Representing community: knowing users in the face of changing constituencies

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the use of the concept 'community' by drawing attention to the ways in which it serves as an organizing principle within systems development. The data come from an ethnographic study of participants and their activities in the Water and Environmental Research Systems Network (WATERS). WATERS is a US National Science Foundation-funded observatory and cyberinfrastructure project intended to serve the heterogeneous scientific disciplines studying the water environment. We identify four vehicles by which WATERS participants sought to know the needs, conflicts and goals of their diverse communities: engaging in vernacular discussions; organizing community forums; implementing surveys; and requirements gathering. The paper concludes that the use of community in IT development projects is substantially divorced from its traditional meanings which emphasize collective moral orientations or shared affective ties; instead, within systems development, community has a closer meaning to a 'political constituency,' and is used as a short-hand for issues of inquiry, representation, inclusion and mandate.

REFERENCES

• 1: Atkins, D. E. C. Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure, National Science Foundation, 2003.
• 2: Bender, T. Community and Social Change in America. Rutgers University Press, 1978.
• 3: Callon, M. Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fisherman. in Law, J. and Kegan, P. eds. Power, Action and Belief, Routledge, 1986.
• 4: Callon, M. Techno-economic Networks and Irreversibility. in Law, J. ed. A Sociology of Monsters? Essays on Power, Technology and Domination Sociological Review Monogrpah 38, Routledge, London, 1991, 132--161.
• 5: Fischer, G. Domain-oriented design environments. Automated Software Engineering, 1 (2). 177--203.
• 6: Gieryn, T. F. Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science From Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists. American Sociological Review, 48 (6). 781--795.
• 7: Joseph A. Goguen, Requirements engineering as the reconciliation of social and technical issues, Requirements engineering: social and technical issues, Academic Press Professional, Inc., San Diego, CA, 1994
• 8: Goguen, J. and Linde, C. Techniques for Requirements Elicitation. in Fickas, S. and Finkelstein, A. eds. Proceedings, Requirements Engineering '93, Computer Society, IEEE, 1993, 152--164.
• 9: Lawrence, K. A., Finholt, T. A. and Kim, I.-h. Cyberinfrastructure for the WATERS Network: a Survey of AEESP and CUAHSI Members, 2006.
• 10: Charlotte P. Lee , Paul Dourish , Gloria Mark, The human infrastructure of cyberinfrastructure, Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 04-08, 2006, Banff, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/1180875.1180950]
• 11: Lynch, M. Scientific practice and ordinary action: Ethnomethodology and social studies of science. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 1993.
• 12: Montgomery, J. L., Harmon, T., Hass, C. N., Hooper, R., Clesceri, N. L., Graham, W., Kaiser, W., Sanderson, A., Minsker, B., Schnoor, J. and Brezonik, P. The WATERS Network: An Integrated Environmental Observatory Network for Water Research. Environmental Science and Technology, 41 (19). 6642--6647.
• 13: NAS, T.N.A.o.S. Setting Priorities for Large Research Facility Projects Supported by the National Science Foundation. The National Academies Press, Washington DC, 2004.
• 14: David Ribes , Karen S. Baker, Elements of social science engagement in information infrastructure design, Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Digital government research, May 21-24, 2006, San Diego, California [doi>10.1145/1146598.1146744]
• 15: Ribes, D. and Baker, K. S. Modes of Social Science Engagement in Community Infrastructure Design. in Steinfield, Pentland, B. T., Ackerman, M. and Contractor, N. eds. Proceedings of Third International Conference on Communities and Technology, Springer, London, 2007, 107--130.
• 16: Ribes, D. and Bowker, G. C. Organizing for Multidisciplinary Collaboration: The Case of the Geosciences Network. in Olson, G. M., Olson, J. S. and Zimmerman, A. eds. Scientific Collaboration on the Internet, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008.
• 17: Ian Sommerville , Tom Rodden , Pete Sawyer , Richard Bentley, Sociologists can be surprisingly useful in interactive systems design, Proceedings of the conference on People and computers VII, p.342-354, January 1993, York, United Kingdom
• 18: Ian Sommerville , Pete Sawyer, Requirements Engineering: A Good Practice Guide, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 1997
• 19: Susan Leigh Star , Karen Ruhleder, Steps towards an ecology of infrastructure: complex problems in design and access for large-scale collaborative systems, Proceedings of the 1994 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.253-264, October 22-26, 1994, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States [doi>10.1145/192844.193021]
• 20: Strauss, A. Continual Permutations of Action. Aldine de Gruyter, New York, 1993.
• 21: Suchman, L. Organizing Alignment: A Case of Bridge Building. Organization, 7 (2). 311--327.
• 22: Suchman, L., Trigg, R. and Blomberg, J. Working artefacts: ethnometods of the prototype. British Journal of Sociology, 53 (2). 163--179.
• 23: Taylor, F. Shifting from a heteronomous to an autonomous worldview of organizational communication: Communication theory on the cusp. Communication Theory, 15 (3). 1--35.
• 24: Taylor, J. R. and Van Every, E. J. The Emergent Organization: Communication as Its Site and Surface. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 2000.
• 25: Throgmorton, J. A. Planning as Persuasive Storytelling. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996.
• 26: WATERS (ed.), http://www.watersnet.org/history.html, accessed Dec.12.2008, 2008.
• 27: Woolgar, S. Configuring the user: The case of usability trials. in Law, J. ed. A Sociology of Monsters, Routledge, 1991.
• 28: Steve Woolgar, Rethinking requirements analysis: some implications of recent research into producer-consumer relationships in IT development, Requirements engineering: social and technical issues, Academic Press Professional, Inc., San Diego, CA, 1994

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.3 Organizational Impacts
          Subjects: Computer-supported collaborative work

Additional Classification:
  J. Computer Applications
  J.4 SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
      Subjects: Sociology

General Terms:
Human Factors

Keywords:
community, cyberinfrastructure, escience, ethnography, infrastructure, science, studies of user-centered design and requirements engineering