What they want and what they get

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze some mismatches between what is offered by light-weight technologies that support online communities and the dreams and fears of a group of 20 potential users of such technologies. In our study, members of an academic community that does not have an online extension answered an open-ended questionnaire. The answers revealed some of their expectations about group applications. With these expectations in mind, we carried out a semiotic inspection of three popular applications. Within the specific range of topics covered in the study, our findings show three important factors that seem to determine the distance between what they expect and what they get: (a) technological resources are limited, but this can be substantially improved with broad band technologies; (b) some design decisions are questionable, and should be revised; and (c) online groups must all be structured and governed by some strict rules, regardless of how informal and loose they might be offline. Factor (c), in particular, seems to be tied to deeper scientific issues involved in the inherent social-technical gap of computer technologies for groups.