IT Design for Amateur Communities Cristian Bogdan Stockholm 2003 Doctoral Dissertation Royal Institute of Technology Department of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science Akademisk avhandling som med tillstånd av Kungl Tekniska Högskolan framlägges till offentlig granskning för avläggande av teknologie doktorsexamen fredagen den 14 februari 2003 kl 13.15 i Kollegiesalen, Administrationsbyggnaden, Kungl Tekniska Högskolan, Vallhallavägen 79, Stockholm. ISBN 91-7283-44467 TRITA-NA-0302 ISSN-0348-2952 ISRN KTH/NA/R--03/02 © Cristian Bogdan, January 2003 [email protected] Abstract The concept of community is receiving increasing attention across organizations and throughout the entire society. Voluntary association, creation of value, and solidarity in community contexts get more and more appreciated and nurtured within companies and other organizations. At the same time, lack of community is raised lately by Western sociologists as a major source of alarm while the large participation possibilities provided by the Internet are seen as a hope for remedy. This thesis aims to contribute in the area of technology design for communities by seeking to gain understanding of voluntary community work and to design artefacts in support for such work. Community work is studied through an ethnographically-inspired approach for empirical observation of community activity and the artefacts that support it. Field study of ‘voluntary working order’ was conducted in several voluntary communities: amateur radio and three student organisations. In studying such working order, one must renounce a set of assumptions that are commonly made about work, starting with the very idea of remuneration as a basic motivation. Instead, challenge as a major motivation is proposed for work in voluntary communities. To draw inspiration for future design, an examination is made of the way this motivation is reflected in the features of technology created by the communities for their own use, in the working contexts of the field settings. Lessons learned about amateur work are then used and refined while reflecting on amateur-work-oriented design of IT artefacts conducted within a student organisation, with a particular interest in self-sustainability of participatory design practices in such settings. Practices of participatory design are re-considered in the context of voluntary work, the absence of the employer-employee conflict, the challenges and learning trajectories of the members. As development is done by members of the student community, design interventions for self-sustainability of amateur software development are described and reflected upon. A generic approach is proposed for action aimed at self-sustainability in amateur settings. The socio-technical features that resemble across the communities studied and practices experienced are then grouped under the generic name of the perspective developed in this thesis: “Amateur Community”. The perspective i is proposed as a point of departure for further study and design intervention in similar communities. Comparisons are made between Amateur Community and other approaches such as Community of Practice. Keywords: amateur, volunteer, community, work, amateur work, participatory design, software development, challenge, contingency, pioneering, public, personal development, learning, hands-on learning, self- sustainability ii Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my supervisor, Yngve Sundblad for his advice, for being open to my rather exotic suggestions of studying computer support for amateur work, and for helping me find a research grant. His openness and continuous support for my efforts in visiting and working with amateurs have been of great value for my work. I also owe Yngve the honour of having had John Bowers as second supervisor. John offered precious guidance in grounding and conducting research as well as in interpreting results. I want also to thank John for the patience that he showed when my results were late or not satisfactory. Olle Bälter was instrumental in helping to move things on with my research, my publications and my dissertation. I thank him also for putting us in contact with Dr. Michael Muller, who, as opponent, provided precious feedback on the late form of the manuscript. Ovidiu Sandor is at the root of many evolutions that lead to this thesis. Not only because he brought me to IPLab and proposed my acceptance as a PhD student, but mainly for showing me an example of ambition and exemplary conduct in research. Much of the design and development work reported in this thesis would not have been possible without his seminal work with the WWW systems of BEST at a time when the WWW was in its beginnings for professional companies, not to mention voluntary organisations. His early observations on Participatory Design and computer supported cooperation in the BEST context were precious insights to me. The HMI graduate school provided an instructive perspective on multi- disciplinary research. I would especially like to thank Kerstin Severinson- Eklundh, Ann Lantz, Martin Helander and Håkan Alm. Liam Bannon gave me good advice during his visits within the HMI school framework. Tessy Cerratto Pargman has been of great help in my late work and motivation as a research student. I am happy that my work inspired her the initiative of a paper that we wrote together. Olle Sundblad has been part of another co-authoring effort. I thank Daniel Pargman for doing a very good thesis that helped me in finding my way through literature and for very nice discussions. I also had helpful discussions on various themes with Anders Hedman, Henrry iii Rodriguez, Kristina Groth, Maria Normark and other fellow graduate students at IPLab and CID. Björn Eiderbäck has been a good friend and roommate. Colleagues at the “Smart” studio of the Interactive Institute, especially Aurelian Bria, Konrad Tollmar, Ingvar Sjöberg, Ariana Kajfes, and Sara Ilstedt Hjelm, provided a stimulating company while working in a fascinating field from a multitude of backgrounds. Amateurs working in the places where I conducted my research were of course of essential help. This thesis would not exist without their kindness and patience. Aurelian Bria (YO3GDL) inspired me with his Ham enthusiasm to study the amateur radio community and facilitated access in Romania and Sweden. One of the contacts was his brother Alex (YO3GLJ) who helped me to gain access to further Ham work places. Cristina Potra opened communication channels with AIESEC, and Dan Luca, Isolda Strom and Mieke Van Den Munckhof helped getting in contact with AEGEE. Many thanks to Philipp von Klitzing for his contribution. When doing IT design and development in BEST, many people provided enormous help, trust and encouragement. Paolo Cravero, Vangelis Sakkopoulos and Andras Grepaly believed that an IT group could be set up in a student organisation. The belief was brought further by Marc Basany, Irina Nicolescu, Florian Gayk, Morten Petersen, Mirel Radu, Marta Sabou, Igor Borojevic and other dedicated members. Thomas Laroche and Stefan Baebler helped me a lot in both design and development of technologies presented here. Enthusiastic beneficiaries of our design include Raul Firu, Priit Potter, Jesus Hidalgo, Adrian Mihai, Frederik Habils, and others. Zsuzsanna Keszler Olivier Cuisenaire, Nikos Kefallinos, Karam Sidaros and Urška Demšar participated actively in the early application design efforts. Later such efforts involved Riinu Lepa, Risto Koivunen, Andrea Casamassima, Pedro Jorge, Josefin Berg, Jana Loncarevic, Lia Mavridou (whom I also thank for the T- shirt design on the front cover!), Gwenael Alizon, Anna Håkansson, and Maria Håkansson. My mother used to knit long at night so she could help me become a student. She wanted me to be a medical doctor, now I am about to do something about the ‘doctor’ part. Thanks to Cristina, my fiancée, for believing in me all these years, and for the years to come. iv Contents Chapter 1 Introduction: Goals and Related work.....................................1 1.1 Community and voluntary work............................................................1 1.2 Objectives..............................................................................................2 1.3 Terms.....................................................................................................3 1.4 Research questions.................................................................................5 1.5 Structure of the thesis.............................................................................6 1.6 Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).................................6 1.7 Methods................................................................................................11 1.8 Related work........................................................................................17 Chapter 2 A Field Study of Amateur Radio work..................................25 2.1 Introduction..........................................................................................25 2.2 Method and Setting..............................................................................27 2.3 Talk on the radio..................................................................................28 2.4 Interim analysis: the amateur radio media...........................................38 2.5 Reconsidering amateur radio work......................................................41 2.6 Tools constructed by radio amateurs...................................................58 2.7 Conclusions: the perpetual work to make radio work..........................63 Chapter 3 Field studies of Amateur Work and Technology in Three Student Organisations....................................................................................69 3.1 Introduction..........................................................................................69 3.2 Field Study...........................................................................................70 3.3 Community endurance through contingencies in arranging International Exchange Projects.................................................................71 3.4 Software Supporting Exchange Projects..............................................82 v 3.5 Conclusions.......................................................................................112 Chapter 4 Amateur-work-oriented design............................................115 4.1 Introduction.......................................................................................115 4.2 Participatory design for Non-Profit and Volunteer Work.................119 4.3 Implications to self-sustainability of new activities as drawn from the field studies in Chapter 2 and 3...............................................................123 4.4 Guiding principles for intervention aimed at self-sustainability.......124 4.5 Setting: IT Committee.......................................................................125 4.6 Design as challenge: participatory design as a new activity in the student community..................................................................................128 4.7 Design for challenge: supporting amateur software developers........144 4.8 Toward an approach to self-sustainability based on member personal development............................................................................................163 4.9 Conclusions.......................................................................................169 Chapter 5 Discussion. The Amateur Community................................173 5.1 Amateur community features............................................................173 5.2 Conclusions.......................................................................................185 References...................................................................................................189 vi Chapter 1 Introduction: Goals and Related work 1.1 Community 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 1