Socio-technical environments grounded in end-user development (EUD) frameworks and supported by EUD technologies provide fundamental enabling conditions for cultures of participation. This paper argues and provides examples and evidence for the following claims: - cultures of participation can cause (1) information overload (by generating substantially more information), (2) participation overload (by engaging people to act not only as passive consumers but as active contributors), and (3) collaboration overload (by requiring coordination activities between the numerous contributors); - developments are needed (and some of them are described) that can reduce these overload problems; - design trade-offs are created by these developments that should be carefully analyzed to gain a deeper understanding of the promises and pitfalls of different approaches.
The digital age has created new opportunities for individuals and communities to engage and cope with information, participation, and collaboration.
Information represents externalized thoughts and knowledge. In oral cultures, information was communicated via speech. Literal cultures created the additional possibilities to use writing and reading in printed form. The digital culture added new possibilities for information capture (with sensors), creation (with computational environments), location (with search engines) comprehension (with multi-model representations), and sharing (with networks).
Participation transcends the absorption of existing information with a focus on actively contributing new or modifying information (e.g.: in the context of creating an artifact, framing and solving a problem, or making a decision). While information is a central concept of consumer culture (called “Read-Only (RO)” cultures by Lessig), active engagements and making contributions is the focus of cultures of participation
(called “Read/Write (RW)” cultures by Lessig) and it represents one of the core
objectives and challenge of EUD [
Collaboration transcends participation by not only contributing something, but by coordinating individual contributions with the contributions of others to achieve a common goal. Collaborations connote relationships between people working together on shared tasks and shared problem spaces. They require a commitment to a common mission and control and authority are determined by different collaborative structures. The distribution of the individual contributions in collaborative activities can be differentiated along the following dimensions: (1) social distribution making activities more fun, more motivating, and by sharing the burden of coping with large problems (“getting the job done effectively and more quickly”); and (2) epistemological distribution by providing richer learning opportunities and suggesting new ways of thinking about problems (“bringing different views and opinions together”). 2
The growth of technology (based on Moore’s Law for computational power and Metcalfe’s Law for the value of networks) has provided the foundations for more information being available at our fingertips and more opportunities being offered for participation and collaboration.
In contrast to technological developments, the growth in human capabilities is
limited: our neurons do not fire faster, our memory does not increase in capacity, and we
do not learn or think faster as time progresses [
Information overload exists for people in the following contexts: • efforts keeping track what is going on in the world at large or in their circle of their friends, people are required to pay attention to emails, blogs, Facebook postings, and
Twitter messages; • opportunities for wanting to learn something, people have infinite resources to do so (including: the web itself, Wikipedia, TED lectures, MOOCs); • challenges in coping with high-functionality environments (including: digital cameras to take photos, word processing systems to create papers and books, drawing applications to create graphical illustrations, programming environments to create software); The exploding amount of information available is due to the dramatically increased possibilities for many more people to create and easily share information. Figure 1 illustrates that information production has increased dramatically (represented by the red curve) whereas people’s capabilities (represented by the black curve) are limited in keeping up with the demands of perceiving, sense-making, organizing, utilizing, and managing all this information. Proc. of Third International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2015 Madrid (Spain), May 26th, 2015 (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. The participation overload problem is caused by the numerous opportunities created in cultures of participation that people can be involved and take charge in numerous activities: • they can check out their own groceries, check in by themselves at airports, make their own travel arrangements, take care of their banking needs, and write and typeset their papers; all of these activities contributing to a “Do-It-Yourself (DIY)” society; • they are encouraged to vote in democracies, determine their own retirement plans, control their energy consumption, and contribute their ideas and insights to shared information repositories (such as Wikipedia, 3D Warehouse, open source environments, and Wikis created for all kinds of purposes); • they are constantly requested to provide feedback about services (e.g.: for hotels, flights, repair shops, support provided via the Internet); • they are empowered in EUD environments to modify, customize, or create the software they use or would like to have.
In our research, we have explored and contrasted two different approaches with linking participation, information production, and information sharing: • •
MODEL-AUTHORITATIVE (“filter and publish”; see Figure 2) is based on strong input filters, resulting in relatively “small” information repositories, and requiring weak output filters; and MODEL-DEMOCRATIC (“publish and filter”; see Figure 3) is based on weak input filters, resulting in large and diverse information repositories, and requiring strong output filters to find relevant and reliable information. Proc. of Third International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2015 Madrid (Spain), May 26th, 2015 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
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This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
Many of our research activities supporting MODEL-DEMOCRATIC have been focused on
democratizing design [
Collaboration overload problems were created by the numerous opportunities
created by the Internet for people to engage in collaborative activities including:
• peer-support communities (e.g.: workers helping other workers, learners helping
other learners with their problems in the context of community networks and forums)
[
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• organization of large, decentralized information spaces created by social production
[
While more information, more participation, and more collaboration can be highly desirable objectives, overload problems should be avoided. Following a few developments are described that can address these problems.
Reducing Information Overload. There are two basic modes to deal with information: • information access systems (“pull-systems” in which users initiate processes with browsing and search methods) are designed with the assumption that users are aware of their information needs and that they know how to ask for them. The major limitation of information access systems is: if a user does not know that something exists, they will not ask and actively searching for it; • information delivery systems (“push-systems”) provide information to users without explicit requests. Many information delivery systems (e.g.: Microsoft’s “Tip of the Day”, recommender systems, etc.) suffer from the problem that concepts get thrown at users in a decontextualized way. Despite the possibility for interesting serendipitous encounters of information, users find many of these features more annoying than helpful.
Search engines (such as Google) are the major tool against information overload in information access systems. Recommender systems may help in making search requests more targeted. Aggregator sites (for flights and hotels (e.g. Kayak), news (e.g.: Google News, Digg), and MOOCs) assist us in avoiding to be forced to search many sites and compare the results.
Information delivery systems pose greater threats for causing information overload
problems. Context-awareness systems [
Reducing Participation Overload. To actively modify or contribute something requires more effort than absorbing existing information. Methodologies and technologies that can reduce participation overload are: • meta-design environments creating contexts at design time that support users as active participants in developing content at use time; • construction kits reducing the demands on users by providing high-level building blocks for reuse, redesign, and remixing; • rich seeds limiting the amount of additional functionality needed; and Proc. of Third International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2015 Madrid (Spain), May 26th, 2015 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
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• domain-oriented environments reducing the effort for users (being knowledgeable in certain domains) by allowing them to express themselves in their own language (thereby supporting human problem-domain interaction and not only human computer interaction).
Another important methodology to reduce the participation overload burden is to
distribute the work to be done for creating modifications and extensions from individuals
to a community (in which gardeners, power users, and local developers may emerge)
[
Reducing Collaboration Overload. Several technology developments attempt to
reduce the demands that collaboration can cause. Collaborative writing and reviewing is
supported with version control and annotation systems. Meetings and webinars are
facilitated by many computational environments. Structuring problems as nearly
decomposable systems [
New developments such as cultures of participation, collective intelligence, and peer
production should be viewed critically and not embraced as magical thinking. As
argued in this paper, information, participation, and collaboration can create unique
opportunities but they also can lead to overload problems. A careful analysis of design
trade-offs [
The efforts to reduce the information overload problem are grounded in the basic
assumption that “less is better”, but in certain contexts the opposite “more is better”
may be the case [
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critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints. To transcend these shortcomings
requires to find the right balance between serendipity [
The participation overload problem can be analyzed with the concept of “libertarian
paternalism” [
Another design-trade-off with respect to participation has been explored in our work
on cultures of participation [
The first problem often occurs in the context of activities that participants consider
personally irrelevant and can be illustrated by do-it-yourself societies. With modern tools,
humans are empowered to perform many tasks themselves that were done previously
by skilled domain workers serving as agents and intermediaries. Although this shift
provides power, freedom, and control to customers, it leads to a participation overload
and will force people to act as contributors in contexts for which they lack the
experience (which professionals have acquired and maintained through the daily use of
systems) and the broad background knowledge to do the tasks efficiently and effectively.
The second problem avoids participation overload but it deprives people to participate
in activities that they find intrinsically rewarding and it prohibits them to modify
systems to fit their needs (the main objective of EUD) [
The Internet has tremendously advanced the opportunities for collaboration and
social production [
Technology is a catalyst and will play an important role for future developments in the digital age. While the growth of technology is certain, the inevitability of any particular "future" is not. A framework focused on design trade-offs will be important and helpful Proc. of Third International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2015 Madrid (Spain), May 26th, 2015 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
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to understand the promises and pitfalls associated with information, participation, and collaboration. 6