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The PALETTE European project based on participatory design aims at designing new Web services for Communities of Practice. In this paper we discuss three aspects of our experience as project members, which we qualify as participation pitfalls we had to tackle during the design process: i) user needs and the notion of usefulness, ii) the use of boundary objects, iii) the participation of users and the idea of emancipation. These issues are not new: the reflections we bring in at the light of our experience in the domain of social computing should contribute to the debate. The pitfalls showed up at an important project stage: the design of so-called "generic scenarios". Following a brief historical account of the project, the three pitfalls are discussed within the framework of Actor-Network Theory.