Community driven development as participation?: involving user communities in a software design process

In this paper we report on a case study of a participatory design process we call Community Driven Development (CDD). Together with a German software company we developed a socio-technical environment to motivate users of an existing online user community to participate in the further development of a product. For the CDD approach developers and users worked together to create a functional description and different prototypes of a target product. By conducting interviews and analyzing formal and informal processes we could identify different motivations, fears, problems and benefits the participants perceived during the process. Our study shows that an existing online community can be a valuable basis for a PD process, but it calls for a careful design of the organizational and technological setting and a sensible process moderation. It also shows that existing professionalization structures in technology design arenas may always lead to an imbalanced ‘participation’.