Situated Software

"There is another strategy, however, analogous to asking the user to recognizing icons; the designer can simply assume the group has a certain capability, without needing to recapitulate it in code. If you have an uncollected payment in a communal buying pool, the software can kick out a message that says 'Deadbeat alert. Deal with it.' A real world group will have some way of handling the problem, usually through moral suasion or the threat of lost reputational capital, or even, in extreme cases, ostracism. This is no different than what happens in offline groups every day, but the solution feels wrong, in Web School terms, because those web applications can't assume there is a tacit reputation system. By relying on existing social fabric, situated software is guaranteed not to work at the scale Web School apps do, but for the same reason, it can work in ways Web School software can't."