Markus Rohde

Towards an integrated organization and technology development

Nowadays organizations are seen as self-organizing social systems. To cope with dynamics of a continuously changing environment they have to be able to react flexibly. To support organizational change we will work out the concept of integrated organization and technology development. This approach offers a framework to deal with organizational and technological change jointly in an evolutionary and participative way. We will investigate on methods to organization development, work psychological guide-lines, approaches to software development and tailoring in use. Based on these results we will develop an integrated approach to organization and technology development.

Engaging with practices: design case studies as a research framework in CSCW

Information and communications technology (ICT) pervades most aspects of our lives and changes everydays practices in work and leisure time. When designing innovative ICTs, we need to engage with given practices, institutional arrangements, and technological infrastructures. We describe the research framework used at the University of Siegen. It is based on a collection of design case studies in particular fields of practice and identifies cross-cutting issues to compare and aggregate insights between these cases. To illustrate this framework, we describe our research activities and discuss three themes which became important in different design case studies.

Community-based learning: The core competency of residential, research-based universities

Traditionally, universities focus primarily on instructionist teaching. Such an understanding has been criticized from theoretical and practical points of view. We believe that socio-cultural theories of learning and the concepts of social capital and social creativity hold considerable promise as a theoretical base for the repositioning of universities in the knowledge society. To illustrate our assumption, we provide case studies from the University of Colorado and the University of Siegen. These cases indicate how approaches to community-based learning can be integrated into a curriculum of applied computer science. We also discuss the role these didactical concepts can play within a practice-oriented strategy of regional innovation.

Community-Building with Web-Based Systems -- Investigating a Hybrid Community of Students

This paper examines WiInf-Central, the ‘virtual homeplace’ of a student community (on Information Systems) at the University of Hamburg, and focuses on processes of social identity and community-building. Drawing on social-identity theory and communities of practice as our theoretical basis, we illustrate that the processes of identity-building and positive in-group evaluation triggered by WiInf-Central serve as a means for students of Information Systems to assert themselves against faculty members and students of other disciplines. While our study reveals strong mechanisms of social exclusion, inclusion mechanisms have to be assessed in a more differentiated way. In particular, our study shows the emergence of several ‘subgroups’, which appear largely closed to other community members. We ascribe this to both the self-organized and the hybrid – half virtual, half real – nature of the community based on WiInf-Central.

Towards a paradigmatic shift in IS: designing for social practice

The paper elaborates on the theoretical foundation of Information System understood as a field of design science. Revisiting Hevners et al. seminal paper [44], we elaborate on theoretical and conceptual shortcomings. Theoretically, we state a somehow limited perception of pragmatist thinking. Conceptually, we criticize a limited definition of the IS research field and argue in favour of an (obligatory) evaluation of IT artifacts in real world settings. To develop the design science paradigm beyond these shortcomings, we present a theoretical framework which takes the interrelation of IT artifacts and social practices as a central focus of research. Such an epistemological and ontological opening of the design science perspective leads to methodological implications. We exemplify methodological shifts by taking the Canonical Action Research (CAR) method as a problematic example. Design probes are discussed as a method which holds considerable promises under a reframed paradigm. The consequences of the theoretical and methodological reflections for a socially relevant IS design science are discussed finally.

Reality is our laboratory: communities of practice in applied computer science

The present paper presents a longitudinal study of the course ‘High-tech Entrepreneurship and New Media’. The course design is based on socio-cultural theories of learning and considers the role of social capital in entrepreneurial networks. By integrating student teams into the communities of practice of local start-ups, we offer learning opportunities to students, companies and academia. The student teams are connected to each other and to their supervisors in academia and practice through a community-system. Moreover, the course is accompanied by a series of lectures and group discussions. In this paper we want to present our experiences and to reflect upon the design changes between the first and the second instance of the course. The evaluation of the course showed that the work on real-world problems and the collaboration in teams together with partners from start-up companies were evaluated as very positive, although design flaws, and cultural and professional diversities limited the success of the first instance in 2001. For the second course in 2002, the didactical design was improved significantly according to evaluation results, which brought evidence that the design changes resulted in better collaborative practices and more stable relationships between start-up companies and students. Furthermore, it was found that especially the differences in cultural background and different historical experiences between the two distinct groups of ‘students’ and ‘entrepreneurs’ might make processes of social identification more difficult and, therefore, successful community-building less likely’.

3D Printing with Marginalized Children—An Exploration in a Palestinian Refugee Camp

We work with a multi-national network of computer clubs for families and children called come_IN. In two such clubs (located in Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank), we worked with children on playful approaches concerning 3D modeling and 3D printing within a five-week, qualitative field study. Based on this study, we report on the achievements as well as on the difficulties of digital fabrication and of “Making” in developmental and educational contexts. The benefits are related to an overarching theme of self-expression where the main focus was on dimensions as playfulness, approachable complexity, individualization, immediacy and physicality and collaboration as well as motivation. The problematic aspects were mostly related to socio-technical limitations concerning the themes of orientation and camera control, the lack of coordination and collaboration features, usability and UX issues as well as the construction and limitations of current 3D printers. Based on those findings, we have derived implications for the design and the appropriation of future systems for digital fabrication with children, especially in developmental/educational settings, such as improvements of their collaboration support or better feedback mechanisms regarding the system status towards the end user.

Motivation mechanisms for participation in human-driven semantic content creation

In the last few years, semantic technologies are continuously maturing and many applications are adopted in various field. To take a step towards overcoming the knowledge acquisition bottleneck, the challenge of generating semantic content persists. It usually requires the involvement of humans, thus motivations and incentives mechanisms that might foster human participation in the semantic content creation should be analysed. We review motivation structures of different successful communities (online communities, social web communities, open source software communities), analyse motivation mechanisms for incentivising semantic content creation, and provide some useful insights for the design of semantic annotation tools which would embed incentives mechanisms.

Computer-Enabled Project Spaces: Connecting with Palestinian Refugees across Camp Boundaries

Come_IN computer clubs are an established approach to support inter-cultural and inter-generational learning in German neighborhoods. We explore the adaptation of the come_IN concept to the Palestinian context as a means to bridge the social and economic divide that has plagued West Bank society for a period of more than six decades. Social exclusion, political conflicts and prolonged military occupation have kept the refugee camps in a perpetual state of marginalization. In this paper we report on our work in Al Amari-- a Palestinian refugee camp adjacent to the city of Ramallah. We examine how the computer club enables the emergence of social ties among residents of the camp and university students acting as tutors. Even though the ties are small-scale and informal, they have the potential to generate new and wider opportunities for exchange that may eventually support more social integration between the camps marginalized population and the wider Palestinian population.

A framework towards IT appropriation in voluntary organisations

There have been different research efforts to analyse the potential, impact and benefits of introducing Information Technology (IT) in voluntary organisations. But recent literature has highlighted that many voluntary organisations are still in an early stage of IT adoption in their organisational settings. The lack of funding, unstable organisational structures and diversity in operations are the key facts which make IT support in voluntary organisations an interesting emergent field of research. In this paper, we analyse the types and organisational structures of voluntary organisations to find out the factors which differentiate IT support in these organisations as compared to other organisations. The paper advocates the need for more ethnographic works to closely analyse the work practices of voluntary organisations. The paper provides a summary of related work carried out in participatory development with voluntary organisations and discusses the important issues which are worth investigating for the improvement of IT support in voluntary organisations.