Appropriation infrastructure: Supporting the design of usages

End User Development offers technical flexibility to encourage the appropriation of software applications within specific contexts of use. Appropriation needs to be understood as a phenomenon of many collaborative and creative activities. To support appropriation, we propose integrating communication channels into software applications. Such an appropriation infrastructure provides communication and collaboration support to stimulate knowledge sharing among users and between users and developers. It exploits the technological flexibility of software applications to enable these actors to change usages and configurations. Taking the case of the BSCWeasel groupware, we demonstrate how an appropriation infrastructure can be realized. Empirical results from the BSCWeasel project demonstrate the impact of such an infrastructure on the appropriation and design process. Based on these results, we argue that appropriation infrastructures should be tightly integrated in the application using the IT artifact itself as a boundary object as well as a bridge between design and use.