Rethinking community through Wittgensteinian family resemblance: Socio-technical innovations in the self-organizing governance of bike-sharing in Hong Kong

This paper examines Hong Kong’s bike-sharing community not as a group defined by shared identity or purpose, but as a set of practices through which people learn how to go on together. It focuses on what counts, in practice, as participation, responsibility, and belonging, treating inclusion and exclusion as matters of use. With Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance in view, the analysis follows how coordination is sustained without uniformity or consensus, so long as actions remain recognizable. Following the 2019 Anti-ELAB protests, protest-related digital practices, most notably coordination through Telegram, reappear in a different setting oriented toward everyday mobility. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, the study follows activities such as bike repair, digital coordination, and app-based use, through which identities such as “Hongkonger” or “pro-democracy” come into view not as fixed positions, but as ways of acting. These practices do not depend on shared motives, yet hold together through overlapping ways of going on. As bike-sharing becomes increasingly standardized through platform design, parking regulations, and digital governance, what can count as participation is more narrowly specified, redrawing the practical boundaries of membership and inviting a rethinking of community through attention to how self-organizing governance is carried on in practice.