=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1640/paper1
|storemode=property
|title=Cultivating a Culture of Participation for the Co-Evolution of Users and Systems
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1640/paper1.pdf
|volume=Vol-1640
|authors=Federico Cabitza,Daniela Fogli,Antonio Piccinno
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/avi/CabitzaFP14
}}
==Cultivating a Culture of Participation for the Co-Evolution of Users and Systems==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1640/paper1.pdf
Cultivating a Culture of Participation for the
Co-Evolution of Users and Systems
Federico Cabitza1, Daniela Fogli2, Antonio Piccinno3
1Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy
cabitza@disco.unimib.it
2Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Università degli Studi di Brescia, Brescia, Italy
daniela.fogli@unibs.it
3Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Bari “Aldo Moro”, Bari, Italy
antonio.piccinno@uniba.it
Abstract. User diversity and co-evolution of users and systems are two important
phenomena usually observed in the design and use of IT artifacts. In the last
years, End-User Development (EUD) has been proposed to tap in these phenom-
ena, by providing mechanisms that support people, who are not software profes-
sionals, to modify, adapt, and even create IT artifacts according to their specific
and evolving needs. However, to motivate and sustain these people, a culture of
participation is necessary, as well as proper meta-design activities that may pro-
mote and maintain it. This paper focuses on the theme of cultures of participation
in EUD settings; to this aim, it presents four main roles, including that of maieuta-
designer, as the “social counterpart” of the meta-designer. Then, it describes how
the maieuta-designer is in charge of carrying out all those activities that are nec-
essary to cultivate a culture of participation, by means of proper tools that are
briefly introduced in the paper.
Keywords:End-User Development, cultures of participation, co-evolution,
meta-designer, maieuta-designer.
1 Introduction
IT artifacts are usually designed as products (commodities) rather than as ad-hoc pro-
jects, that is for end users that do not form a uniform population, but that belong to
different communities. This happens for example in CRM systems, electronic patient
records, and CAD systems, just to name a few. Moreover, each end-user community is
often characterized by user diversity, due to users’ different physical and/or cognitive
abilities, experiences, responsibilities, and work contexts. As a consequence, IT arti-
facts should be designed to be very flexible, in order to be easily adapted to the specific
needs of the user communities and, hopefully, to be personalized by the users to better
fit their evolving needs. In fact, end users are a “moving target”, since they evolve by
using software systems, and, to satisfy new users’ needs, designers must make systems
evolve. This phenomenon is called co-evolution of users and systems and it denotes the
1
Proc. of Second International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2014
Como (Italy), May 27th, 2014 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
variety of situations where users evolve by using software systems, and, to satisfy new
users’ needs, designers must make systems evolve [1].
End-User Development (EUD) has been proposed as one possible solution to cope
with user diversity and co-evolution, since it encompasses techniques that allow end
users to modify and extend their own IT artifacts without necessarily the intervention
of the software developers. However, this requires to “cultivate” a culture of participa-
tion, in order to motivate and sustain end users in their contribution to system evolution
so as to avoid the risk of participation inequality [2] and replicate the current gap be-
tween IT professionals and end users at the shop floor level. The meta-design paradigm
aims to make “users to become co-designers at use time” [3], but yet it seems to have
neglected some important aspects that might make it more operative in real settings,
like its relationship with activities promoting a culture of participation. Therefore, in
this paper, we would like to investigate how to extend the original proposal of meta-
design with mechanisms that are more specifically aimed at cultivating a culture of
participation and thus enabling a suitable environment for the sustainable co-evolution
of users and their systems.
2 Ecology of Participants in Co-Evolution of Users and Systems
In EUD literature, two main roles are usually highlighted, that of end user and that of
meta-designer. Traditionally, the end user is considered a passive user of an interactive
system and consumer of its products and services. However, end users are increasingly
more required to act as active contributors at use time, thus becoming “producers” of
contents and functionalities, like in Wikipedia, Youtube, Scratch, SketchUp, and many
others [4]. Such an “active” end user is called in literature in different ways: “power
user” [5], “local developer”, “gardener” [6], “end-user developer” [7], “bricolant bri-
coleur” [8]. To disentangle this variability of names, we have proposed to refer to such
a figure with the term domain developer [9]. This term has been chosen because this
person is always an expert of the domain in which s/he works and her/his main goal is
more the development of the capabilities available in her/his setting, than just software
code (software is never an end in itself, but always a means). Thus, the domain devel-
oper subsumes all those roles denoting people in charge of carrying out software devel-
opment activities (namely, ‘actual’ EUD activities) without being professional software
developers. In some cases, end users and domain developers are roles played by the
same person, but in the majority of situations they are played by different people, who
may also belong to different communities, like in multi-tiered proxy design problems
[7].
The role of meta-designer, on the other hand, is intended for all professionals who
are in charge of creating the socio-technical conditions for empowering end users to
engage in continuous system development [10]. In other words, a meta-designer “cre-
ates open systems at design time that can be modified by their users acting as co-de-
signers, requiring and supporting more complex interactions at use time” [4]. Given
2
Proc. of Second International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2014
Como (Italy), May 27th, 2014 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
Fig. 1. The four roles in the ICE2 Model.
these definitions, which do not completely clarify the activities a meta-designer should
actually perform, we propose to consider also the role of maiueta-designer1. Like the
meta-designer, also the maieuta-designer can be considered as a role in charge of de-
signing the EUD-enabling environment by which domain developers can build and
adapt the artifacts to be used by end users. The role of the maieuta-designer encom-
passes activities that are involved in the task of supporting the meta-task of the domain
developers, namely creating the socio-technical preconditions for: a) having the domain
experts appropriate the design culture and technical notions necessary for the meta-task
of artifact development and, b) involving as many end-users as possible in the process
of continuous refinement of the artifact, by improving participation and “produsage”
[11]. For this reason we call such a designer a “maieuta”, partly in analogy with the
Socratic method of getting people acquire notions, motivations and self-confidence to
undertake challenging tasks, and partly in clear assonance with the term meta-designer,
of which it is a specialization more oriented to the social aspects of EUD practice than
to the technical ones [8].
These four roles – end user, domain developer, meta-designer and maieuta-designer
– interact with each other and with the IT artifact and EUD tools and each contributes
to the co-evolution phenomenon. Figure 1 presents an extended version of the interac-
tion and co-evolution (ICE2) model proposed in [7], which encompasses all the four
roles. Between end user and domain developer there is actually a continuum of roles
1
The pronunciation is just like that of meta-designer, but with a ju in the middle:
ˈmɛtә designer vs. meɪˈjuːtә designer.
3
Proc. of Second International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2014
Como (Italy), May 27th, 2014 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
that constitutes a rich ecology of participants [4] with different skills towards develop-
ment, responsibility, appropriation and contribution in the whole eco-system. The meta-
designer is focused on designing and providing the most effective EUD tools that may
sustain the co-evolution between end users, domain developers and IT artifacts [7]. The
maieuta-designer, on the other hand, is supposed to facilitate the migration from the
role of end user to that of domain developer along the continuum of roles or at least to
enable and empower end users to appropriate and contribute to their IT artifacts, so that
they can commit themselves in improving the artifacts as a way to make them more
effective and their work more efficient. Whenever an end user is not capable of, or not
interested in, “evolving” into the role of domain developer, the maieuta-designer might
favor her/his participation in system evolution, e.g., by simply driving her/him to report
perceived shortcomings and system faults, and suggesting due modifications and ap-
preciated improvements. The following section provides some further hints on how this
task could be performed.
3 Helping End Users Help Themselves
As it has been outlined above, the concept of maieuta-designer requires identifying
someone that could make the community gathering around an EUD platform and its IT
artifacts progressively more independent of the IT professionals themselves. To some
extent, s/he is who guarantees the long-term sustainability of the EUD project. There-
fore, this can be an IT professional initially, although endowed with a set of skills that
extend the typical IT curriculum (see [8] for a preliminary list of them), but the person
acting this role must also think of how to pass “the baton” to one or more “insiders” of
the community of end users at due time. These latter ones should be endorsed by the
sponsors of the IT project and the organization’s top managers, and be chosen on a
voluntarily basis also according to their ability and will to encourage colleagues in tak-
ing part in the development process. The term “designer” is not out-of-place here, as
one of her/his tasks should be to “design” (or better yet co-design) initiatives in which
to promote the EUD project, disseminate the underlying values and concepts (i.e., em-
powerment, co-production, appropriation, co-evolution, produsage, equipotentiality
[11], etc.), enroll the more expert ones and enthusiasts and give due visibility of their
contributions, and devise simple mechanisms to foster participation and build a real
culture of participation. This can be done in many ways: for instance by applying
blended gamification, within a competition among colleagues, possibly associated with
some reward or compensation policy, e.g., a mechanism by which “the more contribu-
tions produced, the higher the rank achieved”. Moreover, it can be done by setting up a
social media associated with the IT project e.g., a Forum, a Blog, a Wiki, or something
that integrates all of these simpler components, in which to ask for content and contri-
butions and moderate communication within this ad-hoc means. In so doing, such a
Web resource would flank the EUD platform as an additional “resource for action” [12]
and a virtual meeting place where to coordinate tasks upon the EUD artifacts and doc-
ument/discuss the related procedures, FAQs and use instructions.
4
Proc. of Second International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2014
Como (Italy), May 27th, 2014 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
Since a maieutic approach is mainly characterized by the fact that it “brings others
conceive ‘thoughts or ideas'” with questioning [13] (p.35), that is by helping others
actively understand by themselves how they could make a worthy contribution to the
project, we conclude this contribution by also proposing a tentative list of items. Each
item is a question, or better yet a topic, that the maieuta-designer could ask to (or speak
about with) their colleagues. This can be done in either small polls and surveys admin-
istered through the social media reported above, or in informal but yet scheduled meet-
ings with the members of a specific team at a time, or even in totally informal and
extemporous talks had at the coffee break or similar situations.
"Have you found using the system easy to use so far?"
"Have you found any error or something you've considered a fault of the system
while using it lately?"
"Have you applied some effective solution or workaround to overcome a shortcom-
ing related to the system lately?"
“Have you realized to have made errors in the process of either entering or retrieving
information from the system?”
“Do you think the system is requiring you to fill in too many data that are not really
necessary to proceed in your tasks?”
“Since when you've been using the new system, do you think your work load has
increased, reduced or it is just the same?”
“Have you lately experienced problems in the handing over of tasks or in the work-
flow (like unusual delays, common resources been blocked by other teams and the
like)”
“Do you still use paper and office applications that you believe the new system will
(or should) substitute sooner or later?”
“Do you think that communication within your team, or with the other teams, has
changed lately, and if this is the case, it has been either for the worse or for the
better?”
“Since the introduction of the new system, do you think that new people or roles
have gained more visibility and power within your organization, at the expense of
others?”
“What's the main obstacle that prevents you from participating more actively in the
IT project (like time, skills, the colleagues already involved, a sense of pointlessness,
...)?”
…”and what could really convince you to join it, if anything (e.g., explicit acknowl-
edgment by the top management, economic rewards, non-monetary compensations,
benefits, social status, ...)?”
The list mentioned above is provided with no aim of comprehensiveness, but just as a
first contribution within a research strand that could address more seriously how to
contribute in fostering a culture of participation within organizational communities, es-
pecially in the context of a digitization project undergone under the EUD and meta-
design tenets. Our point is that there is a need to detect motivated people within these
organizations, and not only give to the domain developers a set of tools (i.e., the EUD
5
Proc. of Second International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2014
Como (Italy), May 27th, 2014 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
environments), but also (and above all) precise responsibilities and roles (i.e., the ma-
ieuta-designers), and to these latter ones a set of possible actions to undertake and ini-
tiatives to foster so that these roles can contribute in building a real culture of partici-
pation within their organization and all the actors involved enjoy such a culture within
the wider process of co-evolution.
4 References
1. Costabile, M.F., Fogli, D., Mussio, P., Piccinno, A.: Visual Interactive Systems for End-
User Development: a Model-based Design Methodology. IEEE Transactions on System
Man and Cybernetics Part A-Systems and Humans 37(6), 1029-1046 (2007)
2. Brandtzaeg, P.B., Heim, J.: A typology of social networking sites users. Int. J. Web Based
Communities 7(1), 28-51 (2011)
3. Fischer, G.: Meta-Design: Expanding Boundaries and Redistributing Control in Design. In:
Proceedings of Interact'2007, pp. 193-206, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, September (2007)
4. Fischer, G.: Understanding, fostering, and supporting cultures of participation. Interactions
18(3), 42-53 (2011)
5. Bandini, S., Simone, C.: EUD as Integration of Components Off-The-Shelf: The Role of
Software Professionals Knowledge Artifacts. In: Lieberman, H., Paternò, F., Wulf, V. (eds.)
End User Development, vol. 9, pp. 347-369. Springer Netherlands (2006)
6. Nardi, B.: A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing. The MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA (1993)
7. Fogli, D., Piccinno, A.: Co-evolution of End-User Developers and Systems in Multi-tiered
Proxy Design Problems. In: Dittrich, Y., Burnett, M., Mørch, A., Redmiles, D. (eds.) End-
User Development. LNCS, vol. 7897, pp. 153-168. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg (2013)
8. Cabitza, F., Simone, C.: Building Socially Embedded Technologies: Implications on
Design. In: Randall, D., Schmidt, K., Wulf, V. (eds.) Designing Socially Embedded
Technologies: A European Challenge. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg (in print)
9. Cabitza, F., Fogli, D., Piccinno, A.: “Each to His Own”: Distinguishing Activities, Roles
and Artifacts in EUD Practices. In: Caporarello, L., Di Martino, B., Martinez, M. (eds.)
Smart Organizations and Smart Artifacts. LNISO, vol. 7, pp. 193-205. Springer
International Publishing, Switzerland (2014)
10. Fischer, G., Giaccardi, E., Ye, Y., Sutcliffe, A., Mehandjiev, N.: Meta-design: a manifesto
for end-user development. Communications of the ACM 47(9), 33-37 (2004)
11. Bruns, A.: Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and beyond : from production to produsage. Peter
Lang Publishing, New York, USA (2008)
12. Suchman, L.A.: Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge
University Press (2007)
13. Nelson, L.: Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy: Selected Essays. Dover Publications,
New York, USA (1965)
6
Proc. of Second International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2014
Como (Italy), May 27th, 2014 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.