and organisation between villages.Each of these online spaces relate to either one or a combination of the villages and function like a virtual noticeboard for residents to share information.Like the physical noticeboards, the Facebook groups and Pages are controlled by the administrator(s) who decide who is permitted access and what posts are removed.As well as the focus points where information is encapsulated in physical artifacts, there are spaces in the villages (like the shop or the beach) and activities (like a green bowls club or the evening dog walk) that act as 'information grounds' [37] for word-of-mouth information practices, such as gossip.

METHODS
As part of a study into information ecologies and social resilience in rural and coastal villages in the UK, this paper draws on data collected over 8 weeks of fieldwork at four villages within close geographic proximity.The initial stage of this study involved the lead researcher and the lead collaborator mapping out key stakeholders, services, online sites of information, and other social infrastructure in the villages.Due to restrictions on travel and safety concerns regarding physical distance, the synchronous meeting took place using online video calls (Zoom) with documentation carried out and recorded on Miro, a virtual whiteboard.This took place over three synchronous meetings and involved the lead researcher and collaborator each carrying out asynchronous individual tasks in the interim days.
Mapping.Using an online collaborative whiteboard, not only enabled asynchronous collaboration and information-sharing (for example our collaborator creating a table of institutions, organisations, and community leaders) but acted as a simple tool that permitted the creation of stakeholder maps.The process of creating the maps led to discussions about colour-coding different 'types' of organisation or persons and drawing lines of connection between nodes on our map supported conversations about the 'types' of connection between different organisations and people that went beyond geographic proximity, in essence creating a detailed 'social geography' [69] that showed a particular view of how information and influence may be distributed across the villages.Moreover, the process of creating the map, the mapping, helped support focused and productive discussion between researcher and community partner that helped shape the research design.
Recruitment.Based on the mapping activity and the associated categorisation of community stakeholders we worked with the Partnership to identify initial interview participants.We first targeted current and past members of the Partnership (volunteers representing the community for a fixed term), then other community leaders, such as representatives in the local government, faith leaders, those who run community groups, and admins of local Facebook groups and pages.
Survey.The following phase involved sending open invitations through the Partnership's existing distribution lists and adopting a snowball sampling method where the lead researcher requested that interview-participants could put us in touch with anyone else or in some cases residents referred to in the interview that sounded like they could offer a distinct perspective or discuss everyday practices from a range of backgrounds and experiences.Despite identifying groups of people that were important to the goals of both the project and the organisation, we were unable to engage these groups in the interview part of the study.In some respects, as [58] our recruitment opportunities were limited by the existing networks and social capital of the community partners.Creating an online survey opened a potential opportunity to engage people without the same time commitment as the interview and alleviate other barriers to engagement in the study, such as awareness, reluctance, etc. Surveys also offered an anonymous way to air concerns which literature suggests and our own data that people are not willing to do.It was decided that the survey would be distributed via existing email lists and through a network of social media, including several local Facebook pages and groups using the Partnership's Facebook account.
While this did not avert the barriers of digital inclusion and perhaps papered over concerns of digital literacies, it did represent another channel to hearing the views of village residents within the restrictions and social distance rules of the time.The survey was co-created by the lead researcher and lead collaborator at the Partnership.Initially the lead researcher designed a longer survey that included questions that responded to each question group on the interview schedule, however, our collaborators asserted that based on their experience the longer survey should be broken down into shorter surveys that are restricted to specific topics (access to information, effects of the pandemic, use of social media, etc.).In addition, they edited each survey, changing the terminology used, adding, and removing questions.Finally, they suggested the idea of prizes and a prize draw for completion of a survey.
Interviews.The findings presented in this paper draws upon semi-structured interviews.We interviewed 10 residents during this phase.Each village was represented by at least one resident and the three Facebook administrators we interviewed represented three of the villages (see Table 1).Beside from the three admins, we interviewed one councillor, a vicar, a youth worker, and volunteers at the Partnership who were involved in community organisation as volunteers (see Table 1).The shortest interview lasted just over an hour and the longest about 90 minutes.The interviews took place online with both the interviewer and each participant in their own homes.
The interviews were divided into four groups of questions.The first group asked participants about the villages and their role in the community, and the way they identified with rurality.Here, following Hardy et al. [51] we focused on an approach to understand the sociocultural (e.g., community values and perception of rural culture), and symbolic (e.g., words, concepts, and feelings that people use to associate themselves with rural), and avoided descriptive (e.g., population size and density, proximity to urban areas and isolation, and economic indicators) approaches.For example, Hardy et al. [51:23] suggest the following questions, which we adopted in our study under our questions about identity: "Do you consider where you live to be rural?What makes where you live rural?How does rurality affect your life, if at all?"A second group of questions were asked to elicit information about the ways participants accessed local information and the value of information.A third group of questions delved into participants' experience of the pandemic on their social and civic activities, and finally, a fourth group of questions explored their experiences with online spaces with a particular focus on local Facebook groups and pages.We asked participants about their relationship with digital technologies and if and how this had changed during the pandemic, or for any other reasons.Analysis.We analysed the interview data following a 'recipe' for thematic analysis set out by Braun & Clarke [14,20].This incorporated a process wherein: (i) two authors listened to the audio and read transcripts to become familiar with the interview data alongside field notes.Then (ii) authors assigned preliminary 'descriptive' codes to the transcribed data independently, which were later (iii) discussed and iterated, leading to the creation of a list of codes.The next phase involved (iv) the first author developing initial themes by looking for patterns in the descriptive codes in the data.Finally, (v) after discussion between authors, we refined these initial themes through a process of iteration before constructing the final themes presented below.Even though the researchers' background and research motivations inevitably influence the analysis process, we followed an inductive process for our analysis, trying to minimise as much as possible the impact of theory and background research in our codebook and themes.The initial sensitising activities contributed to undertaking an analysis that stays as much as possible close to the realities of people living at these villages (as opposed to following a more deductive approach).

FINDINGS: RURAL INFORAMATION INFRASTRUCTURES
In the first theme we focus on the human and social infrastructures that contribute to information blackholes and firewalls in the rural villages, as well as the ways that people navigate them.In the second theme we report on how online participation is perceived as a "civic duty", the way this works to create surrogate public services and give rise to a parallel politics.In the final theme, we discuss the politics of the villages and how technology is influencing local political representation, influence, and power.

Navigating Information Blackholes and Firewalls
According to our analysis, the information ecosystem within the villages is always close to breakdown due to vulnerabilities triggered by the sharing practices of groups.Key individuals often intervene to perform the work of making information visible including bridging between digital and non-digital information sources.Within the rural villages we studied, the breakdowns in the information infrastructure were more apparent and starker due to the pandemic in two prominent ways.First, much of the social networks and informal information-sharing practices were reliant on physical meetings and encounters and people did not have the resources or capabilities to maintain this during social distancing.Second, the small scale of the villages meant single points of failure in the information ecosystem were common, whether that be a key actor or information interface (or often both).Moreover, the people who take on the role of making connections and filling gaps were often those with existing digital literacies and resources (including time), which disrupted the social order of the rural communities.

5.1.1
The barriers to accessing and sharing information.Participants in our study talked about information being at times either out-of-date or out of sight often in ways that disproportionately affect people in the villages without digital access or literacies.For example, each village has a physical notice board outside of a public building which is valued as an important point of civic and social information (see Figure 2).P2 explained their frustration with the village notice board being left without temporally useful information due to a change in personnel at the Parish Council: "there's a parish council notice board on the green, just opposite here.But when the two representatives of [anon] resigned that hasn't been updated.So, the stuff on the notice board is months out of date now […] We don't even know who's got a key for the notice board these days."This contributed to a situation wherein information is not only out of date, but there is also no way for more information to gain visibility on the familiar information interface.
Such information, at least in part, was added to the council website, but even for those who have access to this, it is not considered visible or public enough.People lacked access to information because it was published it on an obscure website without sufficient publicity for a mobile post office service which visits the villages on a weekly basis since the existing post office closed.When discussing the mobile post office, people talked about a lack of knowledge of the service at all or a lack of places to get information about the times and dates it was in each village.This issue became apparent on one occasion, when the regular driver was absent, and a new driver came at a different time."There was one week when I rang the post office.They said, "Oh, well, the times have changed."I said, 'Well, nobody knows,' 'Well, it's on the website.But, well, who goes on the Post Office website?' Nobody."(P3) For some residents, as well as impacting residents' ability to access important civic information or news about services, sharing practices of groups were linked to missing out on social activity: "I think there are lots of groups that do go on in the village that I have only heard about, but I don't know where to go to find out any information about it.[…] there are lots of other community groups who don't have that vehicle for publicising themselves, apart from sticking notices up in the shop that nobody reads."(P5) For P7 it was important to make information available in spaces that people visit already: "Where you might not be specifically looking for the page on that, or that interest, but you might just see it.It is just letting people know what there is."The suggestion is that the responsibility should be on the local groups and organisers to at least link to information on more public online spaces, such as the civic Facebook groups and 'not just their own webpage'.

5.1.2
The human work of making information visible, bridging, and connecting.The sharing practices and information infrastructure resulting in a patchy information infrastructure.However, despite a dearth of people with skills and resources a small group of residents were responsible for giving information more visibility, oftentimes through supporting people with skills-building or hardware or through the transposition of information from the physical to the online spaces to gain visibility, which was part of the human work of information infrastructuring.For example, P7 described supporting her mother running a charity coffee morning: "She had a paper little poster type thing, and she was going to put it up in the local shop window, and I just photographed it and put it on the [local place-based Facebook] page, so people knew what she was doing." There was a sense among participants that sharing information on the local online spaces was important to gain visibility.However, the concerns about access and digital skills were always added as a caveat.During the pandemic the need to reach those who did not have access to Facebook, or other online spaces became more pronounced and pushed organisers in the villages to expand their outreach methods: "Within a month, we had a flyer.Every resident in [Village B] was delivered a flyer.Everybody was given, essentially, just a little one-pager."(P6) During these times Facebook Groups became a prominent way for people to organise mutual aid and co-ordinate support.Specifically, people referred to one person in the village who coordinated action through the existing Facebook admins: "a few people like me contacted their immediate neighbours.She brought everyone together, everybody together, and she made that much more organised, and set up another, a specific COVID type Facebook support page that people used during the pandemic."(P7) Although it formed a useful 'back-end' tool for organising aid and support, there was a significant effort to reach those who could not or did not access the online spaces prompting people to attempt to bridge between the online organisation that was happening and the community members who might require support.
Some people in the community tried to support people to adopt to the move online, although this was sometimes using technology to organise support and bridge between digital and physical spaces, at other times the effort was focused on giving people access to digital technology.P1, a religious leader whose parish covered three of the villages, explained: "We moved our services online.They couldn't access them.I sent out paper copies of everything to people and they did a few things together over the garden wall […] In the end, what we did was we bought some fairly cheap smartphones and I did an […] idiot's guide with photos of what the screen looked like to show them how to use the phone." The adoption of new technologies had a lasting effect on the way older members of the villages communicated within existing publics.P1 talked about the new skills and knowledge developed through the enforced move to online: "Some of them, beforehand, they'd be there on a Sunday, they'd have a cup of coffee, they'd go home, they wouldn't see each other until the next Sunday and they wouldn't communicate during that time […] Now WhatsApp is pinging every day and people are sending funny little videos or a picture of something that they've seen that's great or encouraging somebody or… It's really, kind of, brought them closer together." As well as bringing new forms of communication and social activity the local online spaces offered an important social service and a point of communication for others that might otherwise be isolated.P6 shared a story of a resident who had recently died.Despite an inability to access the beach due to accessibility issues and his recent ill health, within the small online community this resident was able to connect with others and discuss common interests: "He shared all his stories.He's humorous, you know, a great guy.Without that Facebook group, no one would've heard Lawrence's stories.No one would've heard them because he's not out and about very often engaging with people face to face.He used to love engaging with people on Facebook." People in the villages support each other and communicate in ways that build social capital using (socio)technical infrastructure, but additional human infrastructure (resources, skills, and capacity) is important to maintaining, extending, and bridging gaps in the information ecosystem with individuals acting as a conduit between the digital information sources and those without access to online information.However, as we discuss in the next theme, within the villages there is an overreliance on individuals with digital skills as well as a dependency on individuals who are already known and trusted (social capital), which impacts the way people interact with and perceive online information and creates additional vulnerabilities in the information ecosystem.

Performing Civic Duties, Providing Services, and Offering Protection
Online space serves an important social function within the villages, but careful and dedicated maintenance and moderation of the Facebook groups and pages was vital to norm-setting and gatekeeping that reflected the social norms of the villages in ways that build social cohesion and avoid causing issues within the villages.Such a task requires situated knowledge and resources and comes with both great (potential) power and great (performed) responsibility.Moreover, the pandemic brought about an increased reliance on online spaces for organising social activities, maintaining social networks and groups, as well as finding about what was happening in the villages.This has the effect of surfacing anxiety about privacy online and uncertainty despite the efforts of key actors creating 'safe' online spaces.

5.2.1
The maintenance and purpose of online civic spaces.There was a strong desire in the villages to be self-sufficient without having to rely on other places, people, or organisations.Local situated knowledge was valued above forms of technical expertise.For example, during the study, a group of actors within the villages were setting up a local citizen advice centre, despite there being a municipal Citizen Advice Bureau (CAB) in the nearest town and no current person within the village qualified or certified to give legal advice.This preference and desire for local knowledge and expertise extended to local businesses and tradespeople.There was a shared belief among people we spoke to that there was sufficient resource and expertise within their villages to look to support each other and solve collective problems, but the barrier was that there was not an adequate infrastructure to support this: "If I wanted something done (home improvements), it would be nice to go onto a local website and get a local person rather than somebody from [the city]."(P5).Similarly, it was more important that the management and administration of civic online spaces was carried out by local amateurs rather than those with technical expertise: "I suppose if it was a professionally run group it would be better […] but at least we know the village" (P7) The online civic spaces acted as a means for residents in the rural villages to offer support and solve collective problems among themselves.We were told about people posting about lost or found pets, asking for information stolen items such as bikes, as well as reporting antisocial behaviour and damage to public property.P3, a local councillor, described local civic Facebook pages as a 'bottomup' or community-generated version of what might traditionally be reported or noted on a statutory body's website: "I think people are more likely to use a residents' group, rather than go on to a parish council website or something like that.They just don't do it".Residents in the villages preferred to turn to each other for help and appeal for information on criminal matters rather than report crimes to PACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 8, No. CSCW1, Article 123, Publication date: April 2024.the police: "Burglaries are something where they'll not report them to the police, but they're just asking everybody else for information."(P3) Performing the role of a local Facebook admin seemed to be motivated by a civic purpose and not a social one.When we discussed the 'admin' role with those in the villages running the online pages and groups, the language used spoke to a sense of duty to their community, providing a service, protecting, and preserving local culture.People we spoke to explained that they started the online spaces to provide a space for residents within their village to discuss e.g., local history but often the spaces became more general purpose where people post messages and reply to each other about a range of subjects and topics.In such cases, the admins of popular online spaces have become custodians of very public forums that serve important social functions for the villages.As the groups have grown and extended their purpose admins have developed codes of conduct and reported spending an increasing amount of time performing moderation and norm-setting.While some have taken on this duty on their own, in some cases residents have been asked to take on the role of admin of an existing group, often through existing associations with other community projects.For example, P7 did not choose to do the role of group admin of a popular Facebook page and didn't personally know the person who co-moderated and administrated the civic group with them.However, the reluctance to accept the role did not mean they were prepared to hand over responsibility at the first opportunity.There was a sense of duty associated with the admin role that is entangled with an acceptance of the influence that comes with the role.For example, a local business owner was refused their request to manage the group as "they might have ulterior motives for wanting to do it, and make sure their posts went up there." The role was discussed as separated from 'personal' or 'social' use of Facebook and never discussed overtly as a platform to have a voice in the community.P6, the admin of a popular history page with a membership of over 2,000 explained they "probably only know about 2% of them."Many of the admins also talked in different forms about a burden they felt in taking on such roles but also emphasised the idea of civic responsibility, "It's just about being a good citizen, that sort of thing I guess".(P8) For some the interaction with the civic Facebook pages was intertwined with a civic and institutional obligation.P1, a vicar, talked about the benefits of using online to reach more people during the pandemic but raised concerns about a lack of skills to share the extra workload when inperson church activities re-started: "It's become a bit of a double-edged sword really because it's now increased my workload because even though we're back in the building I can't let go of the online stuff because actually the online stuff is reaching people and helping people that couldn't access the church before."5.2.2 Providing sanctuary in an uncertain digital landscape.The local online spaces are talked about as a form of a grassroots public forum that serve several civic and social functions for the residents in the villages.They have an important sociocultural function and are carefully managed through the creation and enforcement of, often strict, rules: "Every group has its rule book […] It has to state clearly so people know the boundary."(P9) One aspect to the way the online spaces are managed is to ensure the norms of the village are upheld and places of sanctuary are created amongst the perceived unpleasantness of social media platforms.P6 discusses their responsibility to create an online space which protects people from what they see as 'anti-social' norms of Facebook considered antithetical to the norms of the village."If you don't apply a level of control […] then whingers (people who complain) take over, basically, because whingers and trolls seem to be quite prevalent, I think, on

it. I don't think it's always positive or constructive, […] it can cause friction within the villages, or the community. I don't think it's very helpful." (P7)
For some small organisations with a Facebook presence, the small scale of the villages, and in particular the 'goldfish bowl effect' is an advantage in keeping organisations pages free from misuse or abuse: "we have become liked enough in the community, and respected enough in the community, for people who like us not to stand for that, especially in communities that are quite small, and everybody knows everybody."(P1) Despite optimistic ideas about Facebook as a public information ground and with an important civic function, where people could access local information and take part in social and cultural activities during lockdowns, residents also spoke about more cautious approaches to their own personal use."I'd use Facebook for, if you like, proper friends rather than Facebook friends […] I think my philosophy was, "That's about family."I'm highly restrictive on what people can see of me on Facebook other than family and genuine friends."(P6).
Such concerns about privacy restricts what residents share and how they interact on Facebook, outweighing any benefits of knowing everything that was going on in the villages: "I think I probably do (miss out on social activities) […] I would like to use a notice board without it necessarily being able to see me." (P2) Because in the village anonymity would be looked at with caution and suspicion, this is not tolerated in the shared online spaces.This idea that the online space should reflect the real physical spaces of the village was discussed within the framing of privacy.The idea of anonymity when 'everybody knows each other' was antithetical: "I don't think we should be allowed to be anonymous when we use any of these social media things, I think that's just asking for trouble."(P4) We discovered that residents of the villages appropriated digital platforms to do things for themselves in their own way to respond to not only their misgivings about Facebook and perceived failures from official bodies, but also to create and maintain online spaces of sanctuary that fit their specific needs, values, and social norms.However, the penetration of such digital platforms in the everyday practices of such rural places, as well as putting pressure on individuals causing vulnerabilities in the information ecosystem, produces new structures of power and influence that shift the social fabric of the villages.

Power, Politics, and Representation
Having multiple publics within the villages and plural, diverse and strong identities across the villages makes 'doing' politics difficult.In the digital online spaces, the emphasis appears to be in maintaining social norms that lean toward cohesion and collegiality.However, while there is no rural politics as such, a 'politics of the rural' [120] tied up in ideas of identity and rurality itself plays out.The pandemic and resultant centring of online spaces (and those who controlled them) to civic life in the villages disrupted the existing social fabric and give prominence to a "parallel politics" acted out by those who can access, control, and configure digital information infrastructures.
5.3.1 The (place-based) politics of identity.The villages are spoken about as having a shared history that gives birth to a powerful sense of community (P1, P5), a "working class thread" (P6), a "closeness" (P9) and strong shared industrial memory "like on steroids" (P3).This is seen as a strength and can lead to action if it can be nurtured into a sense of local pride (P3, P8) but has eroded through the years preceding the closure of the mining industry and associated loss of employment and identity (P4).This social and economic shift, in light of an influx of new housing development and inemigrants, has created a power dynamic based on the formation of new identities reinforced by symbolic relations to place and history (P1, P2, P10).Within this milieu, prominent 'mining families' have held prominent roles on committees as well as running local businesses such as 'the shop' but this power is being disrupted by new forms of influence based around those with the skills and resources to manage and control online spaces and impact the information that is shared (or not) therein.
Our study has revealed a politics of difference within and between the villages, with different perspectives, worldviews, and motivations.One such divide exists between those who are symbolically local and those who have moved into the villages from urban areas.This is often tied in with ideas of gentrification and driving house prices up for those symbolically from the village.One village that incorporates several newcomers is often singled out as an example of this social class division: "Like [other village] people think only architects and such like live in [my village], that's the sort of overall reputation that they would have, because "We're miners, but you're not," is what they say."(P4) Others noted the existence of a plurality of publics, including more transient, such as travellers and emphasised a lack of cohesion: "There's kind of like a divide, really between old mining families who've been here for years and years and years and then kind of newcomers who've basically been shipped in from council estates […] there's a bit a traveller community as well […] there are quite few little communities that are quite distinct."(P1) There was a reluctance to share resources across villages and a tension around each having their own thing.P4, gave the example of when the Partnership funded a new skate park in one village with the idea that young people from the neighbouring village would share it: "And it wasn't just because they couldn't be bothered to go there, because the distance is nothing, they hop on their bikes and cycle everywhere, but that was the general thought -'Why would we mix with the other villages?'"Another participant told us that on a day trip organised by the Partnership, residents in one village refused to get on the bus, despite the trip being organised for weeks, when they noticed certain people from another village were already on the bus.These examples are a result of family and village rivalries, embedded in a 'goldfish bowl' of identities and norms -described by our participants as 'small village politics'.
It was important for residents to feel like their own village was being represented on local democratic structures, but there were issues, especially for the smallest villages, finding willing volunteers with the time and motivation: "Going back to small village politics, the two [Village D] representatives on the [Village D] Parish Council have both resigned recently […] [Village D] has no representation at the moment.And I don't know if anyone is going to apply to take their places" (P2).Outside of and beyond the 'small village politics', people felt there were not represented on the regional or national scale.P8 recalled inviting the representative for the village in Parliament to an event to promote an environmental campaign about the local river: "I [...] got the local MP to come and have a look at (pollution in the river) […] She didn't even know it was part of her patch." The villages as well as having geographic boundaries are separated by sociocultural markers like identify, loyalty, family, and belonging.As such, the idea of representation is both complicated and bound up in tensions and politics, which come to the fore in different ways, including the way people feel their interests are represented within villages and within the wider regional level.We set how these tensions and politics play out across online spaces in the next section.

5.3.2
The (micro) politics of online space.Within the villages it was in-emigrants from urban areas typically using Facebook as a means of participating, creating new spaces for community-building by working around of established hierarchies, utilising their existing skills and capacity in online spaces.This use of social media was contrasted by its use by people already exorcising substantial influence over what gets done who were able to use Facebook as just another channel for influencing an agenda and achieving goals.
There is an existing power structure that has persisted based on identities from the industrial past.For example, several participants told us of one family that was very influential within their village and across other villages.This family was described as a matriarchal group that were a traditional 'mining' family: "the mining communities are quite matriarchal.The women are the strength, the women are the organisers, the women are the ones who get stuff done."(P1) This family are described as having influence on several committees.For example, in one village: "The village shop and the village hall committee […] is dominated by one large, very powerful, forcefully female family."(P2) which meant they could control who had access to physical assets in the villages such as the public buildings and spaces.But they did not tend to control online spaces.These spaces were run and moderated by typically in-emigrants to the villages -the same people that had roles in the Partnership and other voluntary roles in the community.The same group that became more central and relied upon during the pandemic as they had the skills and existing infrastructure (i.e., Facebook groups) to organise support and keep people connected to their community (see section 5.2).
However, we were told about a new Facebook page that was set up by the mining family with a single purpose to build support and attract funding for two specific community projects (a monument to miners and children's play park).But, once this purpose was achieved the online group was not maintained, despite people remaining active in the group sharing stories and pictures etc. "So, it was stopped when this group was full of vigour and full of enthusiasm and it was really quite lively at first, but it's gone moribund really" (P10).Here, the mining family, who did not engage in the online spaces but had influence over physical spaces, were able to utilise the softer power of creating a social space on Facebook to mobilise people around an issue.This use of place-based Facebook groups and pages was discussed by several of the admins, who despite setting up the groups for purposes of memory sharing, local history, or other forms of social activity were also aware of the influence this gave them to exert their will.First, to set the agenda through rule-setting and controlling access."You know, you've got to be quite strict, and I am, about the rules."(P6) and "to make sure that things that people post on it are appropriate" (P7).Secondly, to get things done.P8 talked about how they can use Facebook to sway opinion by posting things that they know will mobilise people: "We are not a political party as such, and we do want to make changes and sometimes you've got to challenge to make that change." Facebook admins often described themselves as being able to set agendas and garner support for 'unpoliticised' campaigns free from the scrutiny, and legal checks and balances, that those in traditional power roles are held to.P6, described their role as an admin as comparable to a parish councillor but with the ability to influence things "from the outside": "The challenge for the Parish Council is obviously different.There are legal issues around parish council communications as well."However, there is a need to be perceived as neutral or objective.P8 talked about the use of more discrete methods to mobilise people, for example through sharing 'controversial' external links or through choosing not to exercise their power of moderation making 'political issues' seem that they started from 'the members of the group' not the admin: "We don't go for politics necessarily.But if people put politics on and want to talk politics that's up to them.Occasionally we might have an opinion, but it wouldn't be my opinion.(Laughter) It would have to be a collective one."This role then, is a means to orchestrate a parallel politics.
Here, we have highlighted some of the ways people use social media to re-enforce existing control (i.e., the creation then abandonment of the fund-raising Facebook page); in addition (and in contrast), there were people (typically in-emigrants) creating online spaces and co-ordinating action PACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 8, No. CSCW1, Article 123, Publication date: April 2024.
-partially as a way of taking part in and contributing to community life -and creating new spaces for engagement that are not controlled by the existing sources of power and influence (i.e., the local authority, parish council, and the mining family).Another result of this new form of influence has been a disturbance to established power structures, and the establishment of a new power dynamic between those who moderate and control the Facebook pages and groups and other residents.Admins have control over what is posted and the way that norms are enacted online, which becomes an influential position when the spaces are used as sites to mobilise people around issues, allocate resources during crisis, and function as official channels in place of the Local Council and even the police.
The role of admin is performed as a form of civic duty (see 5.2) and the expectations are burdensome (see 5.2), however, those in such positions have the power to influence and operate outside of scrutiny.On the surface, this new level of power shifts old power structures in the villages, however, other actors can and do use the online spaces to exert their own influence operating in the parallel political space to achieve certain goals in "moments of necessity" [60].We have highlighted how these conflicts and negotiations are intertwined with technology and more prevalent in a rural context due to issues of scale, the way identity is managed around social norms, and other sociodemographic factors that characterise rural spaces.

DISCUSSION: RURAL INFORMATICS FOR RURAL RESILIENCE
Community capacity is multidimensional, including participation and leadership, skills and resources, social and inter-organisational networks, sense of community, understanding of community history, community power, community values, and critical reflection [43].Studies have also shown a connection between capacity for resilience in communities and access to digital technology [94,101,122].In our attempt to contribute implications for technology design for rural resilience, in the remainder of this paper we aim to unpack how digital technologies were adopted and adapted for community resilience, as well as the ways they interacted with the politics of the rural.
More specifically, in the following sections we contextualise our findings in relation to prior related work and raise considerations, open questions, and suggestions for future enquiry into rural informatics for resilience.We contribute two types of implications for future HCI work in this space: (i) we contribute practical and methodological implications for designing sociotechnical infrastructures for rural resilience.After introducing 'rural resilience' as the interconnection between resilience, adaptability, collaboration, social capital, and information infrastructures [38,94], we highlight the human work (the burden and individual cost) that according to our findings needs to be acknowledged and designed for in order to maintain social resilience; and, (ii) after summarising the impact of social technologies (e.g., Facebook) have on the politics of rural Northern England during Covid-19, we contribute implications for designing civic technologies for the rural by looking beyond formal roles and institutional frames as the context of design.Making a connection to our findings, we consider how local social media pages and groups functioned as means for 'transplanted' [60] in-emigrants to promote and foster social capital building, and how this disrupted and cut across layers of politics and influence in the villages.

Sociotechnical rural infrastructures and civic participation
The health and economic crises caused by the Covid-19 pandemic -and related physical and social disruption -exposed the ways communities were resilient to change and the role technology played in supporting people to be able to organise support, maintain social connections, and participate in civic activities.In exploring such activities, our participants described a vulnerable information infrastructure held up by a series of uncoordinated actions by human actors to bridge and build across disparate information points.
As Susan Leigh Star declared, sociotechnical infrastructure is embedded in social arrangements [102] -our findings point to the complex interplay between information and human infrastructures: people making information visible in online spaces on behalf of those without the skills, sharing information from digital spaces with others, passing on knowledge and skills, hardware, and support, as well as forging spaces of organised aid, community-building, and communication.
Using available technological infrastructure, the residents in the villages were able to show resilience through demonstrating the capacity to 1) identify and address social problems that arose through the pandemic (including digital literacies and forms of exclusion), and 2) cultivate and use transferable knowledge, skills, and resources to engage with residents during a crisis.In our context, examples of this included the work of social media admins that controlled membership of online groups, as well as curated content through active rule-setting and moderation practices.Admins worked to create spaces that are considerate of rural values and wary of contentious political topics and attention-seeking behaviours that are seen to typify social media landscapes.Here, admins were protecting people and avoiding political conflict (as also seen in the context of professional media managers [110]).We found that dealing with controversy could introduce additional labour that prompted many to feel encumbered but unable to pass on or leave the role, which aligns previous work on citizen journalism and hyper-local news in rural communities that found that when funding for local projects and initiatives ends, the onus on keeping something going falls to a few people who become overburdened [7].
Previous work in HCI within urban contexts has discussed the range of additional costs and burdens brought to organisations who use new technologies [55].Our study brings to light the individual burdens in the maintenance of sociotechnical infrastructure, but also on the sense of duty and responsibility that motivates people to perform these duties.However, we also found indications that the behaviours in local online groups are also affected by an internalisation of learned social norms (and fears of consequences including social ostracisation), which function as a form of collective consciousness.
The scale and the internalised publicness or "goldfish bowl effect" [100] of rural experience also effected the way people interacted in civic online spaces in different ways.On one hand, some organisational accounts felt it offered them a protection from misuse and abuse, and on the other, for more politicised or action-focused groups it has a limiting effect on the ability raise potentially controversial issues.
Previous scholarship in HCI has discussed the critical importance of building relationships with local residents and lead community members through the duration of projects, ensuring skills and infrastructure are in place to sustain endeavours beyond the completion of the research project [58,108], Hardy et al. within a rural context specifically, recommend that designers work with rural communities to "appreciate the connections between types of infrastructures, and the critical role humans play in deploying sustainable technologies" [51:18].Following this, in line with approaches to community development work to build community capacity and resilience [38,53,53,70,96] we advocate for an approach to rural design that focuses on assets (rather than deficits) starting from existing resources and capacities in such contexts (including physical infrastructure and space, and the social arrangements that support ways of doing and ways of knowing).Here, Manzini's work is important in placing emphasis on 'assets' in a way that talks to ideas of social commons, enabling social life and solutions to collective problems to function [73].To inform future work in this space, we raise three cumulative considerations for rural HCI.First, the need to better understand the specific values and histories of a community [31,52] -i.e., the value of local knowledge of and about place as more important than other types of knowledges.This involves adopting a human infrastructure lens to help design to be in harmony with existing social, cultural, political, and economic processes [92], a ceding of control such as that recently called for within HCI [31,56] and a shift from ways of 'design thinking' that de-centres community interests in favour of technical innovation [52].Second, to support communities to communicate and collaborate in ways that are sensitive to, or mitigate the risks involved in, adhering to rural scale and social norms.In our context, we saw how Facebook was used and administered with care as people were aware of the potential social ostracisation that might result.In this regard, social media technologies for rural contexts should be designed with an understanding of potential real-life harms and exclusions that might be created due to the (relatively smaller) scale and generally stronger and fewer ties that exist within these communities.Third, to be attentive to the potential additional responsibilities and burdens (within the context of rural cultures) on those obliged to manage, sustain, and advocate for any intervention.For example, the configuration of social media for increased engagement (e.g., in the case of Facebook), might put an additional burden on the very few people that are managing rural community groups.Instead, social technologies that are sensitive to rural contexts might be designed to "reward" community values, instead of aiming at a quantifiable increase in engagement-like studies in HCI that have explored the design of valuesensitive sharing platforms (e.g., [81]).

Rural Politics and the Politics of Technology
Our findings highlight the ways that technology disrupted and cut across the multiple intertwined layers of politics within the rural villages.At the micro-level we have relayed stories about influence in controlling assets in the villages connected to different symbolic and historic connections to the village.Duncan [34] has reported on the power and control that some families wield over what happens and to whom within a rural community, and that everyone in the town can name them.In our study, we found a 'small village' politics where not only did one family dominate access to infrastructure and social status but also intra-village and family rivalries that persisted for generations, as well as tensions around in-emigration.Such tensions influenced the way online spaces were managed and how people managed their own identity and behaved in such spaces.
The reliance on technology during the pandemic shifted the centre of power and influence away from one influential family who can be 'named by everyone' and "run things" [see also 34:17] to inemigrants with the skills and resources to create and manage digital spaces.This aligns with work on internet-enabled work in three rural US places discovered those taking up internet-enabled roles were much more likely to be 'transplanted' from urban areas then be taken up by rural-originating people [60].The way in-emigrants moderated the groups, controlled, and repaired aspects of the fragile information infrastructure in the villages, protected people from the social pitfalls of 'small village politics', supported social cohesion and creating a way of belonging and to belong.Moreover, the ability to influence the information infrastructure allowed this small group to demonstrate adaptability and collaboration during crisis -organising support and co-ordinating action -as such, promoting rural resilience.But we also saw how a group with traditional power and influence on the ground were able to use affordances of the local Facebook page to raise awareness and mobilise people around an issue without leveraging the potential for social capital and collaboration that others felt had been harboured.From one perspective, we could see how the new civic online spaces functioned as a way for new members of the village to feel they belong to, and could contribute to, a community that may in other ways be resistant to the change in-emigration represents and offer a relatively low-risk way to learn the normative politics of the villages (or indeed as Wang notes, to "create shared meaning and nostalgia" [116]).Another perspective, through the lens of power, seems to reveal a new technical class of digitally literate actors who have used skills acquired through experience outside of the rural villages to construct a new way, which they have authority over, to participate in civic and social life within the villages.
Although those wielding power in digital social spaces did not replicate existing traditional power structures in the villages, it was the case that those who wielded traditional power and influence in the villages were able to operationalise online influence in "moments of necessity" [60:15] despite it not being necessary to maintain existing control and influence in other aspects such as the running committees and local retail businesses.While we hasten to note that this particular (family) group was already in a position of influence and such methods of campaigning would not have been available for those on the periphery who are traditionally excluded, the group are not directly involved in 'politics' per se despite being on various committees and boards alongside those in civic roles such as local councillors.Sherman, in their account of Paradise Valley [95] describes a social divide in which the community's long-time and working-class residents are marginalised, partly as a result of gentrification and the related housing shortages, as well as unemployment caused by the loss of industry (and sense of community).
In our study, while we have talked of the way power and influence has been disrupted and shifted through technology but note that the two groups featured may both be seen as in positions of power regardless of technology.As power shifts from the mining family to the in-emigrants transplanted from urban spaces there exists a larger public of rural-originating residents for whom, despite benefitting from the online spaces could be seen being subordinated by one group then another.This raises questions that are relevant for CSCW researchers and designers around our role in facilitating existing power structures or disrupting them.In asking whether the rural politics we saw playing out should be maintained or disrupted, we turn the lens onto ourselves and our own values (and ambitions).As HCI researchers are we fetishising or romanticising the way we find things as natural?When should we intervene, where and indeed how?Moreover, as de Castro Leal et al. have also warned, there is a need for "detailed studies to inform interventions, and a need to critically question the economic assumptions, models and knowledge systems embedded in HCI projects" [68:18] before we consider 'interventions' of any sort.
While acknowledging that our work raises more questions in relation to technology design for rural politics than it answers, our empirical work points to the additional complexities of designing technologies to support politics within and across rural areas.Even though-as HCI researchers working within urban contexts-we have been focusing on designing technologies to facilitate dialogue between citizens, civil society organisations and political institutions, in rural contexts, such demarcation between roles is less clear and more unstable.As such, the work of designing for politics and the political in rural, requires us to look beyond formal roles and institutional frames as the context of design.It requires us to design technologies that acknowledge the intertwining layers of politics at micro, meso-and macro levels -as also seen in Young's [122] study into rural communities' appropriation of digital technologies to increase resilience through establishing social and economic networks across multiple scales.
Within HCI, at the micro level, this might mean paying particular attention to village or family identities as opposed to a more conventional focus on individual or collective identity as seen in civic engagement literature (see [76]).For example, focusing on encouraging cohesion and pride in the community and engagement in a safe or productive way around the normative goals of the village.It is important that social media (or other information systems) are informed by situated knowledge, existing practices of community-making and maintenance.This may mean eschewing HCI community engagement and digital civics methods and adopting approaches and sensibilities from fields of HCI research that pay closer attention to interpersonal relations, stronger ties between social networks, and micro-dynamics of living together, such as in HCI 'in the home' [62,78] and perhaps more pertinently, studies in and around religion and technology in the home [35,118].
At the local representation (or meso-) level, taking into account the fragility of political representation, how this impacts funding and projects (including our own in research) and technology access, we might focus on creating spaces for dialogue (and innovation) with mediation of differing interests that foster the articulation of and coordination of collaborative action around shared concerns [59,64,72].This might take inspiration from living lab methodologies [3,10,44,123] (and exploring how to adapt these in rural contexts) and/or re-visiting the idea of community research networks [13,16].Our findings also point to the need to challenge some urban-centric ideals of (civic) technologies, such as scale and openness, which might have adverse effects on the ability for social participation and the maintenance and formation of strong community bonds in rural settings.As such, design from the rural could take inspiration from studies into sensitive or divided contexts, such as those with a focus on cultural or political difference [1,117] rather than approaches typical of ICT4D or community development work.
Finally, at the macro level, the need to raise visibility of rural contexts, including issues and struggles, to larger scale political representation and policymaking could be an area of focus.For example, through advocacy and action-oriented approaches as we have seen in HCI [113][114][115], as well as supporting forms of activism and protest [121].However, our findings also point to the need to challenge some urban-centric ideals of (civic) technologies, such as scale and openness, which might have adverse effects on the ability for social participation and the maintenance and formation of strong community bonds in rural settings.However, open questions remain as to whether interventions of any type unfairly and unnecessarily put the burden of responsibility onto residents in ways that might deflect from the bigger challenges and responsibilities of civic institutions.Work from the UK has investigated the impact of community projects on the perceived resilience of community members introducing the concept of "responsiblising" to question whether external support in the form of community interventions is actually needed [74].To be clear, in raising such critical questions and pointing out risk we do not seek to warn against HCI interventions per se but rather echo Castro de leal et al. in calling for "detailed studies to inform interventions, and a need to critically question the economic assumptions, models and knowledge systems embedded in HCI projects and within ourselves as HCI researchers" [68:18].

CONCLUSIONS AND LIMITATIONS
In this paper, we reported on an exploration of rural information infrastructures during the Covid-19 pandemic.The impact that the pandemic had on these rural villages, revealed the resilience but also the vulnerabilities of the existing digital or non-digital information infrastructure in place within rural contexts.Our findings point to: (i) how people often intervene to perform the work of making information visible including bridging between digital and non-digital information sources; (ii) the care and dedicated maintenance and moderation of the Facebook groups and pages, that was vital to norm-setting and gatekeeping that reflected the social norms of the villages in ways that build social cohesion and avoid causing issues within the villages; and (iii) a potential disruption of the "politics of the rural" paving the way for a "parallel politics" shaped by the who can access, control and configure digital information infrastructures.
As such, we have painted a multi-layered, multi-scalar, and complex information ecosystem that is in many ways unique to the rural context.Such as understanding can support us to consider the ways and modes of design in these types of contexts.More importantly, we surfaced how some of the assumptions embodied within existing social information technologies and media (e.g., like various Facebook groups and instant messaging apps during the Covid-19 pandemic) can have an impact on the social arrangements and power relations in the rural, create unnecessary burdens on individuals and strains on relationships, and cause anxiety and alienation in unique ways.In our discussion, we offer directions for design for civic participation in the rural that recognises the already existing multi-scalar rural infrastructures and politics as potential assets for design; for a rural informatics agenda that builds on such rural resources, recognises and rewards community participation and contributions, and affords opportunities to make such community values and ingenuity visible within and beyond the rural community.But we have also called for a cautious approach by highlighting the potential heightened risks in rural communities for technology use (and misuse) as well as the need to reflect on and question what motivates and drives our agendas of innovation in the first place.
Finally, we set out the limitations of this study: first, our findings are about a particular place (Northern rural England) and socio-temporal moment (Covid-19).As such any generalisation of our findings should be done with caution as we know from work within rural contexts, such contexts vary significantly, even within the UK.We believe that this is the benefit and importance of doing work within such contexts, rather than seeing the difficulties in generalisation as a problem.Our context section is quite detailed to allow readers to better understand the context in which this work took place and evaluate the applicability of our findings in similar/other contexts.For example, this work adds to a rich tradition of studies into rural computing across the UK in the last decade (e.g., [16][17][18][19]27,106,107]).As such, we contribute to this UK perspective on the burgeoning rural informatics agenda in HCI (e.g., [51,90,105]).Aligning this work with similar work from the US/ Global South etc. we can start painting a richer picture of what tech design means across the diversity and plurality rural contexts.Second, this work was done during and just after the social restrictions of Covid-19.We believe that this gave us a unique vantage point to explore the use of ICTs -the measures of social restriction presenting a unique opportunity to see interactions between technology and communities at a time of transition and adaption.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Map representing proximity to infrastructure and distances between villages.

3. 1
Demographics, History, Governance, and Information Infrastructure Across four villages there are three Parish Councils (the lowest level of democratic governance in the UK), leaving two represented by one Council (villages B & D -see Table

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Photographs of notice boards from different villages
Facebook."At the scale of the rural villages, what might be seen as healthy debate or discussion can cause unwelcome friction."Sometimes debates are useful because it shares perspectives, or insight into PACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 8, No. CSCW1, Article 123, Publication date: April 2024.

Table 1 .
Information on participant's primary role identified through the mapping exercise, time in years they declared living in their village and village code A -D to represent the four villages anonymously