Chapter 1
Introduction: Goals and Related work
1.1Community and voluntary work
The concept of community is receiving increasing attention in a variety of disciplines in relation to work, knowledge and society at large. Voluntary association and contribution are core values implicit in many understandings of community. Technologies have long played an important role in modern communities (Mynatt et al. 1998). While playing major roles, technologies are not inherently helpful for communities. Carroll and Rosson (2001) review work that suggests a correlation between the decline of community
in the American society, found by Putnam (2000) and the activity of watching television.
Nurturing communities is increasingly considered more effective than trying to implement an organization-wide technology. After experimenting with “organizational memory” systems based on knowledge storage and dissemination, companies are switching to letting their employees do the work of propagating knowledge and experience naturally in what Wenger and (1998) calls “communities of practice”, social aggregations often based on voluntary association and voluntary work (see also Lave and Wenger 1991, Brown and Duguid 2000, Brown and Duguid 1991, Muller and Carey 2002, Millen and Muller 2001). Many such aggregations are independent players in the economy, forming what the Economics literature calls “the third sector”, generally referring to non-for-profit associations for various purposes.
The intricate relationships between community and technology are also dependent on the incentives for work. An immediately apparent feature of voluntary work is that it has a completely different set of incentives than waged work. Orlikowski (1992) has shown that the motivation and reward of work can have important influences on the interpretation and acceptance of the technologies used in a setting. This suggests that, as communities based on voluntary work are gaining more focus, a reconsideration of the technologies designed for communication and collaboration in industrial settings should take place as well. Certain technologies may work in similar ways to support both voluntary and employed work, but others may be used differently. The design of technologies that support voluntary work is likely to encounter constraints specific to voluntary settings, different from design constraints in waged work settings. It is the goal of this thesis to study such specifics.
1.2Objectives
This thesis will investigate the intertwining of social and technological aspects (O’Day et al. 1996) of communities based on voluntary work, with the goal of designing better information technology support for such settings. The thesis is grounded in the research tradition of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Participatory Design (PD) and generally Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
The thesis will attempt to gain better understanding of the motivations of voluntary work and their relations with community endurance and technology support. Such motivations will be examined both at individual level and in the context of community, together with the design rationale of the technologies that support the respective voluntary work. Since many volunteers are not professionals of their trade, the term “amateur work” will be used throughout the thesis to mean “voluntary work”. Different connotations of the word “amateur” will be examined later on.
Community life and voluntary work co-exist with employed work, study and family life. Members communicate with their community using the Internet and other communication means from home, school or the workplace. As communication is one important role of the technology, we will focus our interest on geographically distributed communities, where face-to-face encounters are not an everyday option. Even in co-located communities, the flexibility demanded by other personal obligations (family, study, work) results in constraints on voluntary work that reduce the possibilities for face-to-face encounters. To make more evident the technological constraints imposed by geographical distribution, the settings considered for study and design in the thesis are all distributed over large areas.
Another thesis objective is designing to support voluntary work in geographically distributed communities. Such design will be done against the background of what is learned from field study of community work. More general than design cases, proposing generic design techniques for such settings is a desired result.
Since voluntary work does not generate revenue, resources of voluntary communities can be very scarce. Design interventions can bring resources to the community that will not be there after the designers leave. This can result in unrealistic designs that count on more resources than the community possesses. The need to avoid such situations leads to another objective of this thesis: self sustainability of the socio-technical contexts in which design will take place. The setting should be able to sustain the practices and technologies introduced during design by counting only on its own resources.
1.3Terms
1.3.1“Community”
As expressed by Mynatt el al (1998), “the notion of community has a long and complicated history to social scientific theorizing”. The early understanding of the term ‘community’ was
based on the rural community, characterized by spatial proximity, ongoing face-to-face interaction, and shared institutions and was used as an illustration of an obsolete, pre-modern social formation. Later work in sociology and urban planning reconsidered the positive aspects of “community”, which was still perceived as existing even in modern societies. Community was then seen as a small-scale social group, crucial to social life for promoting social integration, mutual support, etc.
Mynatt et al. extract three broad defining features of community: locality (in the sense of small-scale social group, but not in the sense of spatial locality), meaningful and multi-layered relationships between community members, and dynamism, perpetual development for community reproduction and adaptation across generations.
While according to the considerations above, defining “community” comes as a complicated task, we will attempt to extract an understanding of community from settings that are a-priori perceived as communities and, before that, use a definition that functions as a ‘ladder to throw away’ after being climbed, i.e. after the communities in question have been studied and better understood. Inspired from Mynatt et al, we can assume some necessary conditions for a social group to be a community based on voluntary work:
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A shared interest in doing voluntary work in a certain domain, according to certain values. This bounds the locality of the community and also expresses a shared responsibility in respecting common values1.
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A set of means of communication with the other members, including a way to find out about the existence of other prospective members who also have that interest. This makes sure that the relationships between members exist at all.
This set of conditions does not include prerequisites for community reproduction (or endurance as we will call it later on). Instead, aspects of voluntary community endurance within specific communities will be an object of study in the thesis.
1.3.2 “Amateur”
The word “amateur” is often used in a pejorative sense in everyday speech to denote “novice”, “unprofessional”, “bad approach to work” or “bad quality of work”
2. However, upon close examination of people who talk of themselves as being ‘amateur’, authors like Fine (1998) and Stebbins (1979) have found that the skills of e.g. amateur mycologists, actors, baseball players and archaeologists range from novice-level to an expertise that rivals their professional counterparts. Moreover, certain amateurs are at the same time professionals in the related occupation, and yet others have been or aspire to become professionals in that activity (Stebbins calls them post-professionals and pre-professionals respectively). Sciences like astronomy still depend on the work of amateurs for their progress.
Stebbins finds amateurs as being situated “on the margin” between work and leisure3. He sees amateurs as being related to the corresponding profession, from which they draw influence and sometimes exercise influence towards, and to a “public”, which benefits their activity. This complex of social relationships is called by Stebbins “the professional-amateur-public” (PAP) system.
The use of ”amateur” in the thesis to denote voluntary work has a number of reasons: first, the term suggests parts of the motivation for work: pleasure. Second, the term implies that amateurs do work, and sometimes do it at a ‘professional’4 level, which is important in the context of “computer-supported cooperative work” as a research field that has work as one of its essential study objects. Third, drawing from Stebbins, the term puts amateurs in a social context in relation to the respective profession and its public.
Some immediately apparent features of amateur work have already been suggested: the different incentives for work in comparison to professionals, the sense of ‘flexibility’ of work (times and duration of work, availability for meeting with amateur peers, etc) due to other obligations of the amateur, the geographical distribution of amateur group work due to the aforementioned flexibility and, often, due the lack of a permanent ‘amateur work place’ for the whole group.
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