The sustainability of Cultures of Participation (CoPs) and Personal Information Environments (PIEs) is critical for fostering inclusive, adaptable, and resilient systems that empower users as co-creators. My contribution to the CoPDA 2025 workshop will be focused on: § identification of design principles and guidelines based on failure and success stories of major past developments § initial articulation of how these design guidelines should be reconsidered and further developed by integrating the possibilities of current and future AI developments § contribution to seed discussions at the workshop about the sustainability of different approaches.
heard in personally meaningful problems, failure and success stories of previous developments will identify design principles and guidelines for making future developments more sustainable.
A big hype developed around expert systems in the 1980s [
Lesson Learned: Systems need to evolve and the end-users must be empowered (e.g.: with
support for human problem-domain interaction) to contribute to this evolution. Support for the
seeding, evolutionary growth, and reseeding (SER) model is critical [
The OLPC initiative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child) was an ambitious project aiming to bridge the digital divide by providing affordable, durable laptops to children in developing countries. While it initially garnered widespread attention and support, the initiative struggled to sustain itself as a successful model in the long term. There are again many reasons that the initiative could not be sustained in the long run; the primary ones for our discussion being: it focused heavily on the hardware (the “$100 Laptop) and assumed that technology alone would transform education; it adopted a one-size-fits-all approach, failing to tailor its solutions to the specific needs of different communities.
Lessons Learned: Technology is necessary for enhancing and democratizing education — but it is not sufficient without support for robust community engagement, localized strategies, and a focus on long-term sustainability.
Wikis [5;6] were conceptualized as open, collaborative socio-technical environments designed to support communal memory, knowledge-sharing, and collective content creation. While there are notable success stories (see next section), most wikis did not succeed. For example: we created the seed for a Wiki to support the research groups supported by the National Science Foundation program “Science of Design” (https://www.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/sod-sciencedesign/12766/nsf07-505) which created some initial excitement of creating content among the funded research groups and people who were interested in the topic, but suffered from low contributor engagement over time leading to stagnation. Sustainability in wiki environments requires deliberate design choices that balance openness with quality control, empower communities through governance and incentives, and ensure the tools align with users' evolving needs. By learning from past failures, future wikis can better foster resilient, sustainable cultures of participation.
Lessons Learned: Many potential community efforts suffer from a lack of sustained
participation (“Build It and No One Comes:”) by ignoring the necessary combination of social and
technical issues.[
There is a substantial number of humans of all ages who play with LEGO not because they “have
to” but because they “want to” [
Lessons Learned: Create environments and use communities that foster creativity, adaptability, and continuous engagement facilitated by a low threshold and high ceiling.
Scratch [
Lessons Learned: Scratch and the community using it is successful as a sustainable culture of participation by (1) Enabling long-term engagement through a participatory, remix-friendly platform, (2) Bridging the digital divide being free and by making programming accessible to broad communities, and (3) Fostering open-ended learning with a low-threshold and high-ceiling architecture.
Wikipedia represents a free, comprehensive, and neutral encyclopedia accessible to everyone. It represents a success model for a CoP from which many design criteria can be derived. Lessons Learned: (1) successful balance openness with governance; (2) evolution dynamic, evolving knowledge) over archival (static repositories); (3) incentive structures for the acquisition of social capital and recognition of participants motivating their sustained involvement.
The 2025 CoPDA workshop is the 9th workshop in this series and previous workshops were associated with EUD, AVI, and NordiCHI conferences. We believe that the rationale of the ongoing interest in these workshops is based on the multi-faceted and interdisciplinary nature of “cultures of participation” and the identification of specific themes for the individual workshop that were regarded as essential challenges for creating a deeper understanding, frameworks and socio-technical environments in support of CoPs.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have generated enthusiasm, excitement, and hype
worldwide as well as skepticism [
AI is emerging as a tool for sustainability with a promise of being transformational. While there are substantial discussions and developments achieve how to ambitious climate and environmental goals, our interest is to explore principles and guidelines how future AI developments can increase the successes and reduce the failures analyzed in the previous sections.
Starting with a major address in 2023 (https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-io-2023-keynotesundar-pichai/#helpful-ai), Google declared that to make progress in delivering its mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, it will explore and support the objective “Making AI more helpful for everyone”.
We have studied for a long time PIEs including Email, Endnote, Photos, Maps, Password
Managers, and Apps used by most people in today’s world. For these environments, “Experts”
(users who know everything about the functionality of a PIE) no longer exist.
A fundamental design objective for PIEs:
Claim: If stakeholders associate a high utility value with their PIEs they will engage in activities
to learn, use, evolve, and sustain their PIEs over extended periods of time contributing to their
quality of life [
How AI developments in the future will increase the sustainability of CoPS and PIEs and which
design guidelines should be explored depends critically on which of the overall two fundamental
objectives “AI replacing Humans” or “AI empowering Humans” are primarily pursued. This
differentiation has guided our research for the last few decades [12;13] and is core objective of
the research community focused on Human-Centered AI [
To succeed in sustaining cultures of participation and end-user development mindsets, the lessons learned from the analysis of failure and success briefly analyzed in earlier sections, design guidelines and principles can be grounded by characterizing objectives and developments falling in two fundamentally different approaches which will be briefly characterized. AI replacing Humans. Developments of this approach can be characterized by: § replacing teachers with Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) and tutorials such as Khanmigo (https://www.khanmigo.ai) with design objectives such as delivering instruction efficiently and effectively in a personalized way § adaptive components § grounded in an emulation approach based on the metaphor that to improve humancomputer collaboration is to endow computers with “human-like abilities”. weaknesses of this approach: § AI technologies are used in ways that constrain learner agency, focus on “close-ended” problems, and undervalue human connection and community. strengths of these approaches: § exploits non-human resources to support new levels of distributed cognition § takes advantage in situations where AI components provide unique opportunities surpassing human abilities (e.g.: line calls in tennis, traffic jams identified by Goople Maps) AI empowering Humans. Developments of this approach can be characterized by: § stakeholders have control and autonomy § personally meaningful problems § wicked, open-ended problems with no final answers only design trade-offs § design with and by people § grounded in a complementing approach based on computers are not human and that human- centered design should exploit the asymmetry of human and computer by developing new interaction and collaboration possibilities weaknesses of this approach: § learning demands: how to cope with extensive learning demands required by tools that allow humans to exploit the benefits of complex HCAI technologies in distributed cognition approaches? § participation overload: in the context of cultures of participation will the support for active engagement lead to participation overload (particularly in personally irrelevant activities)? strengths of this approach
§ control: Creating the tools that enable people to solve their own problems
One collaborative effort of the participants during the workshop could be to explore different uses of LLMs and their impact on the sustainability of CoPs and PIEs. My initial assumptions (grounded in the discussions of CoPDA’2024) which could serve for seeding discussions at the workshop: § uses positively influencing sustainability: o provide access to relevant information (e.g., reducing information overload)? o serve as a digital assistant (e.g., drafting initial responses, increasing the backtalk of situations with critiquing systems)? o enhance learning by providing explanations and generating examples? o integrate adaptive features (generated by ChatGPT) with adaptable components (contributed by humans)? § uses negatively influencing sustainability: o create an overreliance on technology? o suppress critical thinking skills needed to analyze bias and misinformation? o reduce the autonomy of end users by imposing its view and value system of the information generated? o replace workers in tasks that the workers can do better and would like to do themselves?
In the current and future digital age, it is more important than ever that all people (learners, workers, citizens) can develop and exercise their abilities to think critically and creatively, engage and work collaboratively, exploit powerful tools supporting new levels of distributed cognition. This will empower them to address the challenges of a complex, fast-changing world full of wicked problems and contribute to the sustainability of CoPs and PIEs.
Declaration on Generative AI The author has not employed any Generative AI tools.