Future forums: A methodology for exploring, gamifying, and raising security awareness of code-citizens

•Future Forums, as a new approach, successfully demonstrated its suitability in encouraging deep and focused discussions and co-design among code developers with varying levels of experience.•Coder Practices, Code Motivation, Resources, Communication, and individual sense of Ethics, all play a crucial role in developing secure code.•The active pursuit of learning in terms of knowledge acquisition and dissemination during secure code development was identified as an important aspect of developing secure code.•The findings from this study gave us a deep insight in the code-citizens’ ecosystem.•Findings indicate how code elements and code practices are represented with game elements, informing future designs of security oriented serious games. Future Forums are multiphase user centered design workshops, with the early phases aiming to initiate discussions, that then leads to the co-design of game elements centered around aspects of code security. The same procedure was followed for each of the three Future Forums, each focusing to a slightly different theme around cyber security. By engaging code-citizens in discussions on cyber security that are rooted in their personal experiences and individual viewpoints, several themes emerged, such as the role of coder practices and ethical behavior in security while coding. Findings gave us a deep insight in the code-citizens’ ecosystem during code development – both in terms of their individual beliefs and practices, and the practicalities they have to consider. Discussions were followed by the co-design and co-creation of game elements. The game elements code-citizens co-created allowed us to observe how code elements and code practices are represented with game elements, informing future designs of security oriented serious games. This paper discusses the implications these findings have to the design of cyber security oriented serious games, and to the wider HCI community working with similar methodologies.