Whats GNU got to do with it?: participatory design, infrastructuring and free/open source software
Abstract
In this paper we link Participatory Design (PD) to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) via Infrastructuring. We describe the characteristics of FOSS focusing on extensibility, generativity and their communities of practice. We discuss how FOSS products and communities provide valuable resources to PD projects beyond the design phase. We use evidence from our long-running, community based PD project to show how FOSS provides essential elements of infrastructure that contribute to the sustainability of this project and suggest that the mutual learning outcomes of PD, together with FOSS resources, can support users' participation after design. We contribute to PD by providing a point of view from developers and facilitators, who combine FOSS and PD, that furthers an understanding of how these two areas are related.
