Social Participation
in Open Source: What it
Means for Designers
Paula m. bach
University of Illinois, GLIS | pmbach@acm.org
michael twidale
University of Illinois, GLIS | twidale@illinois.edu
[ 1] Shneiderman, B.
“Science 2.0.” Science
319 (2008): 1349–1350.
their endeavors to participate in
an unfolding open society. One
of Mozilla’s core tenets is to preserve openness on the Internet.
Socially meaningful participation
isn’t new—it happens in church-es, neighborhood communities,
professional organizations, and
many other venues—but we’ve
just begun to look at social participation on the Web. Of particular interest here is how designers can participate in socially
meaningful ways in open source
projects. Before we turn to this
particular interest, we’ll give an
overview of social participation.
Can open source software
save the world? Recently Brian
Behlendorf, who helped found
and develop the Apache Web
server open source project
and now sits on the Mozilla
Foundation board, asked this
question. He discussed how open
source systems are being built
to address some of the world’s
major problems: economic dis-
tress, natural-disaster responses,
broken healthcare systems, edu-
cation crises, and more.
In July 2009 a group of open
source advocates, some of them
from large, high-profile open
source projects and founda-
tions, launched Open Source
for America. Its mission is to
serve as a “central advocate to
encourage broader U.S. Federal
Government support of and par-
ticipation in Open Source projects
and technologies.”
Another a recent project called
iParticipate, spearheaded by Ben
Shneiderman [ 1], aims to create
a national initiative for partici-
pation that includes social and
computer scientists and design-
ers who build systems and study
the successes and failures of citi-
zen participation in social media.
Shneiderman cites crowdsourc-
ing innovation and open source
as examples of social-media
participation.
socially meaningful Participation
Socially meaningful participation
has the appeal of participatory
culture and social networking;
it can be defined as the expectations community members
have of interdependence, mutual
obligations, and cooperation.
Meeting these expectations
builds social capital. Social capital is the goal of social participation, and its quality is crucial.
Trust, resources for activities,
and relationships are key factors
for social capital of high quality.
The activities of individuals mark
participation. Individuals make
