Low-code, high-sugar. Time to expand the concept of citizen developer

A piñata full of candy

When I first heard the term “citizen developer” I became very excited. I envisioned a new human right being consecrated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a new term to serve as the umbrella for all the initiatives aimed at empowering people in the digital domains.

If there was a new initiative to teach people how to code, then it could be said it was a part of enabling people to become citizen developers, if there was another initiative to teach elderly people to navigate the web, it was also a part of strengthening their developer citizenship, if there was yet another initiative teaching people how to build apps to support their businesses, that too would also fit under the umbrella…

A citizen developer is not a citizen that is a developer

It didn’t take me much longer to come upon the cold cut definition of a Forrester or a Gartner to dispel my visions of grandeur, a citizen developer was defined as

A citizen developer is a user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT. — Gartner

The dream was burst like a piñata, and this one without much candy to spill around. It turns out it is a much narrower concept, not citizenship the kind that entails the entire society, but a kind of new corporate citizenship layer within…well…corporations.

Not a mention of the elderly nor the entrepreneurial. Just the people that don’t want to rely entirely on the IT department to develop their own apps (my empathy still to this people). The ones used to having their own private spreadsheet or model, to help with the tasks of the day, baptized, I grant you that, with the mysterious and somewhat glamorous title of “practitioners of shadow IT”. These were the citizens of this newly created town.

Besides this, something else somewhat disappointed me in this definition, beyond its much narrower scope of application, there were the “runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT”. Or “who” wrote this? Certainly not someone trying to make himself understood by that same layman that developed that same spreadsheet that turned out to be more helpful to him than any tool developed by IT did until that day.

Another term that is usually coupled with citizen developer, is the term low-code platform. Looking for alternatives, people without no formal training in computer science seem to be turning to low-code platforms, to help them craft their own apps. After all…

…low-code platforms — (are) an emerging category that supports rapid assembly of customer-facing applications, requiring minimal hand-coding and enabling productive new development practices. — Forrester

It was then, with some surprise that, in my first intimate contact with a low-code platform at a one-week summer school, coming straight out of a “high-code” coding bootcamp (on Ruby), I found myself surrounded by a majority of computer science students. Effectively, the ad in the flyer, had an asterisk saying this summer school was aimed mainly at computer science students.

At the time, still with my enlarged and sugary vision of the meaning of developer citizenship, I was expecting a more diverse crowd, age-wise and background-wise to be attending. After all those would be the people that would benefit the most from “minimal hand-coding”.

I also saw the cordial tension between the computer science academics, and the representative from the low-code platform. Actually, when I come to think about it, it is quite remarkable they were sitting at the same table. My kudos to that.

At the lunch table, of that unversity where the summer school was taking place, in Lisbon, Portugal, while exchanging impressions with some of the students I learnt their curricula would include learning Assembly and Prolog, while Python and other more modern languages, the one you find massively popular now in online courses, were reserved a few weeks of study, if any at all. Academia seemed quite separated from the trending high-code programming languages, what to expect about its relationship with low-code?

The guardians of the temple will wave their asterisks

Ironically, it seems, the defensiveness from legacy technically educated people happened at two levels — regarding potential laymen low-coders coming from society at large (the ones I thought these platforms would cater primarily to), and the low-code newcomer platform itself.

My interest in diverse fields from Business (where my background originates in), to Philosophy and to Tech has led me to note this attitude some people display of “guardians of the temple”, some exaggeration of jargon, some increase in obscurity in explaining concepts — later revealed completely unnecessary — whenever newcomers are looking in. Expressed also in things as tiny as putting an asterisk saying that the target is mainly x or y people. Asterisks apparently tiny in stature, but enough, sometimes, to deter many people from entering whole new fields…

And low-code platforms are all about letting other people in, perhaps not as much I would like to, or initially thought they were aiming at, but at least the corporate shadow ITers and other similar people (the low-hanging fruit of people already making alternatives for themselves)…

Where are the entrepreneurs?

Besides the elderly, and perhaps on the other end of the (age and drive to learn tech) spectrum, but equally absent from mention are the entrepreneurs. Just hearing about the concept of low-code platforms, that supposedly allow you to speed up development and cut down costs led me to think about entrepreneurs, with their eagerness for fast-prototyping and a shoe string budget.

But just as no one in that class-room was an elderly person nor a student of Anthropology, trying to strengthen her digital skills and capacity to create an app for use in her field project, no one in that class-room was an entrepreneur currently looking for a faster and cheaper way to develop her product. In fact, I have been to many startup meetups and events, and know some of the crowd, and not once recall an event about low-code for startups. I start to wonder why once again.

And then I start hearing the case studies centered in bigger corporations and that, for this low-code platform, there is no special fee or licensing targeted at startups, the ones particularly aligned with its fast-prototyping ethos. Another candyless piñata is burst, the idea faster innovation, exponentially enabled by smaller, new and original businesses using these tools, falling flat on the ground.

(Still) time to open-up

So with no more piñatas to burst it was time to try the platform, start experimenting and learning more…eventually realizing that a demo of an app with working features that before took weeks to develop now apparently takes hours. A flame was reignited again with all the previous shutdown opportunities now twinkling again.

And then it hit me. Just because someone, perhaps on a low-calorie diet, decided to remove all the sweet opportunities enabled by low-code platforms, it doesn’t mean that we have remain hostages to that definition. It’s still an early stage, and things are still being defined and redefined.

When the wider society — including elderly, people from diverse backgrounds, and entrepreneurs start to be considered as a target and beneficiary of low-code platforms — and guardians of the temple converted into helpers of newcomers— the impact can be compounded.

Fast-forward one month and I have continued my training in the low-code platform, and believe it can reach many more people than what’s currently targeted at.

I think it is still time to enlarge the concept of citizen developer and bring it closer to the roots of what it means to be a citizen

A citizen is an inhabitant of a city or town; especially : one entitled to the rights and privileges of a freeman — Merriam-Webster Dictionary

A citizen developer in this high-calorie yet healthier version should be

A citizen developer is an inhabitant of the tech society; especially one entitled to fully benefit from the rights and privileges that it offers. Someone, with or without formal technical training, able to create new applications for consumption by himself or others using his/her own drive and resources. — Andreia

Needless to say that I think that citizen developers should be… all citizens that desire to be so.

Let’s add the sugar back and welcome everyone to this town.