Assessing the Effectiveness of User Participation: Users' Knowledge Participation

Although user participation has been studied over four decades, the effectiveness users’ participative activities has not been well assessed. This research proposes knowledge participation as an assessment of the effectiveness of participative activities performed by users. By capturing the effectiveness of users’ participative activities, the construct of knowledge participation is argued to have more predicative power than the construct of user participation when predicting the outcomes of system development. In addition, knowledge process within an ISD project team is proposed as a mediating mechanism that converts users’ participative efforts into system development outcomes.