Project: Richer Ecologies of Participants
The traditional notions of developer and user are unable to reflect the fact that many software systems nowadays are developed with the participation of many people of different interests and capabilities. The sharp distinction between users and developers gets blurred. Many researchers have used different concepts such as end-user developer, power user, local developer, prosumer,
professional amateur (pro-am), commentators, raters, people engaged in tagging, .... to describe new roles.
To do:
- develop a conceptual framework for characterizing these different roles of people involved in using and developing software systems
- study migration paths between different roles
- compare the engagement in different environments - e.g. assess the following claim:
- commenting/tagging books in Amazon is much more elaborate than in YouTube.
relevant literature:
1. Ye, Y., & Kishida, K. (2003) "Toward an Understanding of the Motivation of Open Source
Software Developers," Proceedings of 2003 International Conference on Software Engineering
(ICSE'03), Portland, OR, pp. 419-429.
2. Preece, J., and Shneiderman, B.: "The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating Technology-
Mediated Social Participation" (forthcoming)
3. Fischer, G., A. Piccinno, and Y. Ye (2008): "The Ecology of Participants in Co-Evolving Socio-
Technical Environments", In Proceedings of 2nd Conference on Human-Centered Software
Engineering (HCSE 2008)
http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/HCSE-2009.pdf4. Ye, Y. and Fischer, G. (2007): "Designing for Participation in Socio-Technical Software
Systems", In Stephanidis, C. (Ed.) Proceedings of 4th International Conference on Universal
Access in Human-Computer Interaction, Part I. Heidelberg, Springer, pp. 312-321.
http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/hcii-2007.pdf