Value-led personas:a methodology to promote sustainable user-centered design?

This paper explores how values can be the focus in user-centered design through the use of value-led personas. Its starting point was exploring value-driven alternative models for micro-business based on the principles of open source. The research documented in this paper is a participatory design process with two emergent micro-businesses as co-researchers. The stakeholders of each micro-business were presented as value-led personas, representing a deep understanding of their values and beliefs gained from ethnographic data. In this project, the use of value-led personas effectively communicated the core values of each micro-business and enabled participants to visualize how stakeholders would interact with the organization. Value-led personas thus have the potential to be an effective communication technique in user-centered design that can lead to purposeful action

Open source guilds:enabling micro­ businesses to create a sustainable community of practice?

This paper outlines how the concept of open source guilds was developed through undertaking a pilot action research project with three micro-businesses in the North West of England as co-researchers. The research initially aimed to explore how a virtual guild could enable micro-businesses to move towards sustainability by creating a community of practice based on open source principles. However, research findings raised the issue of both the business and its community needing to become sustainable. The open source guild addresses this issue by adding the proprietary aspect of the original medieval guilds, enabling a micro-business to defend its core intellectual property while creating a sustainable community based on shared values that operates both off-and on-line

Beyond box-ticking:a study of stakeholder involvement in social enterprise governance

Purpose – This paper aims to present the findings from a small study of social enterprise governance in the UK, taking a case study approach to uncover the experiences of internal actors who are involved in their board-level management. Design/methodology/approach – The study took a qualitative constructionist approach, focusing on stakeholder involvement in social enterprise governance. Initial theme analysis of 14 semi-structured interviews with board or senior management representatives revealed key issues in the governance of social enterprise, which were then explored through a comparative case study of two organisations. Findings – The study found that social enterprises surveyed employed a number of mechanisms to ensure appropriate stakeholder involvement in their governance, including adopting a participatory democratic structure which involves one or more groups of stakeholders, creation of a non-executive advisory group to inform strategic direction and adopting social accounting with external auditing. The research also highlighted the potential of the community interest company legal form for UK social enterprise, particularly in developing the role of the asset-locked body in terms of providing CIC governance oversight. Research limitations/implications – This survey was limited to the North West of England; however its findings can potentially support innovation in conceptual developments internationally. Originality/value – This research contributes to the under-researched field of social enterprise governance, potentially enabling these organisations to adopt more effective governance mechanisms that appropriately manage the involvement of beneficiaries and other stakeholders

The Psychological Implications of Stakeholder Involvement in Social Enterprise Governance

Social enterprises are a unique form of organisation, located where the public, private and voluntary sectors intersect, typically founded by dynamic individuals who deal with social injustice by finding resources in the community. As these organisations develop, isomorphic pressures from stakeholders such as funders and regulatory bodies lead to a formalisation of previously informal relations with vulnerable beneficiaries. This could cause harm or distress to the beneficiaries, which can then impact on front-line workers who are providing day-to-day services to them. In healthcare organisations, it has been shown that workers can form psychological defences to deal with the stress of working with people in pain or distress, which can account for otherwise inexplicable behaviour in teams and organisations. Since social enterprises also deal with people who are vulnerable and needy, they too could evolve similar defences, complicated by the involvement of these individuals in the roles of both client and as stakeholder that can influence the organisation's governance. This exploratory paper first considers social enterprise as a unique form of organisation, then how stakeholder involvement in governance contributes to legitimacy. After outlining how individual and group psychological defences can affect healthcare organisations, the paper then considers the implications for social enterprise governance, concluding with recommendations for further research

The entrepreneur as system architect:Designing narrative forms of open source business model

In the digital platform economy, individual freelance workers are matched to their temporary employers thorough online systems. Workers interact with platform firms individually, undermining collective action and hence worker power. This is an issue for policy, as these workers do not have the protections afforded to those in traditional industries. The platform economy has also enabled open source, where the software architect creates a boundary around the software code they accept from a distributed group of contributors. The role of the software architect raises interesting questions about power in what can be seen as a form of networked organisation. Open source can be viewed as a narrative of software code and discussions about it that create a boundary around the project. Open source can also be framed as a business model, where value created by contributors is captured by the software architect for the benefit of both contributors and users. Business models can be viewed as a narrative that can both express and create a desired future for the entrepreneur. The potential of open source to inform narrative forms of business model is the research area. Taking a social constructionist perspective, this study used workshop and participant observation techniques to engage with the founders and other stakeholders in three case study organisations. The empirical contribution is that a narrative form of open source business model can have a power-balanced structure through a discursive process of boundary management. The methodological contribution is that annotated portfolio techniques can reveal an entrepreneur’s business model design from ethnographic data. The theoretical contribution is the importance of conceptual integrity to business models as well as to software engineering. The issue of conceptual integrity can be explored further in future research on factors in business model success

Reflective ethnographic design of collaborative economy business models using annotated portfolios

As the collaborative platform economy develops, network effects tend to create one dominant platform within each domain such as transport, reducing the power of workers to find alternatives. The research problem is to find a specific methodology that could enable researchers to draw on the experience of participants as workers and their wish to create ways of working that offer them greater power in the collaborative economy. Ethnographic studies can enable researchers to discover how workers make sense of their involvement in the collaborative platform economy and provide valuable data on how current business models and platforms can affect worker power. However, a wish to promote worker power implies a participatory form of research that aims to break down power relations between researchers and participants. This chapter reflects on the methodological challenges of studying the collaborative economy ethnographically in order to develop new business models and platforms. Annotated portfolios, a technique used in human-computer interaction, offers the potential to enable worker experience to inform new business model designs. Researchers can use annotated portfolios to articulate latent designs in ethnographic data gathered from engagement with workers in the collaborative economy. In bringing these designs into existence, researchers can then contribute their perspective to a co-design process with these workers. Annotated portfolio techniques can thus help both researchers and workers to use ethnographic data to design new business models in the collaborative economy

Exploring a new producer-consumer interaction model for facilitating collective action in the collaborative economy

Digital networking technology has helped to bring about the networked society, including new forms of organization and production. In what has been called the collaborative economy, online networking sites act as platforms to mediate between individual freelance workers and customers. These platforms benefit customers as they can find the lowest price for products and services worldwide, but workers do not have the job security or benefits that workers in more traditional organizations have. The collaborative economy also undermines traditional forms of collective action, particularly trade unions, who have lost members in recent years. However, these traditional forms of organization, including cooperatives and guild-like organizations as well as trade unions, are arguably more relevant than ever as growing numbers of individual freelance workers interact with their customers via online platforms. Following reflections on fifteen years of trade union software quality assurance initiatives, particularly the Swedish UserAward program, we realize that there are potential benefits in combining aspects of cooperative, guild and trade union models to promote collective action in the context of the growing collaborative economy. We examine the role that these models could play in enabling user participation and influence and bring them together in the form of a conceptual model which we have called a Software Review Alliance Board. The contribution we make is to propose how a Review Alliance Board model can be an alternative strategy for both software producers and trade unions in assuring the quality of workplace software. Through this model, union members, software programmers, workplace managers and researchers can participate in collective action through the Alliance Board. We propose that a Value Sensitive Design process that considers both direct and indirect stakeholders is appropriate to implement this model

Critical reflection on data publics:a multi-methodology perspective

A problem with making “big data” (such as that on climate change) public is its interpretation. Raw data is generally incomprehensible, and requires some form of analysis to make sense. Previous attempts involve citizens in this analysis have often taken the form of competitive hackathons, where volunteer programmers work on the data and create interpretations of it over a short time period (Briscoe and Mulligan, 2014). However, these interpretations rarely go beyond dealing with technical problems, and it seems difficult to get other citizens involved due to this technical nature (Hellberg and Hedström, 2015). When dealing with complex systems (Mulgan and Leadbeater, 2013), such as global weather patterns or human societies (and the effects of one on the other), we need to deal with underlying factors. The experience of a group of 10 PhD researchers on the Hebridean island of Tiree offers a pointer to a multi-methodology approach that could help deal with big data and uncover non-obvious factors. Their work in October 2016 focused on re-purposing 11 phone boxes on the island that had been recently been decommissioned and given to the community. Data gathering took place over two days, the first day was a “data walk” to elict thoughts and reflections from both researchers and islanders on what constituted data, where walking has been shown to help with gathering data about a sense of place (Evans and Jones, 2011). On the second day, the researchers undertook a “writing free-fall”, where each participant spent an hour with a phone box, reflecting on both the box itself, its surroundings and its possibilities. Free-writing (Badger and White, 2000) was encouraged to overcome blocks to creativity. This parallel process allowed each participant to express their creativity and wishes in a methodology of their choice, leading to a diverse range of responses. These included practical technical solutions, propositional objects, values-led design, poetry and art. After this individual engagement, one researcher gathered together all their responses in a group exercise. As each person gave their response, they brought with them their own background, methodology and worldview. The discussion developed to consider design possibilities that were not obvious, that challenged the taken-for-granted assumptions about what a telephone box was, uncovering its deeper meaning to the local community. This process thus became one of critical reflection (Mezirow, 1990). As the discussion progressed, the value of openness became important in both implementing technical solutions and in creating a renewed sense of community around the re-purposed phone boxes. We propose this multi-methodology as one that could be particularly relevant to data publics, where stakeholders could reflect on the potential for a particular dataset to inform and enhance their lives.Bringing their individual reflections and approaches together in a facilitated session can then promote critical reflection, a transformation of the meaning of the dataset. Such a transformed meaning can then inform how the data could be used to create sustainable solutions to wicked problems in society (Rittel and Webber, 1973), including the effects of climate change

The Platform Review Alliance Board:Designing an organisational model to bring together producers and consumers in the review and commissioning of platform software

Digital networking technology has helped to bring about the platform economy, in which online networking sites mediate between individual freelance workers and their temporary employers. However, the digital platform economy undermines traditional forms of collective action, particularly trade unions. Following reflections on 15 years of trade union software quality assurance initiatives, particularly the Swedish UserAward program, we realize that there are potential benefits in combining aspects of cooperative, guild, and trade union models in the context of the platform economy. We examine the role that these models could play in enabling new forms of collective action and we bring them together in the form of a conceptual model which we have called the Platform Review Alliance Board. We articulate the Platform Review Alliance model as a set of design patterns, which we invite stakeholders to comment on, refine, and ultimately subscribe to. We then apply these design patterns in the domain of transport. In this domain, we show how software producers, users of the software, and other stakeholders, including individual transport providers, can participate in a Review Alliance Board for the commissioning, production, and review of software platforms for transport systems. The contribution we make is to propose how membership in a Review Alliance Board can be an alternative strategy for both software producers and trade union representatives in taking collective action to assure the quality of workplace software in the context of the growing platform economy

The open source guild:creating more sustainable enterprise

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report on an action research project with two emergent micro-businesses that explored how their business model connected with the principles of open source. Design/Methodology/Approach: We first gained initial qualitative data to establish the core values of each micro-business, which we then explored in the context of open source and business models in two design workshops with each organisation. Findings: We developed the open source guild business model, which has the elements of: building a focal micro-business with resources secured through the guild, promoting learning and development through apprenticeship, promoting shared values through a commons of experience and capturing value by protecting key intellectual property. Research limitations/implications: This research was undertaken with two emergent micro-businesses in the North West of England. Further research will be needed to establish the wider applicability of the open source guild model. Practical implications: The open source guild model can be a mechanism for an emergent micro-business to create a community around their values and grow their business without conventional external investment of resources. Originality/value: This research contributes to the literature on business models based on open source and how these models can be sustainable in terms of the quadruple bottom line, which extends the triple bottom line to include personal values and meaning