Participatory design in OSS development: interpretive case studies in company and community OSS development contexts
Netta Iivari · Behaviour and Information Technology · 2010
This article examines distributed participatory design in open source software (OSS) development. User participation is becoming a relevant topic of research in the OSS development context. Though it has not been examined much to date, the OSS development context has been argued to advocate a particular type of participatory design, which can now be scrutinised in its natural setting as it evolves. Two interpretive case studies on user participation in OSS development are included in this article. The first examines a traditional community OSS development project; the second concentrates on the company OSS development context, the case being a software development unit of a global corporation involved in OSS development. Through analysis of the cases, different forms of participatory design (PD), especially of distributed PD, are identified. Distributed PD is interpreted to include gaining an understanding of users' current practices, redesigning them together with users and gathering feedback from users related to the solutions. Different kinds of roles are available to users, as well as to for intermediaries ‘representing users’. Especially, the importance of online forum-based and intermediary-driven PD is emphasised in this article. Implications for PD and OSS research and practice are considered.