"Through the Glassy Box": Supporting Appropriation in User Communities

Communities present considerable challenges for the design and application of supportive information technology (IT), especially in looselyintegrated and informal contexts, as it is often the case of Communities of Practice (CoP). An approach that actively supports user communities in the process of IT appropriation can help alleviate the impossibility of their members to rely on continuous professional support, and even enable complex forms of cooperative tailoring of their artifacts. The paper discusses the property of the accountability of IT applications as one of the basic enabling conditions for the appropriation of the technologies by their end-users, and for its most mature and sustainable form, that is End-User Development (EUD). We illustrate a framework, called Logic of Bricolage (LOB), proposed to both end-users and interested designers to describe (and make accountable) their EUD environments and systems, and facilitate both local appropriation and the sharing of experiences of IT adoption in CoPs.