ECSCW 2007

Frontmatter

What did I miss? Visualizing the Past through video traces

Always-on media spaces broadcast video between collaborators to provide mutual awareness and to encourage casual interaction. This video can be easily recorded on the fly as a video trace. Ostensibly, people can review this video history to gain a better idea of the activities and availability of their collaborators. Such systems are obviously highly contentious, as they raise significant privacy concerns. However, the ease of capturing video means that video trace systems will appear in the near future.

To push the boundaries and encourage debate about video trace technologies within the CSCW community, we created TIMELINE, a highly effective visualization system that combines ideas in slit scanning as used in interactive art to allow people to easily and rapidly explore a video history in detail. We describe its design and implementation, and begin the debate by offering preliminary reflections on how it can be used and misused. To encourage this debate, TIMELINE is freely available for others to try.

Michael Nunes, Saul Greenberg, Sheelagh Carpendale, Carl Gutwin

Social bookmarking and exploratory search

In this paper, we explore various search tasks that are supported by a social bookmarking service. These bookmarking services hold great potential to powerfully combine personal tagging of information sources with interactive browsing, resulting in better social navigation. While there has been considerable interest in social tagging systems in recent years, little is known about their actual usage. In this paper, we present the results of a field study of a social bookmarking service that has been deployed in a large enterprise. We present new qualitative and quantitative data on how a corporate social tagging system was used, through both event logs (click level analysis) and interviews. We observed three types of search activities: community browsing, personal search, and explicit search. Community browsing was the most frequently used, and confirms the value of the social aspects of the system. We conclude that social bookmarking services support various kinds of exploratory search, and provide better personal bookmark management and enhance social navigation.

David R. Millen, Meng Yang, Steven Whittaker, Jonathan Feinberg

Instrumental action: the timely exchange of implements during surgical operations

In this paper we analyse an apparently simple collaborative activity, that of passing an implement from one person to another. The particular case we consider is surgical operations where nurses and surgeons routinely pass instruments to one another. Through fine-grained analysis of specific instances we address,- the preparatory work engaged in prior to passing, the ways in which the layout of artefacts is organised with respect to the temporal ordering of the activity, and how this arrangement can be reconfigured in the light of problems and circumstances that arise in an operation. We examine how passing an implement is finely shaped within the course of its articulation with regard to emerging actions of the participants. We suggest that an analysis of fine details of seemingly simple activities with objects may have implications for our understanding of collaborative work, and a one or two key concepts that have informed the design of advanced solutions.

Marcus Sanchez Svensson, Christian Heath, Paul Luff

Prior-to-request and request behaviors within elderly day care: Implications for developing service robots for use in multiparty settings

The rapidly expanding elderly population in Japan and other industrialized countries has posed an enormous challenge to the systems of healthcare that serve elderly citizens. This study examines naturally occurring interaction within elderly day care in Japan, and discusses the implications for developing robotic systems that can provide service in elderly care contexts. The interaction analysis focuses on prior-to-request and request behaviors involving elderly visitors and caregivers in multiparty settings. In particular, it delineates the ways caregivers’ displays of availability affects elderly visitors’ behavior prior to initiating a request, revealing that visitors observe caregivers prior to initiating a request, and initiation is contingent upon caregivers’ displayed availability. The findings are discussed in relation to our work in designing an autonomous and remote- controlled robotic system that can be employed in elderly day care centers and other service contexts.

Keiichi Yamazaki, Michie Kawashima, Yoshinori Kuno, Naonori Akiya, Matthew Burdelski, Akiko Yamazaki, Hideaki Kuzuoka

Designing family photo displays

We present efforts to explore the relatively underdeveloped area of digital photo display. Using examples from two empirical studies with family homes, we develop our results around three broad themes related to the display of photos and their arrangement. The first theme highlights the collaborative as well as individual work that goes into preparing photos for display. The second attends to the obligations families have to put particular photos on display. The third introduces the notion of curatorial control and the tensions that arise from one person controlling a home’s photo displays. Drawing on these themes, we go on to describe how we have used a critical design approach to open up the possibilities for future display innovations. Three critical design proposals are presented as sketches to illustrate the development of our ideas to date.

Alex S. Taylor, Laurel Swan, Abigail Durrant

The Awareness Network: To Whom Should I Display My Actions? And, Whose Actions Should I Monitor?

The concept of awareness has come to play a central role in CSCW research. The coordinative practices of displaying and monitoring have received attention and have led to different venues of research, from computational tool support, such as media spaces and event propagation mechanisms, to ethnographic studies of work. However, these studies have overlooked a different aspect of awareness practices: the identification of the social actors who should be monitored and the actors to whom their actions should be displayed. The focus of this paper is on how social actors answer the following questions: to whom should I display my actions? And, whose actions should I monitor? Ethnographic data from two software development teams are used to answer these questions. In addition, we illustrate how software developers’ work practices are influenced by three different factors: the organizational setting, the age of the project, and the software architecture.

Cleidson R. B. de Souza, David Redmiles

“…and do it the usual way”: fostering awareness of work conventions in document-mediated collaboration

In this paper, we concentrate on how conventions among practitioners are put at work for the sake of cooperation in those work settings where coordination is mediated at a large extent by complex webs of documental artifacts. Our case study focuses on coordinative conventions exhibited in the hospital domain and mediated by compound patient records. We conceive of the provision of document-mediated awareness information as a “learning device” by which these conventions can be made explicit in all those situations where practitioners need support in coping with and solving cooperative problems in the articulation of their activities. To enable such a context-dependent and usercentered provision of awareness, we also present and outline the WOAD framework that provides users and designers with a conceptual model and language aimed at facilitating the construction of a convention- and collaboration-aware layer on top of traditional architectures of electronic documental systems. To this aim, we take the case of the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) as paradigmatic.

Federico Cabitza, Carla Simone

A safe space to vent: Conciliation and conflict in distributed teams

This paper considers the nature of conflict in relation to the environments within which distributed teams cooperate. Effective conflict management can bring great benefits to distributed teams, while inadequate conflict resolution strategies can incur significant personal and resource costs. The increased geographical, cognitive and emotional distances between members can stimulate and amplify conflict. Parties may display disinhibited behaviour (flaming) or may be reluctant to accept reconciliatory overtures (low trust). These factors can be attributed to the impact of communication technology on social structures that underlie interaction. Shifting to face-to-face meetings can be impractical or involve prohibitive cost, so it is important to establish how best to deal with conflict in technologically-mediated settings. Dispute resolution practitioners (conciliators) have evolved strategies and techniques to construct and regulate “safe-spaces”; settings that are conducive to finding creative solutions to entrenched conflicts. Building on interviews with expert conciliators, we discuss the potential for learning from the structure and constraints of conciliation environments in order to improve conflict management through technologies.

Matt Billings, Leon A. Watts

Semi-synchronous conflict detection and resolution in asynchronous software development

Previous work has found that (a) when software is developed collaboratively, concurrent accesses to related pieces of code are made, and (b) when these accesses are coordinated asynchronously through a version control system, they result in increased defects because of conflicting concurrent changes. Previous findings also show that distance collaboration aggravates software-development problems and radical colocation reduces them. These results motivate a semi-synchronous distributed computersupported model that allows programmers creating code asynchronously to synchronously collaborate with each other to detect and resolve potentially conflicting tasks before they have completed the tasks. We describe, illustrate, and evaluate a new model designed to meet these requirements. Our results show that the model can catch conflicts at editing time that would be expensive to manage at later times.

Prasun Dewan, Rajesh Hegde

Tag-based metonymic search in an activity-centric aggregation service

Knowledge workers often need to find, organize, and work with heterogeneous resources from diverse services, information stores, and repositories. This paper analyzes two problems that knowledge workers frequently encounter: difficulty in finding all relevant resources across diverse services, and difficulty in formulating and executing searches for resources related to their current activity-of-interest. The Malibu project explores solutions to these problems through a dynamic peripheral display that aggregates knowledge resources from multiple services to support activity-centric work. Of particular interest is the ability to select a knowledge resource and use it as a metonym (a proxy) for its social-tagging metadata in a tag-based search for related resources among heterogeneous services. We evaluated our solutions to these two problems through convergent analyses of quantitative (data log) and qualitative (interview and discussion data) data. Our partial successes show the strength of these new ideas, and indicate areas for future research.

Casey Dugan, Michael J. Muller, Werner Geyer, Beth Brownholtz, David R. Millen, Eric Wilcox

The distributed work of local action: Interaction amongst virtually collocated research teams

Existing research on synchronous remote working in CSCW has highlighted the troubles that can arise because actions at one site are (partially) unavailable to remote colleagues. Such ‘local action’ is routinely characterised as a nuisance, a distraction, subordinate and the like. This paper explores interconnections between ‘local action’ and ‘distributed work’ in the case of a research team virtually collocated through ‘MiMeG’. MiMeG is an e-Social Science tool that facilitates ‘distributed data sessions’ in which social scientists are able to remotely collaborate on the real-time analysis of video data. The data are visible and controllable in a shared workspace and participants are additionally connected via audio conferencing. The findings reveal that whilst the (partial) unavailability of local action is at times problematic, it is also used as a resource for coordinating work. The paper considers how local action is interactionally managed in distributed data sessions and concludes by outlining implications of the analysis for the design and study of technologies to support group-to-group collaboration.

Dylan Tutt, Jon Hindmarsh, Muneeb Shaukat, Mike Fraser

Bringing round-robin signature to computer-mediated communication

In computer-mediated group communication, anonymity enables participants to post controversial comments without risking accusations of improper behavior. While this may encourage more open and frank discussion, it diminishes accountability. In addition, anonymous comments are perceived as weaker than non-anonymous comments. We propose a communication protocol that allows a user to send a strong message to the group without having to assume sole individual responsibility. The system posts an anonymous comment, and then calls for supporters. When sufficient numbers of supporters have been gathered, the system reveals the names of all supporters as a round-robin signature. This prevents the originator from being identified. We describe the implementation of this protocol in a text-based chat system, and report our experience operating it at two technical conferences.

Takeshi Nishida, Takeo Igarashi

Asymmetrical collaboration in print shop-customer relationships

The service provider-customer relationship, although not perhaps considered a typical collaborative relationship, is clearly collaborative work. However, such work is constrained by the very (service) nature of the relationship. Customer-service provider interaction can be characterised as interaction at the boundaries of organisations, each of which is likely to have their own workflows and orientations. Many service organisations attempt to facilitate this interaction by configuring their customers, using standardised forms or applications. In this way they bring the customers workflow into line with their own. In this paper we describe field work examining one particular service relationship; that between print shops and their customers. A notable feature of print shop-customer relationships is that customers prepare the material that the print shop then prints. This makes the standardization of workflows difficult, particularly within the service relationship. Technologies exist which aim to automate and standardize the workflow from customers to print shops. However, they have, up to now, largely failed to live up to their promise, leaving print shops to adopt ad hoc solutions. This paper describes the hidden work that the print shops do to make the service relationship work.

Jacki O'Neill, David Martin, Tommaso Colombino, Jennifer Watts-Perotti, Mary Ann Sprague, Geoffrey Woolfe

Dressing up for school work: Supporting a collaborative environment with heterogeneous technologies

This paper approaches heterogeneity and heterogeneous technology as assets, rather than limitations, in the development of computer supported cooperative work. We demonstrate how heterogeneous technologies sustain teachers’ and students’ school work by presenting four different prototypes (the HyConExplorer, the eCell, the iGame- Floor and the eBag) that complement one another because they offer different functionalities and are, at the same time, designed with the wholeness of school activities, particularly group-based ones, in mind. Thus, they provide teachers and students with a broad range of IT support to aid them in and outside of the classroom. We take the school domain as our point of departure, but argue that the focus on heterogeneous technologies is applicable for the general area of CSCW.

Christina Brodersen, Ole Sejer Iversen

Exploring cooperation through a binder: A context for IT tools in elderly care at home

This paper examines the empirical findings of a study of the work and cooperation taking place within and between the home help service and home health care in a Swedish county. The aim is to explore the current context for the design and development of IT tools that may facilitate cooperation and coordination in elderly care at home. The focus of the study is the use of a tool, a binder, which collects material considered as important to sustain cooperation between and within the two services. The paper illustrates concrete aspects of how different types of material is utilised and how the actual use of the binder reveals both advantages and disadvantages. Through focusing on the binder, aspects that are crucial to consider also when designing IT tools are made visible. These aspects include the need to support the integration of home care information and the importance of assisting asynchronous communication through the facilitation of informal information. It is also necessary to consider the mobile nature of the home care work, and the importance of a patient-centric view that promotes information sharing between the heterogeneous network of actors involved in the home care process, including the care receiver and relatives.

Alexandra Petrakou

Common Information Spaces along the illness trajectories of chronic patients

The notion of Common Information Spaces (CIS) is extensively used as a framework to analyse cooperative work. Drawing on recent contributions to the discourse on CIS, this paper develops a perspective on how information is shared in heterogeneous contexts. We study the introduction of an electronic nursing plan in the psychogeriatric ward at the University Hospital of North Norway. The plan was expected to improve information sharing among the healthcare practitioners and in that sense contribute to their CIS. However, although the nursing plan was regularly updated, it was less used in practice than initially expected. We suggest that this can be ascribed to the temporal and evolving character of both medical information and work. Drawing on the notion of trajectories, we elaborate on these findings and develop a perspective on CIS, emphasising its situated, temporal and negotiated character.

Glenn Munkvold, Gunnar Ellingsen

Gifts from friends and strangers: A study of mobile music sharing

Mobile technology has turned the traditionally collective activity of enjoying music into an often private one. New technologies such as wireless ad hoc networks have the potential to re-connect listeners who are now separated by headphones. We report on a field study of Push!Music, a novel mobile music sharing system. Push!Music allows both manual and automatic sharing of music between users through ad hoc wireless networking, and also provides a social awareness of other users nearby. The system was used by 13 subjects for three weeks. In post-study interviews, we identified four categories of results: social awareness, sharing music with friends, sharing music with strangers, and sharing automatically. Based on this, we present implications for design that can be applied not only to mobile music sharing systems, but to mobile media sharing in general: Allow division into active and passive use; enhance the awareness of who, where and when; support reciprocity; and finally, support identity and impression management.

Maria Håkansson, Mattias Rost, Lars Erik Holmquist

Making the home network at home: Digital housekeeping

This paper exploits ethnographic findings to build on and elaborate Grinter et al’s 2005 study of “the work to make the home network work”. We focus particularly on the work involved in setting up and maintaining home networks, which we characterize as ‘digital housekeeping’. Our studies reveal that it is through digital housekeeping that the home network is ‘made at home’ or made into an unremarkable and routine feature of domestic life. The orderly ways in which digital housekeeping ‘gets done’ elaborate a distinct ‘social machinery’ that highlights some important implications for the continued development of network technologies for the home. These include a requirement that designers take existing infrastructure into account and pay considerable attention to how future technologies may be incorporated into existing routines. The preoccupation of household members with making the home network transparent and accountable so that it is available to practical reasoning suggests designers should also consider the development of dedicated management interfaces to support digital housekeeping.

Peter Tolmie, Andy Crabtree, Tom Rodden, Chris Greenhalgh, Steve Benford

Behaviours and preferences when coordinating mediated interruptions: Social and system influence

There is a growing interest in technologies for supporting individuals to manage their accessibility for interruptions. The applicability of these technologies is likely to be influenced by social relationships between people. This paper describes an experiment that examines interplay between a working relationship of an interruptor and an interruptee and two different system approaches to handle interruptions. We tested how system behaviour and the social relationship between the actors influence their interruption behaviours. Our results are consistent with prior research on the importance of relational benefit to understanding interruption. We found that interruptors were far more likely to be considerate of interruptees' activities, when they both shared a common goal. We have extended those findings by showing that interruptees display similar behaviours to those presented by interruptors. The results regarding the systems’ influence show a clear trend towards the positive effect of the Automatic system on peoples’ interruption behaviours which is based on: (i) visible interruption costs, (ii) social tension and (iii) system preference. We think that the results of this experiment translated into design implications can prove helpful in informing the design of computer–mediated solutions supporting interruption handling.

Natalia Romero, Agnieszka Matysiak Szóstek, Maurits Kaptein, Panos Markopoulos

Health care categories have politics too: Unpacking the managerial agendas of electronic triage systems

While investigating the resistance to the electronic triage system, ETRIAGE, at the emergency department of British Columbia Children’s Hospital, we revisit the wellknown CSCW-debate about THE COORDINATOR concerning the politics of standardized categories. Examining the history as well as the design of ETRIAGE, we reveal four basic assumptions about triage work in emergency departments, which are reflected in the design of the ETRIAGE application and related to the managerial agenda of controlling costs in hospitals. We find that ETRIAGE has an embedded surveillance-capability, which challenges the professional authority of nurses’ work and removes discretion from the individual. We argue that the resistance towards ETRIAGE should be understood in terms of experienced nurses’ disputing the assumptions about their professional practice that are embodied within such systems rather than general resistance to change or resistance to technology.

Pernille Bjørn, Ellen Balka

How-To pages: Informal systems of expertise sharing

The How-To has recently emerged as a genre of online content that describes how something is done. This study focuses on computer and electronics hobbyists and their use of How-Tos-how hobbyists use existing knowledge to solve technical challenges, how they document their new knowledge for one another, and how they exchange help and feedback. Our analysis describes How-To knowledge sharing as a fully decentralized expertise-location system in which the How-To functions as both a broadcast of the author’s expertise and a personal portfolio.

Cristen Torrey, David W. McDonald, Bill N. Schilit, Sara Bly

Seeing Ethnographically: Teaching ethnography as part of CSCW

While ethnography is an established part of CSCW research, teaching and learning ethnography presents unique and distinct challenges. This paper discusses a study of fieldwork and analysis amongst a group of students learning ethnography as part of a CSCW & design course. Studying the students’ practices we explore fieldwork as a learning experience, both learning about fieldsites as well as learning the practices of ethnography. During their fieldwork and analysis the students used a wiki to collaborate, sharing their field and analytic notes. From this we draw lessons for how ethnography can be taught as a collaborative analytic process and discuss extensions to the wiki to better support its use for collaborating around fieldnotes. In closing we reflect upon the role of learning ethnography as a practical hands on – rather than theoretical – pursuit.

Barry Brown, Johan Lundin, Mattias Rost, Gustav Lymer, Lars Erik Holmquist

Cues to common knowledge

We show that asynchronous collaboration can be made more effective by providing cues to common knowledge. We demonstrate this by empirically comparing two user interfaces used to support collaborative work. Our position is that effective collaboration is characterized by more co-ordinated and speculative interaction, and that cues to common knowledge help participants develop common ground for interaction. We also suggest that more effective collaboration is indicated by increased reliance on expectations of others’ knowledge which is characterized by implicit references to shared documents and ideas.

N. Bryan-Kinns, P. G. T. Healey, D. Papworth, A. Vaduuva

Backmatter