Doctoral Candidate David Gurzick receives Cerf Award

Date Posted: - 6/15/2009

Doctoral candidate David Gurzick received the Vinton G. Cerf Award for the best Student Authored paper at the Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST) 2009 Conference this past May. His paper, Towards a Design Theory for Online Communities, coauthored with Dr. Wayne Lutters, will soon appear in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) digital library.

Gurzick says, “The paper focuses on formalizing all that would be considered best practice for designing online communities into a set of guidelines and then discuss how these guidelines can be used to create new communities to advance best practice.” Gurzick also noted that the research supporting his paper is geared to end users as design guidelines can help them in the practice of creating new online communities and improving those that are in existence.

Towards a Design Theory for Online Communities proposes that online communities are increasingly important in modern social life. Yet, the diverse collection of guidelines that have directed online community design may not be keeping pace with significant changes in the operating environment of these systems. The award winning paper collected and distilled the most relevant of these guidelines and described their instantiation in a design artifact foundational to a larger design science research project. Main focal points of Gurzick’s paper include the distilled guidelines, a detailed account of the mechanics of their translation into practice, and a framework for doing design science research in online communities.

Looking to its 5^th year in 2010, the DESRIST Conference exists to perpetuate recognition, discussion and scientific sharing of design science research, firmly becoming established as a research paradigm in several disciplines related to information sciences, information systems and technologies. With recognition, debate grows related to the nature, scope and dominant ideologies of design research. Since 2006, the DESRIST Conference has been a meeting place that brings together researchers and practitioners engaged in Design Science research in the broadest sense that deals with information and systems that handle information.