Appropriation as neglected practice in communities: presenting a framework to enable EUD design for CoPs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a conceptual framework and architecture called Logic of Bricolage to support End-User Development in Communities of Practice, facilitating IT appropriation in informal, loosely-organized community settings.

Contribution

It presents a novel general framework and architecture for enabling EUD in CoPs, addressing the lack of unified approaches for supporting IT appropriation.

Findings

Framework demonstrated in three EUD environments

Supports complex tailoring and user-driven IT adaptation

Enhances collaborative activities in communities

Abstract

Communities present considerable challenges for the design and application of supportive information technology (IT), especially when these develop in loosely-integrated, informal and scarcely organized contexts, like it is often the case of Communities of Practice (CoP). An approach that actively supports user communities in the process of IT appropriation can help alleviate the impossibility of the members of these communities to rely on professional support, and enable even complex forms of tailoring and End-User Development (EUD). Although this approach has been already explored by an increasing number of researchers, however there is still a lack of a general framework that could play a role in the comparison of existing proposals and in the development of new EUD solutions for CoPs. The paper proposes a conceptual framework and a related architecture, called Logic of Bricolage, that aims to be a step further in this direction to enable better EUD-oriented support for digitized communities. The framework is described and the architecture instantiated in three concrete EUD environments that specifically regard collaborative activities in order to show the generality and applicability of the framework.