Online Customization Sharing Ecosystems: Components, Roles, And Motivations

The rise of open platforms and public APIs has enabled more users of customizable software to customize by installing plugins or add-ons that are created and shared by others. Despite the prevalence of online customization sharing, we know little about how and why online customizations are shared. Through interviews with 20 users of four diverse systems who have extensive experience with sharing their customizations, we reveal the concept of customization sharing ecosystems. These ecosystems include multiple components for hosting customizations, discussing, and managing them; the ecosystems are sustained through users acting in a diverse set of roles (e.g., sharers, re-users, reviewers, problem reporters, requesters, helpers, publicizers, and packers). Our interviews also reveal motivations for creating and sharing customizations online which overlap considerably with those in open source software. Our findings highlight tradeoffs and design considerations in these ecosystems.