| Computer Support for Social Awareness in Flexible Work | | BIBAK | DOI | 1-28 | |
| Susanne Bødker; Ellen Christiansen | |||
| How do we conceptualize social awareness, and what support is needed to
develop and maintain social awareness in flexible work settings? The paper
begins by arguing the relevance of designing for social awareness in flexible
work. It points out how social awareness is suspended in the field of tension
that exists between the ephemerality and continuity of social encounters,
exploring ways to construct identity through relationships by means of social
encounters -- notably those that are accidental and unforced. We probe into
this issue through design research: In particular, we present three exploratory
prototyping processes in an open office setting (examining the concepts of a
shared calendar, personal panels, and ambient awareness cues). Field studies,
conducted in parallel, have contributed to a conceptual deconstruction of CSCW
concepts, resulting in a focus on cues to relatedness, to belonging, and to
care. Analyzing these three prototypes in their microcosmic usage setting
results in specific recommendations for the three types of applications with
respect to social awareness. The experiences indicate that the metaphors a
'shared mirror' and 'breadcrumbs' are promising foundations on which to base
further design. We present these analyses and suggest that the metaphors work
because of their ability to map experiences from the physical space into
conceptual experiences. We conclude that social awareness in flexible work must
be constructed indirectly, presenting itself as an option, rather than as a
consequence of being able to overhear and oversee. Keywords: 'new' offices; ambience; design research; flexibility; social awareness | |||
| Temporality in Medical Work: Time also Matters | | BIBAK | DOI | 29-53 | |
| Madhu C. Reddy; Paul Dourish; Wanda Pratt | |||
| CSCW has long been concerned with the distribution of activities in time and
in space, but the problems of distributed work have often taken analytic and
technical precedence. In this paper, we are interested in the issue of
temporality in collaborative work. In particular, we want to examine how the
temporal organization of action is experienced by those who are involved in it.
To investigate this phenomenon, we conducted a field study of medical workers
in a surgical intensive care unit. Through this study, we highlight the
temporal organization of the work. In particular, we introduce and describe
three temporal features -- temporal trajectories, temporal rhythms, and
temporal horizons -- that emerge from and influence the work of healthcare
providers as they attempt to seek, provide, and manage information during the
course of their daily work. Keywords: collaborative work; medical work; information seeking; temporality | |||
| Sensemaking in Technology-Use Mediation: Adapting Groupware Technology in Organizations | | BIBAK | DOI | 55-91 | |
| Jürgen P. Bansler; Erling Havn | |||
| Understanding how people in organizations appropriate and adapt groupware
technologies to local contexts of use is a key issue for CSCW research, since
it is critical to the success of these technologies. In this paper, we argue
that the appropriation and adaptation of groupware and other types of advanced
CSCW technologies is basically a problem of sensemaking. We analyze how a group
of "technology-use mediators" (Orlikowski et al. Org. Sci. (1995) 6(4), 423) in
a large, multinational company adapted a groupware technology (a "virtual
workspace") to the local organizational context (and vice versa) by modifying
features of the technology, providing ongoing support for users, and promoting
appropriate conventions of use. Our findings corroborate earlier research on
technology-use mediation, which suggests that such mediators can exert
considerable influence on how a particular technology will be established and
used in an organization. However, we also find that the process of
technology-use mediation is much more complex and indeterminate than prior
research suggests. The reason being, we argue, that new, advanced CSCW
technologies, such as "virtual workspaces" and other groupware applications,
challenge the mediators' and users' sensemaking, because the technologies are
equivocal and, therefore, open to many possible and plausible interpretations. Keywords: appropriation; customization; groupware; sensemaking; tailoring; technology
adaptation | |||
| Information Infrastructures for Distributed Collective Practices | | BIB | Full-Text | 93-110 | |
| William Turner; Geoffrey Bowker; Les Gasser; Manuel Zacklad | |||
| Modern Information Infrastructure in the Support of Distributed Collective Practice in Transport | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 111-121 | |
| John Leslie King | |||
| Transport is one of the oldest and most important forms of distributed
collective practice. This paper traces the role of information and
communication technologies in the transformation of transport-based distributed
collective practice, focusing on the evolution of technologies that place
control of the transport infrastructure in the hands of end users. Examples of
this shift are provided, including an analysis of the events of September 11,
2001 as forms of distributed collective action. Keywords: communications; distributed collective practice; information infrastructure;
transportation; terrorism | |||
| Pushing the Distribution Model to its Limits: Distributed "listening" in a Helpline | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 123-148 | |
| Christian Licoppe | |||
| Our case study explores the extent to which a "Distributed Cognition"-like
ethnographic approach can be used to analyze situations which are not at first
sight compatible with the precepts of computational cognition. In the first
part of the paper, we analyze the collective listening of phone calls in a
helpline. We show why collective listening can be considered a "distributed
collective practice", with a mode of coordination based on repeated verbal
re-enactments of difficult phone calls, rather than upon the discrete
computational steps normally assumed in the standard model. In the second part
of the paper, we analyse the organizational and interactional learning which
takes place when collective listening is re-mediated by using e-mail exchanges
rather than telephone conversations to communicate distress. Our conclusion
discusses critically the viability of the distribution model in a context of
collective listening. Keywords: cooperative work; distributed cognition; distribution models; email-based
interaction; phone-based interaction | |||
| Experiences in Automating the Analysis of Linguistic Interactions for the Study of Distributed Collectives | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 149-183 | |
| Gabriel Ripoche; Jean-Paul Sansonnet | |||
| An important issue faced by research on distributed collective practices is
the amount and nature of the data available for study. While persistent
mediated interaction offers unprecedented opportunities for research, the
wealth and richness of available data pose issues on their own, calling for new
methods of investigation. In such a context, automated tools can offer
coverage, both within and across collectives. In this paper, we investigate the
potential contributions of semantic analyses of linguistic interactions for the
study of collective processes and practices. In other words, we are interested
in discovering how linguistic interaction is related to collective action, as
well as in exploring how computational tools can make use of these
relationships for the study of distributed collectives. Keywords: computational tools; distributed software problem management; interaction
modeling; large-scale automated analyses; speech acts | |||
| Scientific Data Collections and Distributed Collective Practice | | BIBAK | DOI | 185-204 | |
| Melissa H. Cragin; Kalpana Shankar | |||
| As the basic sciences become increasingly information-intensive, the
management and use of research data presents new challenges in the collective
activities that constitute scholarly and scientific communication. This also
presents new opportunities for understanding the role of informatics in
scientific work practices, and for designing new kinds tools and resources
needed to support them. These issues of data management, scientific
communication and collective activity are brought together at once in
scientific data collections (SDCs). What can the development and use of shared
SDCs tell us about collective activity, dynamic infrastructures, and
distributed scientific work? Using examples drawn from a nascent neuroscience
data collection, we examine some unique features of SDCs to illustrate that
they do more than act as infrastructures for scientific research. Instead, we
argue that they are themselves instantiations of Distributed Collective
Practice (DCP), and as such illustrate concepts of transition, emergence, and
interdependency that may not be so apparent in other kinds of DCPs. We propose
that research into SDCs can yield new insights into institutional arrangements,
policymaking, and authority structures in other very large-scale
socio-technical networks. Keywords: distributed collective practice; e-Science; Long-Lived Digital Data
Collections; scientific data collections; scientific information
infrastructure; socio-technical systems | |||
| Documentarisation Processes in Documents for Action (DofA): The Status of Annotations and Associated Cooperation Technologies | | BIBAK | DOI | 205-228 | |
| Manuel Zacklad | |||
| In this paper, we focus on situations where documents serve to coordinate
the work of a distributed collective engaged in common goal-directed
activities. After defining the concept of semiotic products as resulting from
symbolic communicational transactions, we present some coordination strategies
which can be used to compensate for the spatio-socio-temporal distribution
typical of these transactions. Among these strategies, it is proposed to study
in detail the documentarisation strategy, which makes the material substrate
mediating the transactions relatively durable and endows it with attributes
making its further use possible. In our study of documentarisation processes,
several novel concepts are introduced and used to describe Documents for Action
(DofA), their characteristics and the conditions that should be respected for
correctly annotating them. Keywords: document; Document for Action (DofA); documentarisation; annotation;
cooperative writing; newsgroup | |||
| A Methodological Framework for Socio-Cognitive Analyses of Collaborative Design of Open Source Software | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 229-250 | |
| Warren Sack; Françoise Détienne; Nicolas Ducheneaut; Jean-Marie Burkhardt; Dilan Mahendran; Flore Barcellini | |||
| Open Source Software (OSS) development challenges traditional software
engineering practices. In particular, OSS projects are managed by a large
number of volunteers, working freely on the tasks they choose to undertake. OSS
projects also rarely rely on explicit system-level design, or on project plans
or schedules. Moreover, OSS developers work in arbitrary locations and
collaborate almost exclusively over the Internet, using simple tools such as
email and software code tracking databases (e.g. CVS).
All the characteristics above make OSS development akin to weaving a tapestry of heterogeneous components. The OSS design process relies on various types of actors: people with prescribed roles, but also elements coming from a variety of information spaces (such as email and software code). The objective of our research is to understand the specific hybrid weaving accomplished by the actors of this distributed, collective design process. This, in turn, challenges traditional methodologies used to understand distributed software engineering: OSS development is simply too "fibrous" to lend itself well to analysis under a single methodological lens. In this paper, we describe the methodological framework we articulated to analyze collaborative design in the Open Source world. Our framework focuses on the links between the heterogeneous components of a project's hybrid network. We combine ethnography, text mining, and socio-technical network analysis and visualization to understand OSS development in its totality. This way, we are able to simultaneously consider the social, technical, and cognitive aspects of OSS development. We describe our methodology in detail, and discuss its implications for future research on distributed collective practices. Keywords: empirical studies; methodology; software development; open source | |||
| Special Issue: Collaboration in e-Research | | BIB | DOI | 251-255 | |
| Marina Jirotka; Rob Procter; Tom Rodden; Geoffrey C. Bowker | |||
| Remote Collaboration Over Video Data: Towards Real-Time e-Social Science | | BIBAK | DOI | 257-279 | |
| Mike Fraser; Jon Hindmarsh; Katie Best; Christian Heath; Greg Biegel; Chris Greenhalgh; Stuart Reeves | |||
| The design of distributed systems to support collaboration among groups of
scientists raises new networking challenges that grid middleware developers are
addressing. This field of development work, 'e-Science', is increasingly
recognising the critical need of understanding the ordinary day-to-day work of
doing research to inform design. We have investigated one particular area of
collaborative social scientific work -- the analysis of video data. Based on
interviews and observational studies, we discuss current practices of social
scientific work with digital video in three areas: Preparation for
collaboration; Control of data and application; and Annotation configurations
and techniques. For each, we describe how these requirements feature in our
design of a distributed video analysis system as part of the MiMeG project: our
security policy and distribution; the design of the control system; and
providing freeform annotation over data. Finally, we review our design in light
of initial use of the software between project partners; and discuss how we
might transform the spatial configuration of the system to support annotation
behaviour. Keywords: video analysis; e-social science; groupware; synchronous collaboration | |||
| Developing Digital Records: Early Experiences of Record and Replay | | BIBAK | DOI | 281-319 | |
| Andy Crabtree; Andrew French; Chris Greenhalgh; Steve Benford; Keith Cheverst; Dan Fitton; Mark Rouncefield; Connor Graham | |||
| In this paper we consider the development of 'digital records' to support
ethnographic study of interaction and collaboration in ubiquitous computing
environments and articulate the core concept of 'record and replay' through two
case studies. One focuses on the utility of digital records, or records of
interaction generated by a computer system, to ethnographic inquiry and
highlights the mutually supportive nature of digital records and ethnographic
methods. The other focuses on the work it takes to make digital records support
ethnography, particularly the work of description and representation that is
required to reconcile the fragmented character of interaction in ubiquitous
computing environments. The work involved in 'making digital records work'
highlights requirements for the design of tools to support the endeavour and
informs the development of a Replay Tool. This tool enables ethnographers to
visualize the data content of digital records; to extract sequences of
relevance to analysis and remove non-relevant features; to marry recorded
content with external resources, such as video; to add content from internal
and external resources through annotation; and to reorder digital records to
reflect the interactional order of events rather than the recorded order of
events. Keywords: CSCW; digital records; ethnography; e-Social Science; record and replay | |||
| Enriching the Notion of Data Curation in E-Science: Data Managing and Information Infrastructuring in the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 321-358 | |
| Helena Karasti; Karen S. Baker; Eija Halkola | |||
| This paper aims to enrich the current understanding of data curation
prevalent in e-Science by drawing on an ethnographic study of one of the
longest-running efforts at long-term consistent data collection with open data
sharing in an environment of interdisciplinary collaboration. In such a context
we identify a set of salient characteristics of ecological research and data
that shape the data stewardship approach of the Long Term Ecological Research
(LTER) network. We describe the actual practices through which LTER information
managers attend to the extended temporal scale of long-term research and data
sets both through data care work and information infrastructure development. We
discuss the issues of long-term and continuity that represent central
challenges for data curation and stewardship. We argue for more efforts to be
directed to understanding what is at stake with a long-term perspective and
differing temporal scales as well as to studying actual practices of data
curation and stewardship in order to provide more coherent understandings of
e-Science solutions and technologies. Keywords: cyberinfrastructure; data stewardship; information management; ecology;
long-term perspective; scientific collaboration | |||
| What can Studies of e-Learning Teach us about Collaboration in e-Research? Some Findings from Digital Library Studies | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 359-383 | |
| Christine L. Borgman | |||
| e-Research is intended to facilitate collaboration through distributed
access to content, tools, and services. Lessons about collaboration are
extracted from the findings of two large, long-term digital library research
projects. Both the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype Project (ADEPT) and the
Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) project on data management
leverage scientific research data for use in teaching. Two forms of
collaboration were studied: (1) direct, in which faculty work together on
research projects; and (2) indirect or serial, in which faculty use or
contribute content to a common pool, such as teaching resources, concepts and
relationships, or research data. Five aspects of collaboration in e-Research
are discussed: (1) disciplinary factors, (2) incentives to adopt e-Learning and
e-Research technologies, (3) user roles, (4) information sharing, and (5)
technical requirements. Collaboration varied by research domain in both
projects, and appears partly to be a function of the degree of instrumentation
in data collection. Faculty members were more interested in tools to manage
their own research data than in tools to facilitate teaching. They also were
more reflective about their research than teaching activities. The availability
of more content, tools, and services to incorporate primary data in teaching
was only a minimal incentive to use these resources. Large investments in a
knowledge base of scientific concepts and relationships for teaching did not
result in re-use by other faculty during the course of the project. Metadata
requirements for research and for teaching vary greatly, which further
complicates the transfer of resources across applications. Personal digital
libraries offer a middle ground between private control and public release of
content, which is a promising direction for the design of digital libraries
that will facilitate collaboration in e-Research. Keywords: collaboration; digital libraries; e-Research; e-Science; e-Learning;
human-computer interaction; information seeking; information retrieval | |||
| Walking the Tightrope: The Balancing Acts of a Large e-Research Project | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 385-411 | |
| Katherine A. Lawrence | |||
| Although e-Research has received much attention and acclaim in recent years,
the realities of distributed collaboration still challenge even the most
well-planned endeavors. This case study of an e-Research project examines the
'balancing acts' associated with multidisciplinary, geographically distributed,
large-scale research and development work. After briefly describing the history
and organizational design of this information technology and atmospheric
science research project, I identify five paradoxical challenges that cannot be
resolved: research versus development, harmony versus conflict, consensus
versus top-down decision making, frequency and modes of communication, and fast
versus slow pacing. Although collaboration and communication technologies
supported the project's management and organization, most of the complexities
faced by the team were not technological in nature. From the five paradoxical
challenges associated with the project, I distill three cross-cutting issues
that could be relevant to other e-Research projects of this magnitude:
satisfying the multiple needs of a multidisciplinary project, managing
information, and engaging all participants. I identify the practical
implications of these challenges and issues, specifically that organizational
and low-tech solutions -- not the introduction of more sophisticated technology
tools -- are needed to solve these challenges and to better streamline
coordination. Keywords: collaboration technology; communication; distributed work;
e-Research/cyberinfrastructure; geographic dispersion; information management;
multidisciplinary scientific research; paradox; project management; technology
development | |||
| Special Issue: CSCW and Dependable Healthcare Systems | | BIB | Full-Text | 413-418 | |
| Rob Procter; Mark Rouncefield; Ellen Balka; Marc Berg | |||
| The Wireless Nursing Call System: Politics of Discourse, Technology and Dependability in a Pilot Project | | BIBAK | DOI | 419-441 | |
| Casper Bruun Jensen | |||
| This paper discusses a research project in which social scientists were
involved both as analysts and supporters during a pilot with a new wireless
nursing call system. The case thus exemplifies an attempt to participate in
developing dependable health care systems and offers insight into the
challenges of developing and supporting such systems. The analysis proposes
that while dependability is not simply a technical issue, neither is it
something, which can be improved merely by adding a social dimension. Instead,
it argues that dependability is a relative concept, which may mean different
things conditional on how it is specified in practice and who gets to do this.
This relativity makes it important to relate the question of how to support
dependable health care systems to an analysis of both the politics of
technology within specific projects and to the politics of discourse, through
which the researcher becomes involved in such projects. Keywords: dependability; discourse; health care; politics; technology | |||
| Seamless Integration: Standardisation across Multiple Local Settings | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 443-466 | |
| Gunnar Ellingsen; Eric Monteiro | |||
| The pressure towards tighter or "seamless" integration of health information
systems is a recurring issue with both practical and analytical relevance. It
taps into a discourse in the IS literature in general and organisation and
management science in particular. Unfortunately, the prevailing perception of
integration in the IS literature is as a predominantly technical issue. The
CSCW literature, however, is attentive to the socio-technical aspects of
integration. Building on this -- but supplemented with recent elaborations in
science studies -- we aim at exploring the unintended consequences of
information systems integration. A user-led perspective implies emphasising the
tailoring to local needs based on in-depth studies of the micro practices. We
argue, however, that the condition for such an approach is radically undermined
by politically motivated, regional changes towards integration with implicated
standardisation. Enforcing order in the form of standards across multiple local
settings, seemingly a prerequisite for tight integration, simultaneously
produces disorder or additional work in other locations for other users.
Empirically, our study is based on a large, ongoing integration effort at the
University hospital of Northern Norway, specifically studying work practices
and perceptions across multiple laboratories. Keywords: integration; standardisation; unintended consequences; work practices | |||
| Achieving Dependability in the Configuration, Integration and Testing of Healthcare Technologies | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 467-499 | |
| David Martin; Mark Hartswood; Roger Slack; Alex Voss | |||
| This paper presents two case studies, which highlight the practical work
involved in developing and deploying dependable healthcare systems. It shows
how dependability is a thoroughgoingly practical, contexted achievement. We
show how dependability is an outcome of the reasoning and argumentation
processes that stakeholders engage in, in situations such as design and
testing. What becomes relevant during these interactions stands as the
dependability criteria that must be achieved. Furthermore, we examine the way
in which different dependability criteria need to be managed, and even
relatively prioritised, before finally discussing the types of work this
provokes at the boundaries of organisations, particularly when integrating work
and technologies. Keywords: configuration; dependability; ethnography; healthcare; integration; testing | |||
| Multidisciplinary Medical Team Meetings: An Analysis of Collaborative Working with Special Attention to Timing and Teleconferencing | | BIBAK | DOI | 501-535 | |
| Bridget Kane; Saturnino Luz | |||
| In this paper we describe the process of a multi-disciplinary medical team
meeting (MDTM), its functions and operation in colocated and teleconference
discussions. Our goal is to identify the elements and mechanics of operation
that enhance or threaten the dependability of the MDTM as a "system" and
propose technologies and measures to make this system more reliable. In
particular, we assess the effect of adding teleconferencing to the MDTM, and
identify strengths and vulnerabilities introduced into the system by the
addition of teleconferencing technology. We show that, with respect to the
system's external task environment, rhythms of execution of pre-meeting and
post-meeting activities are critical for MDTM success and that the extension of
the MDTM to wider geographic locations with teleconferencing might disrupt such
rhythms thereby posing potential threats to dependability. On the other hand,
an analysis of vocalisation patterns demonstrates that despite difficulties
related to coordination and awareness in video-mediated communication
(evidenced by increased time spent in case discussion, longer turns, decreased
turn frequency and near lack of informal exchanges) the overall case discussion
structure is unaffected by the addition of teleconferencing technology into
proceedings. Keywords: ethnography; healthcare; interaction analysis; multidisciplinary medical
team meetings; teleconference | |||
| Loose Coupling and Healthcare Organizations: Deployment Strategies for Groupware | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 537-572 | |
| David Pinelle; Carl Gutwin | |||
| Healthcare organizations are often organized in a modular, loosely coupled
fashion where separate and semi-autonomous work units specialize in different
areas of care delivery. This partitioning allows each unit to adapt to emerging
practice standards in its area of expertise and to adjust to its local work
environment. However, organizational loose coupling can limit the flow of
information within organizations and can make it difficult to coordinate
services when patients' care is dependent on professionals from more than one
unit. Groupware systems have the potential to improve coordination and
information access in healthcare organizations. However, modularity and loose
coupling make it difficult to introduce new systems when they span more than
one unit, since authority is not always centralized and since perceptions and
frames of reference on new deployments differ across units. In this paper, we
define a groupware deployment framework for loosely coupled healthcare
organizations that has two parts: a set of deployment challenges and a set of
deployment strategies. The deployment challenges include: difficulties
centralizing deployments, perceptions of inequity, role conflicts, and problems
achieving critical mass. The deployment strategies outline a preliminary set of
approaches for addressing the difficulties of deploying CSCW systems in loosely
coupled healthcare organizations. We illustrate the framework by presenting a
case study of a groupware deployment in a home care setting. Keywords: deployment planning; groupware deployment; healthcare; human service
organizations; loose coupling | |||