Supporting the Appropriation of ICT: End-User Development in Civil Societies

By Volkmar Pipek, Mary Beth Rosson, Gunnar Stevens and Volker Wulf For inclusion in L-in-C Report in the December issue of Journal of Community Informatics (JoCI) November 1, 2005 Introduction Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become an important factor in our personal lives as well as in our social organizations—at work, at home, in our hospitals, in the political institutions and in the public media. While in work settings the dynamics of shared business goals, shared task systems, and professional delegation structures result in a relatively predictable and organized design context, the more open-ended and less organized contexts of home or society present considerable challenges for applications of ICT. The goals and interests of the diverse actors in these more general contexts are quite unstable and unpredictable; home and society provide only weak structures of specialization and delegation regarding the use of ICTs. One approach to these challenges is to cede design power to the participating users, so that they can develop solutions that match problems and intentions for action.