Ribes, David Finholt, Thomas A.. "Representing community: Knowing users in the face of changing constituencies." Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). San Diego, CA: ACM, 2008.
This paper traces the use of the concept 'community' by drawing attention to the ways in which it serves as an organizing principle within systems development. The data come from an ethnographic study of participants and their activities in the Water and Environmental Research Systems Network (WATERS). We identify four vehicles by which WATERS participants sought to know the needs, conflicts and goals of their diverse communities: engaging in vernacular discussions; organizing community forums; implementing surveys; and requirements gathering. The paper concludes that the use of community in IT development projects is substantially divorced from its traditional meanings which emphasize collective moral orientations or shared affective ties; instead, within systems development, community has a closer meaning to a 'political constituency.'
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