Developing an Online Community for Women in Computer and Information Sciences: A Design Rationale Analysis

Abstract

We analyze the evolutionary design of an online community system designed to support a developmental learning community of women: wConnect Online. The goal of this community is to engage, connect and support women at different developmental levels with respect to education and career goals in the computer and information sciences. We chronicle the system's development as an instance of action design research, showing how a sequence of four design phases were motivated by different design goals that led to systems with differing design rationales. After motivating the research program, we describe each design phase in detail, followed by a general synthesis and discussion of lessons learned.

Developing an Online Community for Women in Computer and Information Sciences: A Design Rationale Analysis

“…This work was supported by NSF CNS-0634337. Related discussions can be found in Rosson et al, 2008;Rosson et al, 2009a;Rosson et al, 2009b;and Rosson et al, 2010b; a preliminary version of this paper appears in Rosson et al,2011b. We thank the many wConnect members who contributed to design and implementation.…”

“…As the project has evolved and grown, the community's needs and preferences have become more articulated, and the supporting software infrastructure, tools, and online activities have expanded in parallel. The goal of the current paper is to analyze and document this evolutionary software design process; in this we expand an earlier discussion that summarized key elements of the community system's design rationale (Rosson et al, 2011b, and we position the work as an instance of action design research (ADR; Sein et al, 2011).…”

An Affective, Normative and Functional Approach to Designing User Experiences for Wearables

“…We refer to these three as our actor influence network. Our implementation of ADR is similar to the participatory approach of (Rosson and Carroll 2013) and (Lindgren et al 2004)where the authors work with a development team in building an online community for women in computer and information sciences and with a team of developers in creating a tool for competence management respectively. This approach is also beneficial because it promotes the cross-fertilization of expertise between system developers and end users (Kyng 2010).…”