The need for increased user participation and involvement in the process of designing and developing public e-Services has been emphasized in recent years. User involvement is critical to success in the development and implementation of public e-Services, and many visions and efforts are focused on citizen participation in the design and development process. In this article, concepts of Social Systems Design are analysed in the context of local public e-Services in order to improve potential to meet the requirements for user participation and involvement. Results show that the ideas of Social Systems Design, where applicable, can contribute to user-centred development of local public e-Services, and can form a foundation for the development of methods that utilize user participation and involvement. However, further research requires empirical studies.

Technical communication (TC) is an important activity in order to provide the users of technical artifacts with necessary information concerning the operation and maintenance of the products they are using. In the current working procedures of TC, however, the users become too passive. They are just receivers of information. Further, there is no effective feedback from the users to the producers of the information. In order to overcome those problems we here propose an application of social media (SM) in future TC. By using SM as a complementary channel for TC it becomes possible for technology firms to boost their competitive advantage and to improve the quality and completeness of their TC. This technique, however, is still more of a potential and less of a reality. Several problems, mostly concerning security and confidentiality remain to be solved. The empirical base for this work comes from TIC, an EU-funded development project involving several Swedish technology companies. Published research results are somewhat scattered but several sources coherently indicate both the need and potential for SM as a vehicle in TC. By scanning the net it is further possible to identify a number of seemingly successful applications of SM in such applications.

The Viable System Model, VSM, by Stafford Beer is a model used for diagnosing and designing organizational structure and communication to facilitate necessary and sufficient conditions for viability. The model has been used for diagnosing different kinds of organizations at different levels where its use highlights existing or missing communication patterns and information flows in different communication channels and relates findings to a viable system. In a previous article, VSM and Intranet have been discussed and examples of advantages of combining the two concepts when designing organizations, has been given. In this article, VSM is combined with Intranet and possible functions in an intranet that support information exchange between different systems are identified and described. The suggested functions identified in this article are finally related to Intranet use modes, and the concepts of Empowerment vs. control.