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With the widespread availability of open source software and social networking sites, community groups, researchers, artists and other activists have taken political problems from their physical places and built bridges into interactive places to continue their work. The discussion and examples in this paper illustrate how design through practical problem-solving, actively involving participants, extends meaning and experience between and among environments.Full text at ACM

During the last decade, literature about work has increasingly focused on the importance of collective communication, tacit knowledge, and group activities. The idea of designing computer support for groupbased work activities, which we loosely call ''cooperative work'', is a useful and challenging one, for it represents a break from design approaches that focused on centralized and bureaucratic systems of communication and control. To get a clearer idea of the meaning of cooperative work. this article will look at historical patterns of world organization and management strategies. It will contrast user-centered concepts of cooperative work, with the idea of seeing cooperative work in the context of democracy in the workplace. The focus on workplace democracy has been a main theme in the Scandinavian systems tradition. The article uses the Scandinavian tradition, with its roots in a Labor Process Approach as a way to analyze the meaning of cooperation for workplace democracy and its implication for the design of computer support.

Throughout the 1960s there was intense academic debate about the effects of automation, particularly as represented by the computer, on the labor process. Bourgeois economists and sociologists,while admitting that automation frequently reduced skills among many kinds of workers, pointed to the growing employment in the computer industry itself as a bright spot for labor. Many of the new jobs in this growing field were categorized as technical and professional and were considered illustrative of labor-force upgrading.… What was missing from these early evaluations was a firm understanding of the labor processes of capitalism. Marx's analysis is no less applicable to an occupation that could not have been conceived of in his day. In a short twenty-year span, work in the computer field has been transformed by capitalism to suit its needs, through carefully planned division of labor.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-28-number-3" title="Vol. 28, No. 3: July-August 1976" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Using an overview of the data-processing field given by H. Braverman (Labor and Money Capital, New York, 1974) as a starting point, the development & effects of the division of labor in this field are traced from 1950 to 1975, concentrating on the commercial uses of the computer & the processes that change a highly technical labor force into a segmented white-collar assembly line. During the 1950s, three classes of workers were recognized: operators, programmers, & technicians. Workers in each of these categories often overlapped tasks. During the period 1965-1970, management demands for a more controllable labor force, increasing commercial uses of computers, & larger machines, particularly the IBM 360, resulted in a rapid creation of a strict division of labor that prevented task overlap, removed analytical tasks from programming, & greatly increased specialization. Technology was being used to increase productivity & create a rigid hierarchy, while more skilled workers were becoming available & skill requirements for most specific jobs were decreasing. During 1970 to 1975, there was a flood of overly skilled labor, & salaries slowed or stopped their once-steady climb. There was also a tendency toward greater centralization among firms involved in data-processing, thus requiring fewer operators & programmers. M. Migalski.