Co-creating platform governance models using boundary resources: A case study from dementia care services

Abstract

Digital labor platforms are gaining in popularity in our societies. Information systems and software engineering disciplines have focused on organizational and technological aspects of these platforms, favoring the views of platform owners. At the same time, extensive knowledge of how workers use these platforms, and how they are affected by them, is emerging within computer-supported collaborative work and human-computer interaction disciplines. These two strands of research, one favoring the views of the platform owners and the other advocating the views of the platform users, are mainly developed in parallel and without influencing each other much. In this paper, we describe a case study of designing a digital labor platform for person-centered dementia care in a small company. Dementia care illustrates an extreme case of a complex type of work. This complexity helps us debate some of the benefits and shortcoming of current platforms and platform governance models. We analyze our case using an adaptation of the platform boundary resources model. This model helps us illustrate the tensions between platform owners and workers. A focus on platform governance models and how we co-create such models can hopefully lead to better designs for both views.