A league of its own, about the ontology of social sofware

A nice side-effect of lecturing courses like Management of Immaterial Values, is that purposeful reflection is perpetually fueled. The lecture Wim Bouman and I gave on Design Thinking, Ontology and Methodology inspired us to reassess our mental boundaries towards the theme of ontology. This endeavor led to a entry at the annual Conference on Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities (OLKC’09), the fourth one being organized by the VU Amsterdam.

In our article, we advocate a new ontological and epistemological approach towards social software systems from a business perspective. Social software is in need of its own theoretical and epistemic foundation, as we observe a trend towards ill-conceived and possible hazardous reapplying of mechanistic IS/IT patterns of thinking towards a new and exciting class of business applications. We notice a move towards all-embracing theoretical concepts in which auction management systems, like eBay, or syndication services, like Listserv, neatly fit into the ’social software’ categorization. It even seems that if a software application has any capability of communication or interaction, it is likely to be labeled ’social software’. Yet, if (nearly) everything is social software, the concept looses practicality and scientific relevance. We aim for the best of both worlds: applied IT with the rigor of modern information systems and the relevance of contemporary social software. Ultimately, we hope for social software to stand up to its promise as a formative context for organizational learning.

Scientific literature is remarkably scarce for such a widespread real-life phenomenon. The current state of research and theory focuses primarily on e-learning or social software as a research tool. This lack of research seems strange considered from an IS/IT perspective. In the era of the networking knowledge worker, we need to understand and overcome the mismatch between the inherently social character of the knowledge worker´s practices and the functionality-oriented tools that support these quests. Today´s users of the often free public social software services are tomorrow´s designers, managers, decision makers and users of business support systems.

The presentation can also be viewed via Slideshare: