Negotiating Infrastructure: Supporting the Appropriation of Collaborative Software

A growing body of research work tries to go beyond the classical dichotomy of ‘design’ and ‘use’ in order to better understand the accountabilities of technology production and use. Our research focuses on the creative activities at the ‘user’ end of the production line of organisational software. Support for these activities is traditionally discussed in the context of ‘Tailoring’ applications for specific organisational contexts. In earlier studies we were able to identify ‘appropriation activities’ beyond tailoring, like technology-related communication and technology demonstration, which ‘users’ perform in order to make sense of technologies for their practical needs. In this study we report our experiences with developing and conducting means for ‘appropriation support’ to actively facilitate these activities. We developed and implemented a ‘use discourse environment’ following the idea of an ‘Online Future Workshop’ to facilitate the discussions around the establishment of a shared software development infrastructure of four cooperating research organisations. We provided a highly accessible platform (a web-based discussion forum), a goal-oriented discourse and facilitation concept (inspired by the idea of a Future Workshop), and additional articulation support (easier quoting of software artefacts). Our results indicate the usefulness of easy reference to and illustrations of the technology in discussion, the need for process guidance, the need for a stronger integration of work context and appropriation support means, and the increased difficulties through multi-faceted organizational and individual interests that occur in an inter-organisational, distributed environment. The subordinated nature of ‘infrastructural work’ (versus ‘productive work’) could be identified as the main problem for appropriation support concepts. However, our study encourages research beyond an analytical perspective on appropriation phenomena. On the one hand, the support of these activities can become an important aspect of designing the technologies themselves, on the other hand support approaches like the one described here help render visible the ‘invisible work’ appropriation activities constitute, making this type of work also more accessible for an analysis of the dynamics at work.