It design for Amateur Communities Cristian Bogdan Stockholm 2003 Doctoral Dissertation Royal Institute of Technology Department of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science
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5.2ConclusionsWe will now conclude the thesis by revisiting our research questions. While details that help answering the questions have been given throughout the thesis, a brief summary of the main outcomes will be shortly presented here. 5.2.1.1What are the aspects of amateur work that relate to technology and community endurance?Communities based on amateur work were found to endure due to such work being motivated by inexhaustible, yet addressable challenges, as well as by wide audiences of beneficiaries. Such challenges are transformed by pioneering and professional influence and are continuously reviewed within a research-like process. As part of endurance, member learning how to address the challenges and learning (as well as ‘teaching’) about new challenges themselves is of primary importance. Gradual member development through hands-on learning was seen as the preferred way, in a similar manner with the “Community of Practice” perspective. However more formal learning should not be neglected. Practice repetition and ‘wheel reinvention’ were also useful in short-term membership amateur settings. In amateur radio, the main challenges of a certain kind of amateur work were found to be reflected in the technologies developed for its support. Technologies supporting amateur work assist members in addressing their challenges while preserving the contingencies cultivated by the community. The heterogeneity of challenge encountered in student communities found challenge as an important factor in the technology shaping by the community.
As seen when examining Ham artefact design, the contingencies valued by the community members should be carefully preserved in design. While many instances of design for professional work may want to eliminate contingencies and to commit to ‘plans’ such as e.g. workflows, IT design for amateurs should have a slightly different agenda, valuing the situatedness that is pleasurable to users. Due to its sensitivity to voluntary member opinion and free choice in use, Participatory Design is intrinsically suited for IT design in amateur communities. It is recommended that design itself is presented as a challenge to members, through a new-challenge-education approach, in ways that would make apparent the personal development that members can draw from participating in design sessions and learning IT design skills. Chapter 3 has emphasized challenge conflict in heterogeneous challenge environments, and their role in shaping the software. Conflicts such as ‘global-local’ or ‘member-developer’ need to be identified and carefully balanced during design. Amateurs are in a continuous learning process, and learning takes place mostly hands-on. Hands-on work with the designed software is thus a good opportunity for learning, as exemplified in Chapter 3. Other ways of supporting learning should be sought (e.g. learning by example, see the tools for amateur developers in Chapter 4).
5.2.1.3How can the practices of designing and implementing information technologies be made self-sustainable in an amateur setting?Once design is established as a new challenge-ful activity, maintaining it as such is not an easy task. The experience with designing in the student organisation has revealed problems with clearly setting the challenge of design in relation to the challenge of implementation, frequent changes of management of the organisation, interruption of design activities due to intense implementation efforts, etc. The proposed way of seeking self-sustainability of software-related practices within amateur communities is to create a graceful development path for the amateur designers and developers, and to gradually withdraw professionals from different stages as sufficient numbers of setting members arrive at the respective learning stages. Due to lack of resources in many amateur settings, design and development are likely to be done from within, and especially in such cases, self-sustainability of software implementation is an important goal. Chapter 4 described technologies designed to support amateur development of data-driven WWW applications, with promising early results in regard to self-sustainability.
5.2.1.4How can the study of amateur work and technology contribute to CSCW community understandings and research programs? How can the CSCW ‘community’ research agenda be improved?In CSCW terms, amateur work represents a specific form of situated action, which we named ‘pleasurable situatedness’. Other specifics of amateur work in comparison with employed cooperative work have been emphasized, such as the preference for less formal accountability. The Amateur Community perspective has been proposed as a contribution to CSCW understandings of community. As improvement to the CSCW research agenda on ‘community’ a more work-oriented perspective (like in the amateur work perspective, or alternatives) is being recommended. Economy-based understandings of voluntary cooperation in communities (as in Smith and Kollock 1996) were found not to be suitable within amateur communities. Features of amateur work resembled across the settings studied and appeared different in a CSCW sense in fundamental ways from other kinds of work studied, starting from the very aspects of their situatedness as perceived by members. This makes a strong case for Computer Support for Amateur Work (‘CSAW’) as a work-oriented agenda for CSCW in communities. The word ‘cooperative’ is not present in the ‘CSAW’ title, as we know that challenge-motivated voluntary work in amateur communities is fundamentally cooperative.
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