Scaling Participation -- What Does the Concept of Managed Communities Offer for Participatory Design?

This paper investigates mechanisms for scaling participation in participatory design (PD). Specifically, the paper focuses on managed communities, one strategy of generification work. We first give a brief introduction on the issue of scaling in PD, followed by exploring the strategy of managed communities in PD. This exploration is underlined by an ongoing case study in the healthcare sector, and we propose solutions to observed challenges. The paper ends with a critical reflection on the possibilities managed communities offer for PD. Managed communities have much to offer beyond mere generification work for large-scale information systems, but we need to pay attention to core PD values that are in danger of being sidelined in the process

Generification by Translation: Designing Generic Systems in Context of the Local

While the mechanisms of generification during implementation and use of large-scale systems are well known, this paper extends and analyzes the notion into the design phase of generic systems and provides insight into the associated socio-technical key mechanisms at play. The paper draws on the information infrastructure literature, and emphasizes how generic systems’ designs always face infrastructural challenges and opportunities in the development process. The paper illustrates how a vendor solved the infrastructural challenges by (to a large degree) lending on local practice, translating perspectives, and carefully adjusting their design strategy over time. We argue that our findings have implications for practice because they underscore the malleability of the collaboration process between vendor and users. First, we suggest that designing a generic system calls for a flexible vendor willing to change and adjust the development strategy along with the evolving project. Second, to strengthen the user-developer collaboration, we highly recommend giving the user-participants, at the very early stage of a development project, a basic understanding of software design, and raising their skills in making precise contextual narratives. Third, we emphasize the importance of the project management’s engagement in recruiting clinical personnel and in making it possible for the clinicians to participate in the project. Empirically, the paper presents the initial stages of a large electronic patient record (EPR) development project that has been running from 2012 in the North Norwegian health region and is due to finish in 2016

Development as a Free Software: Extending Commons Based Peer Production to the South

This paper examines the concept of commons-based peer production (CBPP) in the context of public health information systems in the South. Based on an analysis of the findings from a global network of software development and implementation, an approach to preserve the importance of local user participation in distributed development is presented. Through practical examples, we discuss the applicability of the CBPP model for software production aimed at improving the public health sector in the South, and propose the concept of a “snowflake topology”

From Artefacts to Infrastructures

In their initial articulation of the direction of the CSCW field, scholars advanced an open-ended agenda. This continuing commitment to open-ness to different contexts and approaches is not, however, reflected in the contents of the major CSCW outlets. The field appears to privilege particular forms of cooperative work. We find many examples of what could be described as ‘localist studies’, restricted to particular settings and timeframes. This focus on the ‘here and now’ is particularly problematic when one considers the kinds of large-scale, integrated and interconnected workplace information technologies—or what we are calling Information Infrastructures—increasingly found within and across organisations today. CSCW appears unable (or unwilling) to grapple with these technologies—which were at the outset envisaged as falling within the scope of the field. Our paper hopes to facilitate greater CSCW attention to Information Infrastructures through offering a re-conceptualisation of the role and nature of ‘design’. Design within an Information Infrastructures perspective needs to accommodate non-local constraints. We discuss two such forms of constraint: standardisation (how local fitting entails unfitting at other sites) and embeddedness (the entanglement of one technology with other apparently unrelated ones). We illustrate these themes through introducing case material drawn on from a number of previous studies

Information technology, contract and knowledge in the networked economy: a biography of packaged software for contract management

In this research I investigate the intersection of information and communication technology (ICT), contract and knowledge in the networked economy as illuminated by the “life” of contract management software (CMS). The failure of CMS to fulfill market expectations provides the motivating question for this study. Based on interview, survey and archival data, I construct a “biography” of CMS from a market perspective informed by the theory of commoditization as well as studies of markets from economic sociology. From the latter, I draw upon the theory of performativity in markets to identify in the failure of CMS a series of breakdowns in performative assumptions and operations normally at work in the making of a packaged software market, ranging from a failure in classification performativity to a detachment of marketized criteria, in the form of analyst ratings, from the underlying software product and vendors. This catalog of breakdown indicates that packaged software production implicates multiple levels of commoditization, including financialized meta-commodities and marketized criteria, in a dynamic I theorize as substitution of performance. I explore the implications of my findings for packaged software and for process commodities more generally, suggesting, inter alia, that process commoditization may revolve around contract and information exchange rather than product definition. I go on to propose an open theorization of contract as a technology of connectedness, in a relationship of potential convergence, complementarity and substitution with ICT, interpenetrating and performative. My contributions are to information systems and organizations research on the topics of packaged software and the relationship of ICT, contract and organizational knowledge; and to economic sociology on the topics of performativity in markets and product qualification in process commoditization

Growing an information infrastructure for healthcare based on the development of large-scale Electronic Patient Records

The papers of this thesis are not available in Munin. Paper 1. Silsand, L., Ellingsen, G. (2014). Generification by Translation: Designing Generic Systems in Context of the Local. Available in: Journal of Association for Information Systems, vol. 15(4): 3. Paper 2. Christensen, B., Silsand, L., Wynn, R. and Ellingsen, G. (2014). The biography of participation. In Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference, 6-10 Oct. Windhoek, Namibia. ACM Digital Library. Paper 3. Silsand, L. and Ellingsen, G. (2016). Complex Decision-Making in Clinical Practice. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '16). ACM Digital Library. ISBN: 978-1-4503-3592-8. Paper 4: Silsand, L., Ellingsen, G. (2017). Governance of openEHR-based information Infrastructures. (Manuscript). Paper 5. Silsand, L. (2017). The ‘Holy Grail’ of Interoperability of Health Information Systems: Challenges and Implications. Available in: Stigberg S., Karlsen J., Holone H., Linnes C. (eds) Nordic Contributions in IS Research. SCIS 2017. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 294. Springer, Cham. This thesis provides empirical insights about socio-technical interdependencies affecting the making and scaling of an Information Infrastructure (II) for healthcare based on the development of large-scale Electronic Patient Records. The Ph.D. study is an interpretive case study, where the empirical data has been collected from 2012 to 2017. In most developed countries, the pressures from politicians and public in general for better IT solutions have grown enormously, not least within Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems. Considerable attention has been given to the proposition that the exchange of health information is a critical component to reach the triple aim of (1) better patient experiences through quality and satisfaction; (2) better health outcomes of populations; and (3) reduction of per capita cost of health care. A promising strategy for dealing with the challenges of accessibility, efficiency, and effective sharing of clinical information to support the triple aim is an open health-computing platform approach, exemplified by the openEHR approach in the empirical case. An open platform approach for computing EPR systems addresses some vital differences from the traditional proprietary systems. Accordingly, the study has payed attention to the vital difference, and analyze the technology and open platform approach to understand the challenges and implications faced by the empirical process. There are two main messages coming out of this Ph.D. study. First, when choosing an open platform approach to establish a regional or national information infrastructure for healthcare, it is important to define it as a process, not a project. Because limiting the realization of a large-scale open platform based infrastructure to the strict timeline of a project may hamper infrastructure growth. Second, realizing an open platform based information infrastructure requires large structural and organizational changes, addressing the need for integrating policy design with infrastructure design

An Approach to Addressing the Usability and Local Relevance of Generic Enterprise Software

Designing for usability and locally relevant features for end-users in generic ‘product’ or ‘packaged’ enterprise software projects is challenging. On the generic level, designers must aim at supporting variety, which is contradictory to the specificity needed to make user interfaces usable, and functionality relevant to end-users within specific organizational contexts. Also, addressing these concerns during the implementation of generic software is difficult due to limitations in the design flexibility of the software, time and resource constraints, possible maintenance issues following customization, and a lack of design methods appropriate for the context of software implementation. Reporting from an ongoing Action Design Research project following a global generic health software, this paper conceptualizes a Generic Software Design Lab that aims to equip design on the level of software implementation with flexibility, tools, and methods to efficiently localize generic software. By conceptualizing the approach and discussing how it works to strengthen implementation-level designers’ ability to address usability and local relevance, the paper contributes with learnings to research and practice related to design, development, and implementation of generic software