Abstracts Business

The little website that grew : http://www.sfu.ca/cedc

by Penny Simpson

This project, hosted on Simon Fraser University's main webserver, was designed to serve three main objectives of the Community Economic Development Centre (CEDC): to promote its academic programs, enhance public awareness of the Centre, and meet its community assistance mandate. The website has grown to over 150 megabytes of permanent CED resources and made the CEDC a recognized destination on the information highway. My story of this website project is not just a tale of technical progress. It is about how an alternate development organization has attempted to shape the new mediums of computer-mediated communication and the World Wide Web to its own social communication goals, without letting the computer-based medium become the message. It is a success story, despite inadequate planning, and insufficient organizational, human, and financial resources. Because the CED Centre is not untypical of small organizations working in the new information economy, this story shares some salutary lessons. Conducted close to home, as website development is, such a project can fuel awareness of an organization's own ideals, theory and practices. They can recursively provoke conflicts between amateurism and professionalism, unveil class and gender conflicts, and evoke internal social critiques about communication and design more frequently documented in profit-oriented organizations. The story suggests that firmly held social ideals of community empowerment and appropriate technology, based on E. F. Schumacher's work, can guide organizations well, but website development can be better served by more practical heuristics enriching that framework. Website development takes more time and more iterative consultation and "articulation work" than can be imagined. The complex social and technical capabilities needed to create websites now mean that neither overworked employees of social organizations nor consultants can do projects alone. The knowledge of both is required. Lessons from participatory design literature, political economy literature on the new economy, and website design can be integrated into planning to eliminate pioneering on what is no longer a frontier. The process of developing a website to fit social ideals can exact fewer social costs, if those ideals are purposefully matched. with the highly usable heuristics from participatory computer-mediated communication practice.