| Creating Assemblies in Public Environments: Social Interaction, Interactive Exhibits and CSCW | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 1-41 | |
| Jon Hindmarsh; Christian Heath; Dirk Vom Lehn; Jason Cleverly | |||
| This paper examines the use of a series of three low tech interactive
assemblies that have been exhibited by the authors in a range of fairs,
expositions and galleries. The paper does not present novel technical
developments, but rather uses the low tech assemblies to help scope out the
design space for CSCW in museums and galleries and to investigate the ways in
which people collaboratively encounter and explore technological exhibits in
museums and galleries. The bulk of the paper focuses on the analysis of the use
of one interactive installation that was exhibited at the Sculpture, Objects
and Functional Art (SOFA) Exposition in Chicago, USA. The study uses
audio-visual recordings of interaction with and around the work to consider how
people, in and through their interaction with others, make sense of an assembly
of traditional objects and video technologies. The analysis focuses on the
organised practices of assembly and how assembling the relationship between
different parts of the work is interactionally accomplished. The analysis is
then used to develop a series of design sensitivities to inform the development
of technological assemblies to engender informal interaction and sociability in
museums and galleries. Keywords: art - assemblies - design sensitivities - ethnography - interactive exhibits
- museums - social interaction - video | |||
| ICT and Integrated Care: Some Dilemmas of Standardising Inter-Organisational Communication | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 43-67 | |
| Brit Ross Winthereik; Signe Vikkelso | |||
| There is a growing interest in the issues of how to organise healthcare work
along individual patient cases rather than along the demarcation lines of
healthcare organisations. Health information systems, such as electronic
patient records, are seen as important change agents, since they are asserted
to help the coordination of care across organisations through fast and accurate
exchange of clinical data. The paper explores how a semi-standardised discharge
letter is employed to communicate about the patient between two organisational
settings, the hospital and the general practitioner. It is shown that the
discharge letter plays a double role as informational tool and accounting
device. And it is argued that further standardisation of the discharge letter
content - in order to facilitate electronic exchange - is likely to strengthen
the letters role as a tool for organisational accountability and weaken it as a
clinical tool. The paper concludes that this finding adds to the theoretical
understanding of how computers support cooperative work, and that understanding
how healthcare professionals present themselves as accountable and trustworthy
should be of major concern when designing healthcare ICTs. Keywords: accountability - communication - coordination - discharge letters - ICT -
integrated care - standardisation - STS | |||
| Book Review: Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, Paul Dourish, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001, 256 pp. ISBN 0-262-04196-0 | | BIB | Full-Text | 69-77 | |
| Matthew Chalmers | |||
| Book Review: Distributed Work, Pamela J. Hinds and Sara Kiesler (eds.), MIT Press, Cambridge, 2002, 475 pp. ISBN 0-262-08305-1 | | BIB | Full-Text | 79-85 | |
| Jaakkotul Virkkunentftul | |||
| Book Review: Social Thinking - Software Practice, Yvonne Dittrich, Christiane Floyd and Ralf Klischewski (eds.), MIT Press, Cambridge, 2002 | | BIB | Full-Text | 87-90 | |
| Paul Dourish | |||
| Beyond Bandwidth: Dimensions of Connection in Interpersonal Communication | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 91-130 | |
| Bonnie A. Nardi | |||
| Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is a keystone of computer-supported
collaborative work. Current CMC theory utilizes an information channel metaphor
in which media vary according to how well they afford the transfer of messages
in the channel, i.e., bandwidth. This paper draws attention to a different
aspect of communication argued to be equally important: a relation between
people that defines a state of communicative readiness in which fruitful
communication is likely. Drawing on research on instant messaging (Nardi et
al., 2000) and face to face communication (Nardi et al., 2002; Nardi and
Whittaker, 2003), as well as related literature, three dimensions of connection
that activate readiness are proposed: affinity, commitment, and attention.
These dimensions comprise a field of connection between dyads. A field of
connection is conceptualized as a labile, multidimensional space in which the
values of the dimensions vary according to the history of communicative
activity. Affinity, commitment, and attention are constantly monitored,
negotiated, and managed through social bonding, expression of commitment, and
capture of attention. The management of fields of connection requires
significant interactional work to sustain communication over time. Keywords: affinity - attention - commitment - computer-mediated communication -
interpersonal communication - social connection | |||
| Mobility Work: The Spatial Dimension of Collaboration at a Hospital | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 131-160 | |
| Jakob E. Bardram; Claus Bossen | |||
| We posit the concept of Mobility Work to describe efforts of moving about
people and things as part of accomplishing tasks. Mobility work can be seen as
a spatial parallel to the concept of articulation work proposed by the
sociologist Anselm Strauss. Articulation work describes efforts of coordination
necessary in cooperative work, but focuses, we argue, mainly on the temporal
aspects of cooperative work. As a supplement, the concept of mobility work
focuses on the spatial aspects of cooperative work. Whereas actors seek to
diminish the amount of articulation work needed in collaboration by
constructing Standard Operation Procedures (SOPs), actors minimise mobility
work by constructing Standard Operation Configurations (SOCs). We apply the
concept of mobility work to the ethnography of hospital work, and argue that
mobility arises because of the need to get access to people, places, knowledge
and/or resources. To accomplish their work, actors have to make the right
configuration of these four aspects emerge. Keywords: Anselm Strauss - collaboration - hospitals - mobility - mobility work -
standard operating configuration | |||
| Words about Images: Coordinating Community in Amateur Photography | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 161-188 | |
| Rebecca E. Grinter | |||
| This paper describes how the adoption of digital technologies by two amateur
photography communities created coordination challenges. Digital technologies
disrupted the classification schemes used not just to sort images into groups
for competition, but also served to coordinate the community itself. In opening
up the classification scheme, members were able to see and reflect on the
sources used to establish the definitions that sorted images and organised
their practices not just locally but more widely across various boundaries.
Without having words about images, both amateur photography communities would
have struggled to coordinate. Keywords: amateur communities - classification | |||
| The Electronic Laboratory Journal: A Collaborative and Cooperative Learning Environment for Web-Based Experimentation | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 189-216 | |
| Georgios John Fakas; Anh Vu Nguyen; Denis Gillet | |||
| Numerous tools have been developed for supporting the collaboration between
students in education, tools that mainly include facilities for sharing
documents and enabling discussions. However, these environments do not
emphasize the use of facilities that sustain collaborative work in the
framework of remote experimentation carried out by a group of students located
at different places. The Electronic Laboratory Journal (eJournal) paradigm
proposed in this paper is a collaborative and cooperative environment for
Web-based experimentation in engineering education. The eJournal enhances the
traditional laboratory journal, by providing a group of students with Web-based
tools to collect, annotate, organize and share the data chunks necessary to
complete their experimentation assignments. The data chunks, called fragments,
may be composed of numerous objects of any format, such as text, images,
graphics, manuscripts, measurement logs or experimental results. Fragments can
be uploaded from local disks or imported from Web components. The eJournal also
handles the submission of results to the educators and facilitates remote
supervision, assistance and tutoring of the students. The eJournal paradigm is
currently assessed at the School of Engineering, the Ecole Polytechnique
Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), in the framework of hands-on experimentation
activities focusing on remote manipulation of real setups and Web-based
simulation. This paper presents the eJournal environment, its application and
its evaluation as an enabling Web-based application for flexible learning. Keywords: cooperative learning - collaborative learning - distance learning -
knowledge engineering - remote experimentation - World Wide Web | |||
| Moving with the Times: IT Research and the Boundaries of CSCW | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 217-251 | |
| Andy Crabtree; Tom Rodden; Steve Benford | |||
| The field of CSCW research emerged with the development of distributed
computing systems and attempts to understand the socially organized
('collaborative' or 'cooperative') nature of work in order to embed such
systems in the workplace. As a field of interdisciplinary inquiry CSCW was
motivated by technological developments and the need to understand the
particular contexts within which those developments were intended to resonate.
In other words, it is no mere accident that CSCW took work as its topic and
resource - the historical nature of IT research from which the field emerged
meant that for all practical purposes it could not be otherwise. Yet times
change. IT research moves on. Today mobile, ambient, pervasive, ubiquitous,
mixed reality and wearable computing, et cetera, are of fundamental concern to
the contemporary computing research community. Furthermore, these developments
are accompanied by a movement away from the workplace to focus on diverse
settings in everyday life: homes, games, museums, photography, tourism,
performances, indeed diverse bodies of people and pursuits that generally fall
under the conceptual rubric of the 'ludic'. Accompanying this shift away from
work is a call for new approaches and concepts that will enable researchers to
better understand the ludic and inform design appropriately. In this paper we
seek to address the boundaries of CSCW and the ability of CSCW to respond to
contemporary research agendas. We present an ethnomethodological study of a
location-based mixed reality game to demonstrate the continued relevance of
CSCW approaches and concepts to contemporary agendas in IT research. Keywords: CSCW - ethnomethodology - IT research - ludic pursuits - mixed reality game | |||
| Collaboration Among Designers: Analysing an Activity for System Development | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 253-282 | |
| Kristina Lauche | |||
| Workplace studies provide an important input to system development, yet
there is no straightforward way of translating empirical results into
requirements. This study contributes to the development of methods by reporting
an activity theory based approach consisting of (i) field observations, (ii)
modelling and (iii) a specific task analysis for system requirements. The
research informed the further development of the Build-it system, a multi-user
system designed to support co-located interaction between designers in
engineering and architecture, and other stakeholders such as clients,
operators, or inhabitants. The background research was conducted in four
engineering companies and comprised of meeting observations, a questionnaire on
design collaboration (n=94) and the analysis of 20 artefacts. The findings
indicate that collaboration is of critical importance to the design process,
and at least some of the tasks in engineering design could be supported by a
system like Build-it. The task analysis for system requirements involved
potential users from engineering but extended the scope to other domains,
namely architecture and chemical process engineering (n=22). In all three
domains a multi-user system like Build-it would be advantageous; however, the
specific requirements varied more than expected. The study critically reflects
on the use of generic concepts and the process of conducting research for the
purpose of understanding work for design. Keywords: activity theory - collaborative design - research methods - tabletop systems
- understanding work for design | |||
| Book review: The Locales Framework: Understanding and Designing for Wicked Problems, Geraldine Fitzpatrick, (ed.), The Kluwer International Series on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2003, 254 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 1-4020-1190-3 | | BIB | Full-Text | 283-285 | |
| Paul Dourish | |||
| Book Review: Public and Situated Displays: Social and Interactional Aspects of Shared Display Technologies, Kenton O'Hara, Mark Perry, Elizabeth Churchill and Daniel Russell (eds.), The Kluwer International Series on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2003, 456 pp. ISBN 1-4020-1677-8 | | BIB | Full-Text | 287-291 | |
| Carl Gutwin | |||
| Book Review: Tracing Genres through Organizations. A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design, Clay Spinuzzi, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003, 264 pp. ISBN 0-262-19491-0 | | BIB | Full-Text | 293-296 | |
| Hubert Knoblauch | |||
| Book Review: Computer-Supported Collaboration with Applications to Software Development, Fadi P. Deek and James A. M. McHugh, The Kluwer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, 2003, 264 pp. ISBN 1-4020-7385-2 | | BIB | Full-Text | 297-299 | |
| Yvonne Rogers | |||
| Conceptualizing the Awareness of Collaboration: A Qualitative Study of a Global Virtual Team | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 301-322 | |
| Piritta Leinonen; Sanna Jarvela; Paivi Hakkinen | |||
| Innovative organizations are increasing their use of distributed teamwork,
but there are several difficulties in reaching shared understanding between the
team members in these settings. A lack of awareness of other team members'
working processes is one of the drawbacks that a virtual team may face while
attempting to collaborate on a shared task. In this study virtual teamwork was
supported with a specific working model. The aim was to investigate virtual
team members' awareness of collaboration. One global team (N=19) within a
single organization worked as a distributed team in a shared web-based
workspace for three months. The data were gathered by means of questionnaires,
log-files of the shared virtual workspace and collected company documents in
order to find out how team members perceive their collaboration. Based on
qualitative data analysis, three different aspects of collaboration awareness
were identified: an awareness of the possibility for collaboration, an
awareness of the aims of collaboration, and an awareness of the process of
collaboration. The results presented in this paper give guidelines for
discussing what the awareness of collaboration means in the context of
distributed collaboration. Keywords: awareness of collaboration - Computer Supported Collaborative Learning -
Computer Supported Cooperative Work - distributed team - social cognition -
virtual teamwork | |||
| Socialization in an Open Source Software Community: A Socio-Technical Analysis | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 323-368 | |
| Nicolas Ducheneaut | |||
| Open Source Software (OSS) development is often characterized as a
fundamentally new way to develop software. Past analyses and discussions,
however, have treated OSS projects and their organization mostly as a static
phenomenon. Consequently, we do not know how these communities of software
developers are sustained and reproduced over time through the progressive
integration of new members. To shed light on this issue I report on my analyses
of socialization in a particular OSS community. In particular, I document the
relationships OSS newcomers develop over time with both the social and material
aspects of a project. To do so, I combine two mutually informing activities:
ethnography and the use of software specially designed to visualize and explore
the interacting networks of human and material resources incorporated in the
email and code databases of OSS. Socialization in this community is analyzed
from two perspectives: as an individual learning process and as a political
process. From these analyses it appears that successful participants
progressively construct identities as software craftsmen, and that this process
is punctuated by specific rites of passage. Successful participants also
understand the political nature of software development and progressively
enroll a network of human and material allies to support their efforts. I
conclude by discussing how these results could inform the design of software to
support socialization in OSS projects, as well as practical implications for
the future of these projects. Keywords: actor-network - learning - Open Source - socialization - software
development | |||
| Collaboration and Trust in Healthcare Innovation: The eDiaMoND Case Study | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 369-398 | |
| Marina Jirotka; Rob Procter; Mark Hartswood; Roger Slack; Andrew Simpson; Catelijne Coopmans; Chris Hinds; Alex Voss | |||
| This paper presents findings from an investigation into requirements for
collaboration in e-Science in the context of eDiaMoND, a Grid-enabled prototype
system intended in part to support breast cancer screening. Detailed studies
based on ethnographic fieldwork reveal the importance of accountability and
visibility of work for trust and for the various forms of 'practical ethical
action' in which clinicians are seen to routinely engage in this setting. We
discuss the implications of our findings, specifically for the prospect of
using distributed screening to make more effective use of scarce clinical
skills and, more generally, for realising the Grid's potential for sharing data
within and across institutions. Understanding how to afford trust and to
provide adequate support for ethical concerns relating to the handling of
sensitive data is a particular challenge for e-Health systems and for e-Science
in general. Future e-Health and e-Science systems will need to be compatible
with the ways in which trust is achieved, and practical ethical actions are
realised and embedded within work practices. Keywords: collaboration - trust - healthcare - grid - breast-screening | |||
| The Metamorphoses of Workflow Projects in their Early Stages | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 399-432 | |
| Thomas Herrmann; Marcel Hoffmann | |||
| Empirical studies on workflow usually focus on systems which have already
been introduced and on the problems which occur with these systems if
exceptional cases differ from the regular business processes. This study
focuses on the problems that occur in the early stages of projects intended to
introduce workflow systems but which do not inevitably succeed. In most cases
the companies under investigation eventually introduced other types of
software, or the business processes were merely analysed and improved but not
automated during the project. We explain this phenomenon by referring to
Orlikowski's concept of metamorphoses which analysed organizational change
under conditions of groupware usage. A number of empirical details in our study
of seven companies during a 4-year period can be related to this concept as
well as to literature on workflow. In our ex-post study of the workflow
projects we concluded that paradoxically starting with a workflow project might
be an appropriate way of introducing improvement in cooperation and
coordination without using workflow management technology and that concepts for
flexible workflow technology are of minor relevance for this improvement. Keywords: business processes - flexibility - process modelling - project management -
workflow-management system | |||
| When Plans do not Work Out: How Plans are Used in Software Development Projects | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 433-468 | |
| Kari Ronkko; Yvonne Dittrich; Dave Randall | |||
| Based on empirical material from the area of software engineering, this
article discusses the issue of plans and planning as an integral part of and
prerequisite for software development work. It relates observed practices to
literature produced by the Computer Supported Cooperative Work community.
Empirical studies of software development practice seldom address re-planning.
By analyzing the empirical material from one project we are able to show how
certain kinds of co-ordination problems arise and how they may be dealt with.
The empirical research does not focus primarily on the character of plans;
instead, it raises the question 'what means are necessary and should be
provided in order to cope with situations when plans do not work out? In
relation to plans, especial emphasis is on "due process", i.e. how the project
plan and the company wide project model are maintained to enable the
identification and articulation of deviations from it. On the basis of our
empirical analysis we propose to support the articulation and coordination work
necessary in situations where plans do not adequately work out. Keywords: articulation work - due process - plans - project management - software
engineering | |||
| Supporting Adaptable Consistency Control in Structured Collaborative Workspaces | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 469-503 | |
| Yi Yang; Du Li | |||
| Consistency control is a critical issue in collaborative systems. Supporting
flexible consistency control in particular matches the dynamic and situated
needs of cooperative work. However, previous approaches generally provide only
limited flexibility due to their static binding between shared data objects and
consistency control protocols. We propose a component-based framework that
allows for the runtime plug-n-play of consistency protocols in collaborative
systems. We model data and protocols in a way such that they are cleanly
separated and can be dynamically bound at run time to achieve flexible control.
Data-protocol bindings can happen at the property, object, and workspace
levels. The framework provides reusable services for implementing adaptable
consistency control in a range of collaborative workspace applications. Keywords: adaptability - collaborative workspace - component-based groupware -
consistency control - flexibility - groupware framework - runtime plug-n-play -
system design | |||
| Over the Shoulder Learning: Supporting Brief Informal Learning | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 505-547 | |
| Michael B. Twidale | |||
| The paper reviews work on informal technical help giving between colleagues.
It concentrates on the process of how colleagues help each other to use a
computer application to achieve a specific work task, contrasting this with the
focus of much prior work on surrounding issues like the choice of whom to ask,
information re-use and the larger work context of encouragement or otherwise of
such learning. By an analysis of the literature and a study of office activity,
some strengths and weaknesses of the method are identified. The difficulties of
talking about the process of performing graphical user interface actions are
explored. Various design implications for functionalities to improve the
efficiency of informal help giving are explored. A consideration of informal
learning can help in designing more effective, learnable, robust and acceptable
CSCW systems. It also provides a different perspective on interface design as
an exploration of features to support human-human interaction, using the
computer screen as a shared resource to support this. In this way CSCW research
may contribute to HCI research, since during such help giving, all computer
systems are at least temporarily collaborative applications. Keywords: computer supported collaborative learning - help giving - informal learning
- interface design - workplace learning | |||
| Discovering Social Networks from Event Logs | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 549-593 | |
| Wil M. P. van der Aalst; Hajo A. Reijers; Minseok Song | |||
| Process mining techniques allow for the discovery of knowledge based on
so-called "event logs", i.e., a log recording the execution of activities in
some business process. Many information systems provide such logs, e.g., most
WFM, ERP, CRM, SCM, and B2B systems record transactions in a systematic way.
Process mining techniques typically focus on performance and control-flow
issues. However, event logs typically also log the performer, e.g., the person
initiating or completing some activity. This paper focuses on mining social
networks using this information. For example, it is possible to build a social
network based on the hand-over of work from one performer to the next. By
combining concepts from workflow management and social network analysis, it is
possible to discover and analyze social networks. This paper defines metrics,
presents a tool, and applies these to a real event log within the setting of a
large Dutch organization. Keywords: business process management - data mining - Petri nets - process mining -
social network analysis - workflow management | |||