Designing for Light-Weight Collaboration: The Case of Interactive Citizens' Advisory Services

This paper reports on the design of a collaborative system to support citizens’ advisory services. Recent research on the adoption of collaborative technologies indicates that: a) successful collaborative technologies diffuse from the private sector to the business sector and not vice versa, b) collaborative processes evolve and therefore cannot be prestructured in detail, and c) creative collaboration can be characterized as creating and sharing mental models. We demonstrate how these insights informed our design of a citizens’ advisory system and provide data from an evaluation in a German city. Implications for the design of our collaborative system are offered. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13335-0 Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-40346 Accepted Version Originally published at: Schwabe, G; Bretscher, C; Schenk, B (2010). Designing for light-weight collaboration: the case of interactive citizens’ advisory services. In: DESRIST Conference 2010, St. Gallen, Switzerland, 4 June 2010 5 June 2010, 449-460. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13335-0 Designing for Light-Weight Collaboration: The case of Interactive Citizens' Advisory Services Gerhard Schwabe, Claudia Bretscher, Birgit Schenk 1 University of Zurich, Department of Informatics, Binzmuehlestrasse 14, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland 2 University of Applied Sciences Kehl, Kinzigallee 11, 77694 Kehl, Germany Abstract. This paper reports on the design of a collaborative system to support citizens' advisory services. Recent research on the adoption of collaborative technologies indicates that: a) successful collaborative technologies diffuse from the private sector to the business sector and not vice versa, b) collaborative processes evolve and therefore cannot be prestructured in detail, and c) creative collaboration can be characterized as creating and sharing mental models. We demonstrate how these insights informed our design of a citizens’ advisory system and provide data from an evaluation in a German city. Implications for the design of our collaborative system are offered. This paper reports on the design of a collaborative system to support citizens' advisory services. Recent research on the adoption of collaborative technologies indicates that: a) successful collaborative technologies diffuse from the private sector to the business sector and not vice versa, b) collaborative processes evolve and therefore cannot be prestructured in detail, and c) creative collaboration can be characterized as creating and sharing mental models. We demonstrate how these insights informed our design of a citizens’ advisory system and provide data from an evaluation in a German city. Implications for the design of our collaborative system are offered.