IS Success Awareness in Community-Oriented Design Science Research

Design efforts on innovative IS artifacts are increasingly taking place in agile, small, and specialized long-tail communities supported by academic research. Long-tail communities need to reflect and develop awareness for the success of community-specific IS (CIS) artifacts in their particular practice context in an ongoing manner. In community-oriented DSR, researchers participate as active community members contributing CIS success awareness with the help of CIS success models resulting from ongoing CIS evaluation. However, CIS success awareness is challenging to achieve compared to organizational IS due to diversity, dynamicity, informal structures and permeable boundaries. In this paper, we emphasize the benefits of ongoing CIS success awareness with the help of custom-tailored CIS success models in community-oriented DSR contexts. We demonstrate our approach in a longitudinal case study of designing and evaluating therapeutic tools in an aphasia community.