| Bloggers and Readers Blogging Together: Collaborative Co-creation of Political Blogs | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 1-36 | |
| Eric P. S. Baumer; Mark Sueyoshi; Bill Tomlinson | |||
| A significant amount of research has focused on blogs, bloggers, and
blogging. However, relatively little work has examined blog readers, their
interactions with bloggers, or their impact on blogging. This paper presents a
qualitative study focusing specifically on readers of political blogs to
develop a better understanding of readers' interactions with blogs and
bloggers. This is the first such study to examine the same blogging activity
from both readers' and bloggers' perspectives. Readers' significance and
contributions to blogs are examined through a number of themes, including:
community membership and participation; the relationship between political
ideology, reading habits, and political participation; and differences and
similarities between mainstream media (MSM) and blogs. Based on these analyses,
this paper argues that blogging is not only a social activity, but is a
collaborative process of co-creation in which both bloggers and readers engage.
Implications of this finding contribute to the study and understanding of
reader participation, to the design of technologies for bloggers and blog
readers, and to the development of theoretical understandings of social media. Keywords: blog readers; blogging; blogs; online activism; political blogs; social
media | |||
| Variations and Commonalities in Processes of Collaboration: The Need for Multi-Site Workplace Studies | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 37-59 | |
| Rebecca Randell; Stephanie Wilson; Peter Woodward | |||
| Workplace studies have made a major contribution to the field of CSCW,
drawing attention to subtle practices that enable effective collaboration.
However, workplace studies typically focus on a single setting, making it
difficult to assess the generalisability of the findings. Through a multi-site
workplace study, we explore a specific collaborative process, that of the
handover which occurs when a patient is transferred from one hospital or ward
to another. The study demonstrates that the term 'handover' captures a variety
of collaborative practices that vary in both their form and content, reflecting
aspects of the setting in which they occur. Multi-site workplace studies are
shown to be essential for CSCW, not only generating findings that have
relevance beyond a single setting but also focusing attention on aspects of
work practice that may otherwise go unnoticed. Keywords: workplace studies; ethnography; healthcare; handover | |||
| Tertiary-Level Telehealth: A Media Space Application | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 61-92 | |
| Duncan Roderick Stevenson | |||
| A media space provides the communications channels to support the
interactions between people at different locations using video and audio links
and shared access to data. This paper looks at a telehealth implementation of
outpatient consultations for tertiary-level paediatric surgical patients,
consultations which exercise a high degree of interpersonal and data-sharing
communication between the participants. Framing the telehealth situation as a
media space invites the designer of the telehealth system to access a large
body of prior work which identifies and discusses many of the issues that will
arise in this complex multi-participant telehealth context. This paper
presents, as a case study, a two-year project that developed and deployed a
whole-of-room telehealth system in partnership with surgeons from The Royal
Children's Hospital (RCH), Melbourne, Australia. Based on observations at the
hospital and discussions with the surgeons, a descriptive model of the proposed
telehealth consultation (and of its deployment in a clinical trial) was
developed. This descriptive model became the vehicle for gathering requirements
and for design and evaluation of the telehealth system. The evaluation
contained four major components: two human factors studies, an observational
study of training and process change for the clinicians and a clinical trial of
the resulting system. The case study demonstrates the flow of design decisions
from concept to deployment. It highlights the gaps that appeared in the
descriptive model when the transition was made from the laboratory to
deployment in the hospital. The conclusion is that, at this relatively
unexplored level of telehealth, there are likely to be gaps in such a
descriptive model that are not uncovered by laboratory experiments or by
analytic evaluation but emerge only during a clinical trial with actual
patients, clinicians and patient data. Keywords: tertiary telehealth; outpatient consultation; media space application;
descriptive model; case study | |||
| Artefactual Multiplicity: A Study of Emergency-Department Whiteboards | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 93-121 | |
| Pernille Bjørn; Morten Hertzum | |||
| Whiteboards are highly important to the work in emergency departments (EDs).
As a collaborative technology ED whiteboards are usually placed in the dynamic
centre of the ED, and all ED staff will approach the whiteboard regularly to
organize their individual yet interdependent work. Currently, digital
whiteboards are replacing the ordinary dry-erase whiteboards in EDs, which
bring the design and use of whiteboards in ED to our attention. Previous
studies have applied the theoretical lenses of common information spaces,
coordination, and awareness to the investigation of whiteboard use and design.
Based on an ethnographic study of the work practices involving two differently
designed ED whiteboards, we found these concepts insufficient to explain one
essential characteristic of these heterogeneous artefacts. In this paper, we
suggest an additional theoretical concept describing this characteristic of
heterogeneous artefacts; namely artefactual multiplicity. Artefactual
multiplicity identifies not only the multiple functions of heterogeneous
artefacts but also the intricate relations between these multiple
functionalities. Keywords: whiteboard; emergency department; work practice; design; artefactual
multiplicity | |||
| Layers in Sorting Practices: Sorting out Patients with Potential Cancer | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 123-153 | |
| Naja Holten Møller; Pernille Bjørn | |||
| In the last couple of years, widespread use of standardized cancer pathways
has been seen across a range of countries, including Denmark, to improve
prognosis of cancer patients. In Denmark, standardized cancer pathways take the
form of guidelines prescribing well-defined sequences where steps are planned
and pre-booked in order to manage patient trajectories. They are different from
typical medical guidelines because they combine both administrative and
clinical prescriptions. A key issue related to the enactment of a standardized
cancer pathway concerns the decision to initiate a pathway for a particular
patient. Due to the limited resources within the Danish healthcare system,
initiating cancer pathways for all patients with a remote suspicion of cancer
would crash the system, as it would be impossible for healthcare professionals
to commit to the prescribed schedules and times defined by the standardized
pathways. Thus, sorting patients with symptoms of potential cancer becomes an
essential activity. In this paper, we investigate the pre-diagnostic work of
sorting patients with symptoms that may potentially be cancer. We identify and
conceptualize the sorting practices for potential cancer patients in the
pre-diagnostic work as being structured in layers of the interrelated,
iterative practices of constructing, organizing, re-organizing, and merging the
multiple queues within which each patient is simultaneously situated. We find
that the ordering of patients in queues is guided by the formal sorting
mechanism, but is handled by informal sorting mechanisms. We identify two
informal sorting mechanisms with large impact on the sorting practices, namely
subtle categorizing and collective remembering. These informal sorting
mechanisms have implications for the design of electronic booking systems
because they show that sorting patients before initiating a standardized cancer
pathway is not a simple process of deciding on a predefined category that will
stipulate particular dates and times. Instead, these informal sorting
mechanisms show that the process of sorting patients prior to diagnosis is a
collaborative process of merging multiple queues while continuously deciding
whether or not a patient's symptoms point to potential cancer. Keywords: pre-diagnostic work; cancer; sorting; collaboration | |||
| Special Theme: Project Management in E-Science: Challenges and Opportunities | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 155-163 | |
| Dimitrina Spencer; Ann Zimmerman; David Abramson | |||
| In this introduction to the special theme: Project Management in e-Science:
Challenges and Opportunities, we argue that the role of project management and
different forms of leadership and facilitation can influence significantly the
nature of cooperation and its outcomes and deserves further research attention.
The quality of social interactions such as communication, cooperation, and
coordination, have emerged as key factors in developing and deploying e-science
infrastructures and applications supporting large-scale and distributed
collaborative scientific research. If software is seen to embody the relational
web within which it evolves, and if the processes of software design,
development and deployment are seen as ongoing transformations of this dynamic
web of relationships between technology, people and environment, the role of
managers becomes crucial: it is their responsibility to balance and facilitate
the dynamics of these relationships. Keywords: e-science; cyberinfrastructure; collaboratories; e-infrastructures;
usability; interdisciplinary collaboration; agile management; agile
development; team-building; project management; leadership; facilitation of
e-science teams; software development | |||
| Bridging the Disciplinary Divide: Co-Creating Research Ideas in eScience Teams | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 165-196 | |
| Deana D. Pennington | |||
| Collaboration within eScience teams depends on participants learning each
others' disciplinary perspectives sufficiently to generate cross-disciplinary
research questions of interest. Participants in new teams often have a limited
understanding of each other's research interests; hence early team interactions
must revolve around exploratory cross-disciplinary learning and the search for
interesting linkages between disciplines. This article investigates group
learning and creative processes that impact the efficacy of early team
interactions, and the impact of those interactions on the generation of
integrated conceptual frameworks from which co-created research problems may
emerge. Relevant learning and creativity theories were used to design a
management intervention that was applied within the context of an incipient
eScience team. Project evaluation indicated that the intervention enabled
participants to effectively cross disciplines, integrate conceptualizations,
and generate research ideas. The findings suggest that attention to group
learning and creativity issues may help overcome some barriers to collaboration
on eScience teams. Keywords: interdisciplinary research; learning and collaboration; problem finding;
team science; eScience teams; cyberinfrastructure teams | |||
| Agile Project Management: A Case Study of a Virtual Research Environment Development Project | | BIBAK | DOI | 197-225 | |
| Rob Procter; Mark Rouncefield; Meik Poschen; Yuwei Lin; Alex Voss | |||
| In this paper we use a case study of a project to create a Web 2.0-based,
Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for researchers to share digital resources
in order to reflect on the principles and practices for embedding eResearch
applications within user communities. In particular, we focus on the software
development methodologies and project management techniques adopted by the
project team in order to ensure that the project remained responsive to
changing user requirements without compromising their capacity to keep the
project 'on track', i.e. meeting the goals declared in the project proposal
within budget and on time. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we describe how
the project team, whose members are distributed across multiple sites (and
often mobile), exploit a repertoire of coordination mechanisms, communication
modes and tools, artefacts and structuring devices as they seek to establish
the orderly running of the project while following an agile, user-centred
development approach. Keywords: agile software project management; eResearch; Virtual Research Environment;
user engagement; Web 2.0 | |||
| Socially Embedded Collaborative Practices: Introduction to a Special Issue based on the COOP 2010 Conference | | BIB | DOI | 227-229 | |
| Myriam Lewkowicz; Markus Rohde | |||
| "Remain Faithful to the Earth!"*: Reporting Experiences of Artifact-Centered Design in Healthcare | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 231-263 | |
| Federico Cabitza | |||
| In this paper we report about two design experiences in the domain of
healthcare information technology that shed light on the advantages of getting
rid of complex and abstract representations of hospital work and of
concentrating on the artifacts that practitioners habitually use in their daily
practice. We ground our approach in the recent literature on the often
unintended shortcomings exhibited by healthcare information systems and propose
a lightweight method to support the phases of requirement elicitation and
functional design. We then discuss the main requirements expressed in our
recent research activity and provide examples of how to address them in terms
of modular and reusable design solutions. Keywords: Artifact-centered design; Requirement elicitation; Healthcare; Domain
analysis; System analysis; Hospital work; Healthcare information technology | |||
| Analyzing Political Activists' Organization Practices: Findings from a Long Term Case Study of the European Social Forum | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 265-304 | |
| Saqib Saeed; Markus Rohde; Volker Wulf | |||
| Designing ICT support for transnational networks of social activists is a
challenge due to diverse organizational structures, cultural identities,
political ideologies, and financial conditions. In this paper we present
empirical findings on ICT usage in the organizing process of the European
Social Forum (ESF) covering a period of almost 3 years. The European Social
Forum is a platform for political activists involved in the anti-globalization
movement. During our data collection period, the 5th and 6th European Social
Fora were held in Malmo (2008) and Istanbul (2010). The paper describes complex
social practices in organizing ESF events. We use the term fragmented
meta-coordination to denote this type of practice. Mundane IT applications,
such as a mailing list and a content management system, play a central role in
enabling different aspects of fragmented meta-coordination. The findings also
indicate how lacking resources, organizational distribution, and technical
limitations hamper the preparation process and reduce the transparency of
political decision making. Our analysis highlights central organizational and
technological challenges related to ICT appropriation in transnational networks
of social activists. Keywords: ethnographic case study; technology and the third sector; community
informatics; social movements and ICTs; political organizing; meta-coordination | |||
| Collocated Social Practices Surrounding Photo Usage in Archaeology | | BIBAK | DOI | 305-340 | |
| Marco P. Locatelli; Carla Simone; Viviana Ardesia | |||
| Archaeology is a domain of work where photographs play a relevant role: here
they are used in different phases of the archaeological work for many purposes,
some of which are common to other domains or to home usage (e.g., archiving).
We focus our attention on one of the initial phases of the archaeological
process, namely excavation, since the related activities use photographs in a
very particular way and under the constraints of a very demanding physical
setting. Moreover, in this phase the use of digitized photographs is recent,
and in their adoption they are interestingly combined with photographs printed
on paper. This paper presents the results of a study performed at an
archaeological site in the south of Italy: it reports the observed collocated
collaborative practices surrounding photographs and discusses these practices
to identify some functionalities of a supportive technology. Keywords: social practicies; collocated; photo-work; photo-talk; photographs;
archaeology | |||
| The Concept of 'Work' in CSCW | | BIBA | DOI | 341-401 | |
| Kjeld Schmidt | |||
| The scope of CSCW, its focus on work, has been a topic of sporadic debate for many years -- indeed, from the very beginning in the late 1980s. But in recent years the issue has become one of general concern. Most of this debate has been taking place in closed fora such as program committees, editorial boards, and email discussion groups, but over the last few years the debate has been brought out in the open in a few publications, in particular in a programmatic article from 2005 by three esteemed CSCW researchers: Andy Crabtree, Tom Rodden, and Steve Benford. They argue that CSCW should 'move its focus away from work'. Other researchers argue along the same lines. Taking this open challenge as a welcome cue, the present article addresses CSCW's scope: the rationale for its focus on ordinary work. After an initial discussion of the arguments put forward by Crabtree et al. and by others, the article focuses on an analysis of the concept of 'work', drawing on the methods and insights of 'ordinary language philosophy', and, flowing from this, a critique of the notion of 'work' in conversation analysis. After a critical appraisal of prevailing myths about the realities of work in the contemporary world, the article ends in an attempt to position CSCW in the context of technological development more broadly. The underlying premise of the article is that it is time to reconsider CSCW: to rethink what it is and why it might be important. | |||
| Supporting the Collaborative Appropriation of an Open Software Ecosystem | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 403-448 | |
| Sebastian Draxler; Gunnar Stevens | |||
| Since the beginning of CSCW there was an intense interest for research on
workplace design using tailorable applications and sharing customizations.
However, in the meantime the forms of production, distribution, configuration
and appropriation of software have changed fundamentally. In order to reflect
these developments, we enlarge the topic of discussion beyond customizing
single applications, but focusing on how people design their workplaces making
use of software ecosystems. We contribute to understand the new phenomenon from
within the users' local context. By empirically studying the Eclipse software
ecosystem and its appropriation, we show the improved flexibility users achieve
at designing their workplaces. Further the uncovered practices demonstrate, why
design strategies like mass-customization are a bad guiding principle as they
just focus on the individual user. In contrast we outline an alternative design
methodology based on existing CSCW approaches, but also envision where the
workplace design in the age of software ecosystems has to go beyond. Keywords: appropriation; CSCW; end user development; software eco-systems; tailoring;
workplace design; eclipse | |||
| Technology in Protestant Ministry | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 449-472 | |
| Rebecca E. Grinter; Susan P. Wyche; Gillian R. Hayes; Lonnie D. Harvel | |||
| As Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) have entered homes and
more, so Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) research has expanded to
examine new motivations for coordination and communications. Recently this has
grown to include a focus on religion. But, yet, while the uses of ICTs by
practitioners of a variety of faiths have been examined, far less is known
about how officials within religious institutions adopt, use and reject ICTs.
In this paper, we report findings from a study of American Protestant Christian
ministers' use of ICTs. We present findings and discuss the use of systems in
church management, worship, pastoral care, and outreach, and the challenges in
integrating ICTs into religious practice. Despite these difficulties, we found
that ministers, chose to experiment with ICTs because of their ability to
sustain, reinforce and grow their church (laity and ministry collectively)
community. Keywords: religion; collaboration | |||
| Accounting and Co-Constructing: The Development of a Standard for Electronic Health Records | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 473-495 | |
| Claus Bossen | |||
| Patient records are central, constitutive parts of health care and
hospitals. Currently, substantial sums are being invested in making patient
records electronic, in order to take advantage of IT's ability to quickly
accumulate, compute, and propagate data to multiple sites, to enhance
coordination of health care services and cooperation among staff, and make
patient records immediately accessible to distributed actors. Investors also
aim to increase health care services' accountability and integration, and
improve quality and efficiency. This paper analyses a Danish national standard
for electronic health records, on the basis of an application prototype test
designed to that standard. The analysis shows that, inscribed in the standard
is an ambition to increase the accountability of staff and health care services
at the cost of increased work, loss of overview, and fragmentation of patient
cases. Significantly, despite the standard having been conceived and developed
in a process of co-construction involving clinicians, clinicians did not find
it adequate for their work. This analysis argues this was the result of the
model of work embedded in the standard coming from a stance external to
practice. Subsequently, a flip-over effect occurred, in which the model of work
became a model for work. Hence, this paper argues that co-construction
processes should not only include users as representatives of a profession, but
strive to produce experiences and knowledge intrinsic to practice. Keywords: accountability; clinical work; co-construction; electronic health records;
health care; hospitals; participatory design; representations; user involvement | |||
| Computer Interaction Analysis: Toward an Empirical Approach to Understanding User Practice and Eye Gaze in GUI-Based Interaction | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 497-528 | |
| Robert J. Moore; Elizabeth F. Churchill | |||
| Today's personal computers enable complex forms of user interaction. Unlike
older mainframe computers that required batch processing, personal computers
enable real-time user control on a one-to-one basis. Such user interaction
involves mixed initiative, logic, language and pointing gestures, features
reminiscent of interaction with another human. Yet there are also major
differences between computer interaction and human interaction, such as
computers' inability to stray from scripts or to adapt to the idiosyncrasies of
particular recipients or situations. Given these similarities and differences,
can we study computer interaction using methods similar to those for studying
human interaction? If so, are the findings from the analysis of human
interaction also useful in understanding computer interaction? In this paper,
we explore these questions and outline a novel methodological approach for
examining human-computer interaction, which we call "computer interaction
analysis." We build on earlier approaches to human interaction with a computer
and adapt them to the latest technologies for computer screen capture and eye
tracking. In doing so, we propose a new transcription notation scheme that is
designed to represent the interweaving streams of input actions, display events
and eye movements. Finally we demonstrate the approach with concrete examples
involving the phenomena of placeholding, repair and referential practices. Keywords: computer interaction analysis; ethnomethodology; conversation analysis;
human computer interaction; eye tracking; web search | |||
| Investigating the Role of a Large, Shared Display in Multi-Display Environments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 529-561 | |
| James R. Wallace; Stacey D. Scott; Eugene Lai; Deon Jajalla | |||
| We conducted an empirical study to investigate the use of personal and
shared displays during group work. The collaborative environments under study
consisted of personal workspaces, in the form of laptops, and a shared virtual
workspace displayed on a nearby wall. Our study compared the use of the large
shared display under two different interface content conditions; a status
display that provided an overview of the group's current task performance, and
a replicated view of the shared workspace that allowed task work to occur on
the shared display. The study results suggest that while participants used
their personal displays primarily to perform the task, the shared display
facilitated several key teamwork mechanisms. In particular, the provided status
display best facilitated monitoring of group progress, whereas the replicated
content display best facilitated conversational grounding. Regardless of the
shared display content, having a shared, physical reference point also appeared
to support synchronization of the group activity via body language and gaze. Keywords: multi-display environments; evaluation; design; display configuration; input
redirection; personalized views; content replication; job shop scheduling task | |||