Studies have shown that programmers frequently seek external information during programming, from source code and documents, as well as from other programmers because much of the information remains in the heads of programmers. Programmers therefore often ask other programmers questions to seek information in a timely fashion to carry out their work. This information seeking entails several conflicting factors. From the perspective of the information-seeking programmer, not asking questions degrades productivity. Conversely, asking questions interrupts other programmers and degrades their productivity, and may be frowned upon by peers due to the perceived social inconsideration of the information seeker. From the perspective of the recipients of the question, even though helping is costly, not helping also incurs social costs due to the deviation from social norms. To balance all these factors, this paper proposes the STeP_IN (Socio-Technical Platform for In situ Networking) framework to guide the design of systems that support information seeking during different phases of programming. The framework facilitates access to the information in the heads of other programmers while minimizing the negative impacts on the overall productivity of the team.

Design is a ubiquitous activity. The complexity of design problems requires communities rather than individuals to address, frame, and solve them. These design communities have to cope with the following barriers: (1) spatial (across distance), (2) temporal (across time), (3) conceptual (across different communities of practice, and (4) technological (between persons and artifacts). Over the last decade, we have addressed these barriers and have tried to create sociotechnical environments to turn them into opportunities for enhancing the social creativity of design communities. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organization Interfaces – computer supported cooperative

The first decade of the World Wide Web predominantly enforced a clear separation between designers and consumers. New technological developments, such as the cyberinfrastructure and Web 2.0 architectures, have emerged to support a participatory Web and social computing. These developments are the foundations for a fundamental shift from consumer cultures (specialized in producing finished goods to be consumed passively) to cultures of participation (in which all people are provided with the means to participate actively in personally meaningful activities). End-user development and meta-design provide foundations for this fundamental transformation. They explore and support new approaches for the design, adoption, appropriation, adaptation, evolution, and sharing of artifacts by all participating stakeholders. They take into account that cultures of participation are not dictated by technology alone: they are the result of incremental shifts in human behavior and social organizations. The design, development, and assessment of five particular applications that contributed to the development of our theoretical framework are described and discussed.

The fundamental challenge for social computing is to contribute to fostering communities in which humans can transcend the limitation of the unaided, individual human mind by helping each other. Going beyond antidotal examples requires an analytical framework in which to interpret data in order to understand the context- and application-specific nature of these collaborations. We have studied peer-support communities (PSCs) in the context of the SAP Community Network (SCN), which relies on forums and conferences to support their collaboration. This research attempts to create a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of social support provided by peers in software development communities from the following perspectives: 1. Responsiveness—how responsive are communities to the needs of its members? 2. Engagement Intensity—how timely is the peer support? 3. Role Distribution—how wide is the participation of users and in what kind of roles do they participate? 4. Reward System—what is the impact of explicit reward (point) systems on community behavior? The data gained from analyzing these perspectives (and their comparison with open source software peer-support communities) has provided insights and led to an increased understanding of what works in PSCs. Here we articulate some initial design guidelines to further improve the potential benefits gained from these communities.

Abstract – The Reciprocity project is an attempt to design new collaborative environments based on the criticisms of the more centralized approaches. The project uses the potential of new Internet Peer-to-Peer middleware to support fully distributed collective activities. Each activity is managed in a distributed approach, and is specified through a set of XML documents, in accordance with our metamodel for collaborative activity. Our motivations for developing this project include a desire to exploit the potential for a more active and collaborative learning process, and a need for the kind of interorganizational exchanges that could lead to more learners becoming interested in the same topics. Our experience in the use of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) platforms has led us to think seriously about the social value of linking or exchanging learning resources and the necessity of collaborating across organizational boundaries. In these conditions, acknowledging the different actors ' contributions becomes essential in order to encourage and empower their participation.

The continuing spread of the World Wide Web and mobile communications devices is changing whole disciplines and industries. Entrepreneurs, policy makers, and researchers are recognizing that the many orders of magnitude increase in collaboration through socio-technical systems offers compelling opportunities for business, education, national security, and beyond (1). The vital importance of collaboration justifies it as the focus for the next phase of science, whose new research methods could have high intellectual and societal payoffs (2, 3, 4). Emerging successes such as scientific collaboratories among genomic researchers, engineering innovations through open source software, and community-based participation in cultural heritage projects are early indicators of the transformative nature of collaboration (5). Ebay, Amazon, and Netflix have already reshaped consumer markets, while political participation and citizen journalism are beginning to change civil society. Patient-centered medical information and secure electronic health records are improving healthcare, while creating opportunities for clinical research. MySpace and Facebook encourage casual social networks, but they may soon play more serious roles in facilitating emergency/disaster response (6). Social media platforms, such as Wikipedia, flickr, and YouTube, are also stunning success stories of web-based

The research activities in software engineering at the Center for LifeLong Learning & Design (L3D) in the past have been grounded in the basic assumption that important aspects of software engineering are best understood as human-centered design activities. Some of the major objectives were to support designers with domain-oriented design environments, allowing them to interact at the problem domain level and to frame activities and artifacts based on an evolutionary approach. A fundamental shift occurring over the last few years is the formation of participation cultures enhanced and supported by a change from an industrialized information economy (specialized in producing finished goods to be consumed passively) to a cyber-enabled networked information economy (in which all people are provided with the means to participate actively in personally meaningful problems). Some of the implications of this fundamental shift for software engineering, including meta-design, lessons learned from open source software, and distribution and diversity in communities, are explored, and their implications for the “automate/informate” perspectives are briefly discussed. Keywords software design; domain-oriented design environments; human-problem domain interaction; meta-design; distribution and diversity; networked information economy; participation cultures

Abstract: Looking at software development as a collective knowledge activity has changed the view of the role of communication in software development from something to be eliminated to something to be nurtured. Developer-centered collaborative software development environments (CSDEs) should facilitate software development in such a way, as individual software developers collaboratively develop information artifacts through social interactions. In this chapter, we identify two distinctive types of communication in software development, coordination communication and expertise communication, and argue that different sets of design guidelines are necessary in supporting each type of communication. We then describe nine design guidelines to support expertise communication based on the theories of social capital and models of supporting collective creativity.