The Swedish public sector is involved in an overwhelming change process aiming towards creating a good-service society based on information technology. Rationalisation, efficiency and effectiveness are the leading signs in the dominating discourse of Swedish society of today. This discourse is silent about public sector employees, their agencies, their participation, and how the public sector is the dominant labour market for women. Alternative stories of women’s presence in the creation of a good-service society are presented with a focus on performances of gender, skills, learning and technology. The empirical material was collected in municipalities in the south east of Sweden. Methods sensitive to everyday practices in order to create space and time for women and their stories were developed and used. The methodological approach, feminist technoscience, provides opportunities to move beyond the dominating IT discourses in order to make visible other discourses where women are present.

In a joint research project concerning the use and design of IT in public services, we are using a simple figure of on-going design-oriented interactions to highlight shifting foci on relationships of co-development of services, citizenship and technology. We bring together a number of concrete examples of this on-going everyday co-development, presented from the different perspectives that we, as researchers from different disciplines and traditions, represent in the project. The article explores and discusses working relations of technology production and use that we see as central to what is actually making e-government happen -or not happen. The main challenge in this area, as we see it, concerns making visible, and developing supportive infrastructures for, the continuing local adaptation, development and design in use of integrated IT and public services.

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In this paper we discuss two Participatory Design (PD) projects, one in Tanzania-Zanzibar and the other one in Sweden. In both countries the design process was done through the analysis of work practices involving both designers and users. The discussion focuses on a number of factors such as location, time and scene. We also ask how different projects can be that it is still possible to talk about PD as an overall participation and design approach. If PD is not a singular, definite, closed and fixed approach on the explicit layers, so how do these projects relate to each other when focusing on methods embracing the ambiguities of participation? The paper ends with a discussion of differences and similarities considering participation in the projects.

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