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Distributed Design and Distributed Social Awareness: Exploring Inter-subjective Dimensions of Roles

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Proceedings of COOP 2010

Abstract

This research deals with the investigation of inter-subjective dimensions of roles and participation in distributed design processes (DDP), as linked to group or social awareness. It is focused on an open-source software community – the Python programming language community – as a model of DDP. On the basis of semi-structured interviews, we show that participants agree upon a typology of roles based on evident activities and experiences of participants, and that this knowledge guides their strategic use of archives for maintaining situation awareness. Contextualized interviews on a specific design process helps in understanding how this typology of roles is instantiated in a design situation and how social awareness is distributed among participants.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The PEP process is similar to other design processes in distant design communities, like the Request for Comment used by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the XEP process used by the jabber community (www.jabber.org). This formal process is also closed to the consensus-based decision making of Apache.

  2. 2.

    This PEP concerns the introduction of a module for decimal calculation, pushed by users in the financial domain.

  3. 3.

    Faked names.

  4. 4.

    Ernesto was not anymore part of the project at the time of the PEP, but was the owner of the first code, with Aziz, to implement decimal in Python. In this sense, it is referred by participants to be a contributor in respect of a code ownership value in OSS communities. For this reason, we do not discuss any further his profile.

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Acknowledgements

We thank our interviewees for the time they have spent to answer our questions.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ergonomics Lab, Research Center on Work and Development, Cnam, 41 rue Gay-Lussac, 75005, Paris, France

    Flore Barcellini

  2. Département SES – Bureau B 421, LTCI- UMR 5141 – CNRS – Telecom Paris Tech, 46 rue Barrault, 75634, Paris, Cedex 13, France

    Françoise Détienne

  3. INRIA, Paris, France

    Françoise Détienne

  4. Ergonomics-Behavior-Interaction Lab, Paris Descartes University, 45 rue des Saints-Pères, 75006, Paris, France

    Jean-Marie Burkhardt

Authors
  1. Flore Barcellini
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  2. Françoise Détienne
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  3. Jean-Marie Burkhardt
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Flore Barcellini .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , ICD/Tech-CICO Fre CNRS 2848, Universite de Technologie de Troyes, rue Marie Curie 12, Troyes Cedex, 10010, France

    Myriam Lewkowicz

  2. IEP, rue Gaston de Saporta 25, Aix-en-Provence, 13625, France

    Parina Hassanaly

  3. , Information Systems and New Media, University of Siegen, Hölderlinstr. 3, Siegen, 57068, Germany

    Volker Wulf

  4. , Information Systems and New Media, University of Siegen, Hoelderlinstr. 3, siegen, 57068, Germany

    Markus Rohde

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Barcellini, F., Détienne, F., Burkhardt, JM. (2010). Distributed Design and Distributed Social Awareness: Exploring Inter-subjective Dimensions of Roles. In: Lewkowicz, M., Hassanaly, P., Wulf, V., Rohde, M. (eds) Proceedings of COOP 2010. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-211-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-211-7_2

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