More User Participation by New media? Media use in Small Software Firms

Abstract

New media is often regarded as opening new possibilities for participation. Concerning software engineering, we argue that it is not new technical possibilities, but the organizational context and communicative needs of developers that influence user participation. We draw on findings of our current study on software engineering in small enterprises, based on interviews with developers and managers. Our interviewees used the World Wide Web and news groups mainly for information research. E-mail was widely used for communication and data transmission. All the same, phone calls and face-to-face-communication did not loose their significance, because e-mail as a text-based medium is only of limited use to gain information or to validate interim results.