Terry Costantino

CAVEAT Exemplar: Participatory Design in aNon-Profit Volunteer Organisation

This paper reports a university course-based case study undertaken with a volunteer organisation. Our goals were to explore the use of participatory design in a non-profit volunteer setting; to reflect on the experience of learning and applying participatory methodologies; and to create a prototype, using off-the-shelf database software, that could become a sustainable organisational information system. We found system design methodologies that stress cooperation and consensus especially appropriate when working with volunteers, who expect control over their work in exchange for their time and effort. The Future Workshop was particularly valuable in developing group insight into work and consensus around system priorities. The study resulted in a prototype which has evolved, through in-house refinement, into a working system.

The PIPWatch toolbar: Combining PIPEDA, PETs and market forces through social navigation to enhance privacy protection and compliance

This paper describes the prototype development of the PIPWatch toolbar, a software interface device embedded within a Web browser designed to enable consumers to easily assess and compare the compliance of on-line businesses with Canadian private-sector privacy legislation - the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. (PIPEDA). It represents a new form of privacy enhancing technology (PET) that employs social navigation techniques to help an on-line community of individuals concerned about the handling of their personal information to build and share a database that tracks the privacy performance and regulatory compliance of Websites they visit.

Exploring participation in the design of public library e-services

Public libraries are in crisis-mode trying to figure out their future. One area they are struggling with is their role and relationship to the Internet -- their e-services. This study engages public library staff, vendors and members in the redesign of online account management features as a way to look at participation from the perspective of the participants. Bringing together concerns, ideas and methodologies from the fields of librarianship, education, and Participatory Design, this study uses a Participatory Action Research approach to explore what we mean by participation and to identify barriers to achieving our ideal vision of participation.

Participatory design of public library e-services

Public libraries are in crisis-mode trying to figure out their future. One area they are struggling with is their role and relationship to the Internet -- their e-services. This study engages public library staff and vendors in the redesign of online account management features as a way to explore participation from the perspective of the participants. Grounded in our experience, we explore what we mean by participation and identify barriers to achieving our ideal vision of participation. Mid-way through the project, we have begun to grapple with fundamental questions about participation and design and have identified some concerns we have, personally and organizationally, about involving library members in productive design activities, beyond their inclusion in generative and evaluative activities.

Screen time for children

When setting out to redevelop its online offerings for children, The Toronto Public Library needed to establish a position on the controversial issue of screen time for children. Given the concerns about the appropriateness, benefits and potential harms of screen time for young children, the question of what if anything the library should be providing online for children aged 5 years and under needed to be answered. This paper examines how an answer to this key question was achieved and the implications of this decision for the design of online services for children.

Issues of Participation: A Framework for Choices and Compromises

Members of the Participatory Design PD community often raise concerns about participation-participation in what, by whom, and for what purpose? To help determine and answer questions important to participatory practice, the author derived a framework of key issues of participation using literature from Participatory Design and related practices such as Participatory Action Research, Participatory Democracy and Participatory Development. The key issues are: values, representation, power relations, context, transformations, effectiveness, and sustainability. The author posits that giving attention to these issues when designing, conducting and reflecting on participation will improve participatory practices by making choices and compromises more explicit to those involved in the research as well as those who review the research results. The paper discusses how the author derived the framework and then uses the selected literature to explore each of the seven issues and how they can be addressed in participatory practice in general, and within PD more specifically.

PIPWatch Toolbar: Using Social Navigation to Enhance Privacy Protection and Compliance

The main goal of this project is to evaluate the prospects of combining social navigation techniques into a PET that helps Internet users identify which Websites comply with Canadian privacy legislation and to honor the concerns common among Canadians who conduct personal transactions via the Web. Our PIPWatch tool allows users to collect and share information about the privacy practices of various Websites.