Examining Cultural Volunteer Crowdsourcing Technology: An Appropriation Perspective

This paper describes research in progress which proposes an appropriation perspective to examine the iterative design, development and subsequent redesign of a cultural volunteer crowdsourcing application. The Technology Appropriation Cycle (TAC) model (Carroll 2004) assists with understanding the process of appropriation and describes how user’s appropriation choices can inform the design of future iterations of the system. The preliminary analysis indicates that the users appropriated the crowdsourcing technology platform through recursive use over time by participating in open communication with designers. Upgrades of the system appear to have been achieved through incremental improvements that resulted in staggered version releases. These initial findings appear to support the utility of employing the TAC model to explain the iterative view of technology (re)design for a crowd-based collective system. We conclude with a refined TAC model that reflects our preliminary analysis of on-going involvement of the crowd and the use of incremental version releases.