Abstract. Thispaper explores some of the reasons that may underlie the gender segregation and declining levels of female participation within the field of computing in Europe during the 1990s in both the professional (industrial) and academic spheres. The interrelationships between three areas – communicative processes, social networks and legitimizing claims to knowledge overlaid by gendered‐power relations – are used to analyse and explain the existing situation. The paper draws upon statistical data to explore the extent of gender segregation and then focuses on the authors' own experiences within the UK and Scandinavia in order to explore some of the underlying causes. While direct discrimination does still occur, the paper suggests that indirect, deep‐rooted discrimination is the major reason for the situation that currently exists. Drawing upon our own experiences in academia and business and acknowledging the importance of the institutional context, the paper offers a number of recommendations as to how the current situation may be improved. We suggest first that consideration is given to the pedagogical design and marketing of computing courses so that individuals are initially attracted to computing from far more diverse backgrounds, approaches and interests than at present. Second, we suggest that those with influence in the field reflect upon the constitution and behaviours of the informal networks in which they are involved and seek to include female researchers more actively here. Finally we suggest that consideration is given in more general terms to how the field may become more gender neutral and, thus, more inclusive in the future. Masculine discourses and ‘hard’ skills have dominated within computing for too long and contribute significantly to the declining participation of women within computing.

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Contemporary information systems development (ISD) takes place in a dynamic environment; it is generally acknowledged as a complex activity. It has been proposed that ISD projects should be viewed as a complex adaptive system (CAS) and that these projects are better understood through the application of CAS. Distributed participatory design (DPD) is an approach to contemporary ISD where different, geographically dispersed stakeholders, often called the crowd, participate voluntarily and typically unaffiliated with the development organisation in the development and design of information systems in distributed design teams which are mostly online on Internet, web-based, and social media platforms. Going beyond individual methods, techniques, and practices, the objective of this research is twofold as we answer the two research questions: how are DPD projects in crowdsourced ISD managed and performed in their entirety and how does CAS theory provide plausible explanations and contribute to an understanding of contemporary ISD? For this purpose, we present a case of DPD in crowdsourced ISD in an intergovernmental, not-for-profit environment in the context of a DPD project which engaged Pacific Youth in the development of a digital game where we applied CAS theory to better understand and gain insights for ISD theory and practice.

A growing number of IT organizations pursue a systematic strategy to mature their software operation. These efforts have severe implications for their customers or clients both in terms of opportunities and challenges. As a consequence a number of customer related models have emerged as a supplement to the software process centered maturity models. This paper addresses the improvement of the customer-supplier relation in IT development on a theoretical, a normative, and a practical level. It presents theoretically founded insights into the nature of customersupplier collaborations. This knowledge is used 1) to evaluate and compare normative models for how to improve customer-supplier relations and 2) to explore practical ways to improve the relation between an IT organization and its customers. The paper is concluded with a discussion of implications for research and practice.

This paper is a discussion about how the Application Perspective works in practice.t We talk about values and attitudes to system development and computer systems, and we illustrate how they have been carried out in practice by examples from the Florence project. 2 The metaphors 'utensil' and 'epaulet' refer to questions about how we conceive the computer system we are to design in the system development process. Our experience is that, in the scientific community, technical challenges mean making computer systems that may be characterised as 'epaulets': they have technical, fancy features, but are not particularly useful. Making small, simple, but useful computer systems, more like 'utensils', does not give as much credit even if the development process may be just as challenging.