Call for Papers

Second International Symposium on End User Development (ISEUD 2009)

Conference Chairs:
- Boris de Ruyter, Philips Research, Eindhoven, Netherlands
- Volker Wulf, University of Siegen and Fraunhofer FIT, Germany

Programm Chairs:
- Volkmar Pipek, University of Siegen, Germany
- Mary Beth Rosson, Penn State, USA

Deadline for Submission: September 1, 2008

Date of Symposium: March, 2 - 4 2009
Location of Symposium : Siegen, Germany


Theme:
Organizations and work practices vary widely and evolve rapidly. The
technological infrastructure has to follow, allow or even support these
changes. Traditional Software Engineering approaches reach their limits
whenever the full spectrum of user requirements can’t be anticipated or
the frequency of changes makes software reengineering cycles too clumsy
to address all needs of a specific field of application. Moreover, the
increasing importance of ‘infrastructural’ aspects, particularly the
mutual dependencies between technologies, usages, and domain
competencies, calls for a differentiation of roles beyond the classical
user-designer dichotomy.
End User Development (EUD) addresses these problems by offering
lightweight, use-time support which allows users to configure, adapt and
evolve their software by themselves. EUD is understood as a set of
methods, techniques, and tools that allow users of software systems, who
are acting as non-professional software developers, at some point to
create, modify or extend a software artefact (cf. Lieberman, Paternó,
and Wulf 2006). While programming activities by non-professional actors
are an essential focus, EUD also investigates into related activities
within the process of developing a software infrastructure, e.g. the
collective understanding and sense-making of use problems and solution
alternatives, the interactions among end users around the
introduction/diffusion of new configurations, or delegation patterns
that may also partly involve professional designers.
EUD concepts have found widespread use in commercial software with some
success: recording macros in word processors, setting up spreadsheets
for calculations, defining e-mail-filters, desktop widget configuration
or configuring/composing mesh-ups. Although these applications only
realize a fraction of EUD's potential and still suffer from many flaws,
they illustrate why empowering end-users to develop the systems they are
using is an important contribution to letting them become active
citizens of the Information Society.
EUD integrates different threads of discussion from Human Computer
Interaction (HCI), Software Engineering (SE), Computer Supported
Cooperative Work (CSCW), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Concepts such
as tailorability, configurability, end-user programming, visual
programming, natural programming, and programming by example already
form a fruitful base, but they need to be better integrated, and the
synergy between them more fully exploited.//
Also driven by developments in the context of Web 2.0, the number of
end-user developers compared to the number of software professionals
will grow exponentially. This underlines the importance of systematic
research in EUD. The potential to provide EUD-based adaptation over the
Internet may create a shift from the conventional few-to-many
distribution model of software to a many-to-many distribution model.
EUD could also lead to a considerable competitive advantage in adapting
to dynamically changing (economic) environments by empowering end-users.
The increasing amount of software embedded within consumer and
professional products also points to a need to promote EUD to enable
effective use of these products. This momentum may also be picked up to
improve software (re-)design based in user-driven innovation tools and
strategies.
On the political level EUD is important for full participation of
citizens in the emerging Information Society. While techniques of Web
2.0 already contribute to a democratization of the creation of content,
the modification of the software infrastructure are difficult for
non-professional programmers. This results for many sectors of society
in a division of labor between those who produce and those who consume.
EUD has the potential to counterbalance these effect.
The Second International Symposium on End User Development will focus an
emergent discussion which so far has been conducted on many different
fori.Suggested topics include but are not limited to:

- Empirical studies of EUD practises
- User Interfaces for EUD
- Metaphors for software modularization
- Requirements specification for EUD
- Architectures for EUD
- EUD as part of software infrastructuring
- Support for collaboration among non-professional programmers
- EUD for specific types of devices
- EUD in specific fields of application
- EUD for user groups with specific needs
- Education concepts to foster EUD
- Micro-economical effects of EUD
- Marco-economical impact of EUD
- Political implications of EUD