Organizations and work practices vary widely and evolve rapidly. The technological infrastructure has to follow, allow or even support these changes. Traditional Software Engineering approaches reach their limits whenever the full spectrum of user requirements can’t be anticipated or the frequency of changes makes software reengineering cycles too clumsy to address all needs of a specific field of application. Moreover, the increasing importance of ‘infrastructural’ aspects, particularly the mutual dependencies between technologies, usages, and domain competencies, calls for a differentiation of roles beyond the classical user-designer dichotomy.

End User Development (EUD) addresses these problems by offering lightweight, use-time support which allows users to configure, adapt and evolve their software by themselves. EUD is understood as a set of methods, techniques, and tools that allow users of software systems, who are acting as non-professional software developers, at some point to create, modify or extend a software artefact (cf. Lieberman, Paternó, and Wulf 2006). While programming activities by non-professional actors are an essential focus, EUD also investigates into related activities within the process of developing a software infrastructure, e.g. the collective understanding and sense-making of use problems and solution alternatives, the interactions among end users around the introduction/diffusion of new configurations, or delegation patterns that may also partly involve professional designers.

EUD concepts have found widespread use in commercial software with some success: recording macros in word processors, setting up spreadsheets for calculations, defining e-mail-filters, desktop widget configuration or configuring/composing mesh-ups. Although these applications only realize a fraction of EUD's potential and still suffer from many flaws, they illustrate why empowering end-users to develop the systems they are using is an important contribution to letting them become active citizens of the Information Society.

EUD integrates different threads of discussion from Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Software Engineering (SE), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Concepts such as tailorability, configurability, end-user programming, visual programming, natural programming, and programming by example already form a fruitful base, but they need to be better integrated, and the synergy between them more fully exploited.

Also driven by developments in the context of Web 2.0, the number of end-user developers compared to the number of software professionals will grow exponentially. This underlines the importance of systematic research in EUD. The potential to provide EUD-based adaptation over the Internet may create a shift from the conventional few-to-many distribution model of software to a many-to-many distribution model. EUD could also lead to a considerable competitive advantage in adapting to dynamically changing (economic) environments by empowering end-users. The increasing amount of software embedded within consumer and professional products also points to a need to promote EUD to enable effective use of these products. This momentum may also be picked up to improve software (re-)design based in user-driven innovation tools and strategies.

On the political level EUD is important for full participation of citizens in the emerging Information Society. While techniques of Web 2.0 already contribute to a democratization of the creation of content, the modification of the software infrastructure are difficult for non-professional programmers. This results for many sectors of society in a division of labor between those who produce and those who consume. EUD has the potential to counterbalance these effect.

The Second International Symposium on End User Development will focus an emergent discussion which so far has been conducted on many different fori. Suggested topics include but are not limited to: