Cross-participants: fostering design-use mediation in an open source software community

Motivation – This research aims at investigating emerging roles and forms of participation fostering design-use mediation during the Open Source Software design process Research approach – We compare online interactions for a successful “pushed-by-users” design process with unsuccessful previous proposals. The methodology developed, articulate structural analyses of the discussions (organization of discussions, participation) to actions to the code and documentation made by participants to the project. We focus on the useroriented and the developer-oriented mailing-lists of the Python project. Findings/Design – We find that key-participants, the cross-participants, foster the design process and act as boundary spanners between the users and the developers’ communities. Research limitations/Implications –These findings can be reinforced developing software to automate the structural analysis of discussions and actions to the code and documentation. Further analyses, suppo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ECCE
• Authors: Flore Barcellini, Françoise Détienne, Jean-Marie Burkhardt
• Keywords: Design Process, Design-use Mediation, ECCE 2007, Human Computer Interaction, Participation Fostering Design-use