DEMOS: A participatory design approach for democratic empowerment of IS users

Abstract

The issue of democracy in society is at the heart of our current concerns. The organizations and their information systems are also concerned by this issue. Democracy in organization requires a debate about norms, values and language encapsulated in the information systems. The participatory design approaches address this issue by proposing a democratic empowerment for users during design phase of projects. To go further, we propose a structured method to integrate democracy into information systems. This method named DEMOS for DEsign Method for democratic information System is described and then illustrated by a real experiment provided by a “lifelong training” service at the University. All aspects of the method are addressed: from elicitation phase to implementation. We particularly focus on techniques and tools used during the design phase.