Hans-Erik Nissen, Victor Kaptelinin: Social Thinking – Software Practice: A Report from an International Seminar

September 5–10 a seminar called ''Social Thinking – Software Practice. Approaches Relating Software Development, Work, and Organisational Change'' was held at Schloss Dagstuhl in Germany. The seminar gathered 32 participants. Most of these came from various branches of Computer and Information Science. Three of the participants, however, were sociologists.

In their invitation to the seminar the organisers wrote: 3During the last decade, the embedding of software into work practices has stimulated interdisciplinary cooperation between social scientists and computer scientists in areas such as computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) or human computer interaction (HCI). The discussion is largely driven by experiences gained in development projects. Key questions include: How can the perspectives and conceptualizations of different users and other stakeholders be taken into account? What is the relation between, on the one side, reflective and analytic abstractions of the social sciences and, on the other side, generative abstractions developed by the designers in order to be implemented in and with a computer application? A coherent understanding of these and related questions is needed in order to provide suitable methods for software development.2

Discussions following presentations of invited papers and position papers as well as during group work offered many interesting ideas on the conference theme. In our reports from the seminar we will present a number of these.

Välkommna!
Per-Olof Ågren