Creating Digital LAM Content for Schools : Modelling User Involvement in Multi-organisational Context

Public services are usually created in a network of organisations, meta-organisations that consist multiple actors with variety of capacities. Managing work in meta-organisations face unique challenges due to multiple stakeholders with different understandings of the tasks. Management of the work requires shared base understanding of contributions needed from multiple stakeholders and for many tasks, this is not yet properly understood and modelled. User-centred design, even it supports well multi-disciplinary development of systems and services with multiple actors and can be applied to ascertain a balanced outcome from the design work, is one of these areas that lacks this understanding and requires further modelling. Typically, user-centred design responsibilities are set in a public organisation who creates the digital service platform. Through our case on creating digital library, archive, and museum (LAM) content service for schools, we study how user centred design activities happen outside the platform provider organisation. More specifically, we study how the content creation organisations can utilise the expertise of a teacher and identify how this expertise can be incorporated in content creation organisations. Based on our findings we form a tentative model for user involvement in meta-organisations (UIMO) which aims to formulate a structure for the user-centred design responsibilities in networked environment.