Information, Participation, and Collaboration Overload — A Design Trade-Off Analysis Gerhard Fischer Center for LifeLong Learning and Design (L3D), Department of Computer Science, and Institute of Cognitive Science University of Colorado at Boulder gerhard@colorado.edu Abstract. Socio-technical environments grounded in end-user development (EUD) frameworks and supported by EUD technologies provide fundamental en- abling 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 sub- stantially more information), (2) participation overload (by engaging people to act not only as passive consumers but as active contributors), and (3) collabora- tion overload (by requiring coordination activities between the numerous con- tributors); - 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. 1 Introduction The digital age has created new opportunities for individuals and communities to en- gage and cope with information, participation, and collaboration. Information represents externalized thoughts and knowledge. In oral cultures, in- formation was communicated via speech. Literal cultures created the additional possi- bilities to use writing and reading in printed form. The digital culture added new possi- bilities for information capture (with sensors), creation (with computational environ- ments), location (with search engines) comprehension (with multi-model representa- tions), and sharing (with networks). Participation transcends the absorption of existing information with a focus on ac- tively 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), ac- tive engagements and making contributions is the focus of cultures of participation 1 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. (called “Read/Write (RW)” cultures by Lessig) and it represents one of the core objec- tives and challenge of EUD [1], [2], [3]. Collaboration transcends participation by not only contributing something, but by coordinating individual contributions with the contributions of others to achieve a com- mon goal. Collaborations connote relationships between people working together on shared tasks and shared problem spaces. They require a commitment to a common mis- sion and control and authority are determined by different collaborative structures. The distribution of the individual contributions in collaborative activities can be differenti- ated 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 Developments Causing and Contributing to the Overload Problems 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 in- formation 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 lim- ited: our neurons do not fire faster, our memory does not increase in capacity, and we do not learn or think faster as time progresses [4]. The mismatch between these devel- opments has caused and contributed to information, participation, and collaboration overload problems. 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 cam- eras 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 il- lustrates 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. 2 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. Fig. 1. The causes of the information overload problem 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 environ- ments, 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 soft- ware 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. 3 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. Fig. 2. MODEL-AUTHORITATIVE underlying Professionally Dominated Cultures Fig. 3. MODEL-DEMOCRATIC underlying Democratic Design Cultures Many of our research activities supporting MODEL-DEMOCRATIC have been focused on democratizing design [5] by supporting meta-design [6], and fostering social creativity by giving all people a voice [7] thereby creating new challenges and opportunities for research in EUD. Collaboration overload problems were created by the numerous opportunities cre- ated 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) [8]; • engagement in collaboratories [9]; 4 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. • organization of large, decentralized information spaces created by social production [10]; and • crowdsourcing environments [11]. 3 Developments to Address the Problems While more information, more participation, and more collaboration can be highly de- sirable objectives, overload problems should be avoided. Following a few develop- ments 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 limi- tation 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 serendipi- tous 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 re- quests 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 [12] (based on user models and task models) supporting personalization and task relevancy can filter out information that users may consider irrelevant. Reducing Participation Overload. To actively modify or contribute something re- quires more effort than absorbing existing information. Methodologies and technolo- gies that can reduce participation overload are: • meta-design environments creating contexts at design time that support users as ac- tive 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 5 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. • 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 com- puter interaction). Another important methodology to reduce the participation overload burden is to dis- tribute 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) [13]. Reducing Collaboration Overload. Several technology developments attempt to re- duce the demands that collaboration can cause. Collaborative writing and reviewing is supported with version control and annotation systems. Meetings and webinars are fa- cilitated by many computational environments. Structuring problems as nearly decom- posable systems [14] reduces the demands for coordination as individuals can work on their own parts. On the social side, the burden of managing the additional demands generated by collaborative efforts can be distributed by creating additional roles (such as curators and facilitators) who are responsible for the coordination of the contribution of participants. 4 Design Trade-Offs: Drawbacks Associated with Reducing Overloads New developments such as cultures of participation, collective intelligence, and peer production should be viewed critically and not embraced as magical thinking. As ar- gued in this paper, information, participation, and collaboration can create unique op- portunities but they also can lead to overload problems. A careful analysis of design trade-offs [15], grounded in conceptual frameworks will protect people to suffer from delusions by only observing the gains and not being aware of the losses. It is important to keep in mind that many of the technological developments reducing the overload problems described in the previous section are complex artifacts by themselves and to learn and to use them may contribute to the overload problems. 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 [4]. The promises associated with context-aware systems are accom- panied by the pitfalls that systems tailoring their services (including news and search results) to people’s inferred personal preferences and tastes, may cause unintended con- sequences that recipients get trapped in "filter bubbles" [16] representing a unique uni- verse of information computed by algorithms. These algorithms create context aware- ness based on users’ previous actions and behaviors with the drawback that users do not get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden their worldview and that unexpected encounters with different topics and opinions are eliminated. Filter bubbles may lead to groupthink [17] with a loss of individual creativity and independent think- ing, as well as a tendency to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without 6 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. critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints. To transcend these shortcomings requires to find the right balance between serendipity [18] and making information rel- evant to the task at hand [12] by designing interaction mechanisms that allow users to select their own personal, situation- and time-dependent best mix of these design trade- offs. The participation overload problem can be analyzed with the concept of “libertarian paternalism” [19], an interesting design-trade-off discussed in behavioral economics and public policy. It advocates to explore middle ground as the choice between pater- nalism (being prescriptive) and libertarian (being permissive). Libertarian paternalism distributes control with nudges between choice architects (e.g.: policy makers in gov- ernments, designers, teachers, meta-designers) and users (e.g.: citizens, learners, end- users.). An overemphasis on paternalism (by establishing commands, scripts, workflow processes, requirements, or prohibitions) will reduce the participation demands for the users — but without the libertarian dimension the approach will pay no respect for the individual autonomy of users. Another design-trade-off with respect to participation has been explored in our work on cultures of participation [1]. Participants can encounter two opposing problems: • someone wants to be a consumer but is forced to be a designer; • someone wants to be a designer but is forced to be a consumer. The first problem often occurs in the context of activities that participants consider per- sonally 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 experi- ence (which professionals have acquired and maintained through the daily use of sys- tems) 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 sys- tems to fit their needs (the main objective of EUD) [5]. The Internet has tremendously advanced the opportunities for collaboration and so- cial production [10]. Collaboration in cases where it is based on collectivism involving coercion and centralized control and where it requires additional work (without bene- fiting from it) can and will be perceived and experienced by participants as collabora- tion overload [20] whereas collective action based on self-election, self-interest, and distributed coordination can contribute positively towards creating cultures of partici- pation. 5 Conclusions 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 7 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. to understand the promises and pitfalls associated with information, participation, and collaboration. 6 References 1. Fischer, G.: Understanding, Fostering, and Supporting Cultures of Participation. ACM Interactions XVIII.3 (May + June 2011), 42-53 (2011) 2. Jenkins, H.: Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Cultures: Media Education for the 21st Century. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (2009) 3. Lessig, L.: Remix: Making Art and Commerce thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Penguin Press, New York (2008) 4. Buxton, W.: Less is More (More or Less). In: Denning, P.J. (ed.) The Invisible Future - the seamless integration of technology in everyday life, pp. 145-179. McGraw-Hill, New York (2002) 5. von Hippel, E.: Democratizing Innovation. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (2005) 6. Fischer, G., Giaccardi, E.: Meta-Design: A Framework for the Future of End User Development. In: Lieberman, H., Paternò, F., Wulf, V. (eds.) 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