Authors:
Roberto Pereira
and
M. Cecilia C. Baranauskas
Affiliation:
University of Campinas, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Organizational Semiotics, Culture, Values, Social Software.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence
;
Collaborative and Social Interaction
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
HCI on Enterprise Information Systems
;
Human-Computer Interaction
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Interface Design
;
Knowledge Management and Information Sharing
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Requirements Analysis And Management
;
Semiotics
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
Despite the popularity of the so-called social software, just a small fraction of the systems launched on the Web is really successful. The diversity of users, their limitations, preferences, values and culture, are examples that indicate the complexity of developing this kind of system; moreover there is still a lack of approaches, artifacts and methods for supporting designers to deal with this complexity. This paper presents an artifact specially adapted to support designers in the task of evaluating social software, taking values and cultural issues into account. It draws on Organizational Semiotics and on building blocks of culture to shed light on this research area. The artifact was applied to the evaluation of five different prototypes of systems for supporting cross-cultural collaboration, and the results demonstrate the viability of using this artifact for supporting the evaluation as well as the design of social software.