About the Project

Web 2.0 environments (characterized by social production, mass communication, democratizing innovation, and collaborative design) represent communities of active contributors and designers and have opened new possibilities for user/designer (or prosumer) driven evolution of socio-technical environments. The opportunity for SAP is to understand how their software environments can take advantage of these opportunities to reach new levels of innovation, collaboration, and creativity.

We will use an innovative conceptual framework (further discussed below) grounded in

• Meta-design
• Re-defining the Roles of Users and Developers
• Redistributing the Design Activity
• Re-thinking the Openness of Software Systems
• Nurturing User Communities

as a starting point to analyze current user communities associated with SAP products in order to understand the state of practice. Based on this understanding, we will explore issues that needed to be addressed to integrate better user participation in the development and evolution of SAP products. At the same time, we will refine our initial conceptual framework based on empirical data and provide a guide for the design and development of future products and user communities.

In this proposed research, we intend to use meta-design as both an analytic framework and a design framework. Using meta-design as an analytic framework, we seek to develop a better understanding of user participations in user communities associated with SAP products. Based on this better understanding, we will propose intervening strategies and techniques to re-design the social infrastructure for sustained user participations that in the end lead to better product design, support and evolution.