Archiv für September, 2007
ECSCW 2007 – Day 3 – Closing
In the last session of the conference the closing keynote was given: “TUNES: The Irish traditional music session as organizational model” by Micheal O Suilleabhain from the University of Limerick. The first thing to notice was that the whole setup has changed – instead of a screen for a video projector there were some music instruments placed on the platform.
The theme of the talk is “How does a (music) session work?”.
Irish traditional dance music differs from Jazz music and symphony orchestras – collaboration and polyphony (Jazz) and power of uniformity (Symphony Orchestra) – “the uniformity of the bowing is the power in the string section” (even if the sound is off, one can see that it is a bad performance!)
Monophony in symphony orchestra: The musicians are submerging parts of their individuality (for the purpose of the music)
In contrast monophony (as a team) in traditional Irish dance music: Harmophony – Musicians play together – more or less the same (monophony), but every one keeps some individuality – in the tradition of the music and in coordination/cooperation with the co-musicians.
The musicians are not payed – they play with their backs to the audience – they are playing for themselves (interesting connection to Social Software!) – there are even musicians that act as lurkers, or join in later, …
Characteristics of a session: Some “rules/conventions/patterns” that form the “architecture” of the music; there is no leader (everybody can take initiative to develop monophony into a different direction); additionally there is a lot of individuality in playing the music (when to breath, when to set breaks, … – “identity markers”)
“Creative process that informs the music”
I do not know if I got everything right / made it understandable for anybody who has not been here … A great and inspiring talk! With live music to demonstrate the concepts.
A quote from Micheal about teaching (to a teacher): “you will grow older but your students will stay the same age all the time …”
A quote about being late (from the one who is late and is questioned because of it): “you have the clock, I have the time”
And that was it … But “after the conference is before the conference” – next ECSCW will take place from September 7th to September 11th 2009 in Vienna – see web site of ECSCW 2009.
With that my blog will switch back from (bad) English [the language of science ;-)] to German – So, bye to my English readers.
ECSCW 2007 – Day 3 – Paper Session 2
- “How-To Sharing: Informal Systems of Expertise Location”, Cristen Torrey: “how-to = online content that describes how something is done”; question: how/why are how-to pages built, documented and broadcasted; ethnographic study / interviews for this; some results: Web 2.0 technologies and services (especially RSS feeds; photo/video hosting) play an important role; “google is my friend too”; documentation for keeping a record for oneself; documentation for building an online identity; implications of how-to-sharing: supporting mixed media is essential (all kinds of tools, well integrated); challenge: how-tos constitute a personal portfolio, authors motivations may not align well with organizational requirements for knowledge sharing – that is exactly the issue/problem in Enterprise 2.0!!! Opportunity: address ownership issues, …
Comment: lots of how-tos are collaboratively authored … hobby crafts projects should be distinguished from larger (collaborative) documentation projects … - “Seeing ethnographically: Teaching ethnography as part of CSCW”, Barry Brown: “ethnography = catch-all phrase for a range of different things, just as long as they involve field work of some sort”; interesting (meta-work): studying the students of a practical course on ethnography!!! (to learn about how to teach ethnography); students were asked to share their fieldnotes via a wiki – and it worked! (multimedia fieldnotes, up to 70 reads per fieldnotes, accountability of ‘hidden work’); wiki was extended for adding comments/notes to wiki pages (no editing other groups notes, but commenting on them), for better displaying history awareness information; one of the conclusions: wiki as a mundane workplace/schoolplace tool
- “Cues to Mutual Knowledge”, N. Bryan-Kinns: looking at asynchronous collaboration; experiment: first order cues to the activities of an individual, second order cues to the activitites of others, third order cues that support mutual-beliefs; does providing cues mean awareness support? I think yes; design of two shared workspaces for comparative experiment: Npathy (1st + 2nd), Mpathy (1st, 2nd, 3rd order cues – additional timeline which shows connection of read and write events); (positive) effect on number of contributed documents; increased co-ordinated use of documents; more implicit references
Interesting try to quantitatively compare awareness features (even when the whole talk did not use the word ‘awareness’)
ECSCW 2007 – Day 3 – Panel
The panel session started with a series of conference announcements:
- Participatory design conference 2009 (submissions March 2008)
- Persuasive 2008
- Collaborations Technology 2008 in Japan
- CSCW 2008 in San Diego
- GROUP 2007
- Communities and Technologies 2009
Then the panel “The Changing Technological Landscape of CSCW – from BSCW to Sharepoint”:
Carl Gutwin
- the role of technology in CSCW: “underachiever” – everything was done 40 years ago (the Engelbart demo …); the rest that is successful was done without our help (IM, Social Networking, ….)
- So, is there any reason to keep building CSCW systems? Yes! I wanna build cool toys (gadgets)!
- Problem: 80/20 rule – that is the reason why groupware still sucks … “better than nothing does not mean good enough”
- Working with technology can show us new kinds of interactions
- Great example from lab: realtime chess with eight people playing at the same time (on one board)
Mike Fraser
- “What happened to Hiroshi Ishii?” … he is alive and well and publishing in CHI, UIST and DIS … (not in (E)CSCW) – they value experimental design
- Is CSCW committed to new technologies? Or is it ‘mundane’?
- In 1995 it was valued to get a system work!!!
- “just because a mundane technology is easier to study in situ shouldn’t mean we dump new systems from studies”
- “This community should be (a) embracing and (b) generating technically competent researchers.”
- “Why should computer scientists learn about situated action if social scientists can’t code?”
Carla Simone
- traditional approaches coexist with new challenges: the predominant web based “culture”, the pervasive computing paradigm
- need to find an “innovative” way to deal with this contrasting situation
- current situation: several successful application that focus on well defined and generic functionality (IM, BSCW, blogs, …); research prototypical tools that focus on highly specialized goals
- changing the landscape: make these applications really integrated!!!, give collaboration a primary role in shaping the “operating system”, overcome the web approach by creating “local” spaces of cooperation, let users flexibly select their preferred metaphor (task, community, communication, …)
Volker Wulf
- lots of developments in technology – a history of diversification
- diversification also in the way we are using the technologies
- we have less valid assumptions about the current environment of a collaborating colleague
- we have less valid assumptions about technological environment to design for
- use routines are less pre-defined by technology
- “We always said we use IT infrastructure … Now we really do!”
- “Work routines do not ‘benefit’ from IT use, they require IT!” – Danger of breakdown
- Towards Infrastructure-Oriented CSCW: stronger focus on interoperability, prepare for breakdowns, accountable technologies, less anticipable use situations – put the user in control, raising infrastructure awareness (in design), applying research from STS/Cyberinfrastructures to ‘work infrastructures in the small’
- Issue of innovation: we have lost a little bit on innovation in technology (with applications for cooperation), and we have lost a little bit in innovation in management/organization science
Discussion
- Problem: We will not get all the (relevant) “gadget builders” into our community
- One use of gadgets: Gadgets help us to ask questions about ourselves
- Importance of keeping up with the present technologies – e.g. mobile phones are not mentioned/used in the papers at this conference; things that have a huge collaborative impact is what CSCW should have a look at
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After the panel there was an additional announcement: In the future the ACM CSCW conference will be an annual conference – will be moved from November to February to synchronize with ECSCW and GROUP.
ECSCW 2007 – Day 3 – Paper Session 1
The paper session on the morning after the social event – not so many participants in yet (45 just before the first talk started) – but numbers are increasing ;-)
Before I address the papers presented (it really was worth visiting this session – as it was with most other session at this conference), some comments on a discussion I had yesterday evening (around the social event): While new media like Blogs are helping to move some traffic away from email, they generate new problems of media choice and overload – how to deal with the input all the feeds deliver you have subscribed to? One solution is a change of view on the side of the consumer: feed reader inboxes are not the same as email inboxes – it is okay to just discard some entries in the feed reader inbox. We might also try some technical support: perhaps building on the former work on collaborative filtering for Usenet News? (Blog) feeds provide more meta data then Usenet News groups, so it might even work better than with them – especially regarding the cold start problem.
But now the papers:
- “Making the Home Network at Home: Digital Housekeeping”, Peter Tolmie: “maintaining the PC has become a household chore”, “home networks are no longer geek experiments, they are an ordinary solution to burgeoning technological complexity” – quite interesting observations – The authors studied three households in the UK; very interesting observations of how home networks are “integrated” in the household – both physically and regarding processes and routine – and what tasks have to be addressed (and what practices have been developed for these); they identified some “orderly characteristics” in digital housekeeping; some implications for design: handling legacy in the home, providing for transparency; “How can this be extended to encompass how people reason about the home as their home, not just the home network as a home network?”
Discussion: There were questions on how digital housekeeping is distributed over genders, how it works in single parent households – but because of the three family sample there was not much to say about these questions – there surely is need for broader studies …
I very much like the term “digital housekeeping” … “normal people” have to deal with the complexities of technology … not primarily a CSCW topic, but nevertheless very interesting … - “Behaviours and Preferences when Coordinating Mediated Interruptions: Social and System Influence”, Agnieszka Szostek: focus: interruption behaviour of interruptors and interruptees and user preferences; controlled (game) experiment to derive some insights (two participants, individual tasks, possibility to ask each other – interruptions, time pressure, awareness display about status of other person); tested some hypotheses about social and system influences; the underlying question was how the system can decide if the user should be interrupted by questions, what systems can/should do – highly relevant in CMC environments!; just one interesting outcome: it was better to have automatic rejection (in addition to manual rejection) and not to show to the rejected person how it was done – to allow the rejector to “save face”; Implications for design: desired behaviour of the systems depends on moment-to-moment activities of both actors; need for: manual and automatic interruption filtering, mechanisms to present interruption costs, buffer to queue interruptions
I like this application of the “awareness” concept … Never have thought about further researching on how to (semi-)automatically react on awareness information to address interruption handling (in CMC) … might be a good field for further research
A collection of papers on interruptions in hci - “Health Care Categories have Politics too: Unpacking the Managerial Agendas of Electronic Triage Systems”, Ellen Balka: research question: “how can an understanding of the agenda embedded within the design of an it.application help us to explain failure of the application in practice?”; research method: discourse analysis of academic literature; work practice study in the emergency department of a Canadian children hospital; Research finding: insight into the political agenda behind the it-application lead to identify conflicts …
ECSCW 2007 – Demos – SONAR
One of the demos here at ECSCW 2007 is “SONAR: Social Networks Architecture” by IBM Haifa Research Lab – Given by Ido Guy:
The application gathers social network information from several providers: email (Lotus Notes), social tagging (Dogear), blogs (comments), social networking services (Fringe), …, allows to weight the links according to source (a nice user interface with sliders for this) and display the result – firstly as a list of your contacts ordered by the aggregated contact strength and secondly as a per-person-view showing how the contact with this person is distributed over all the sources and how this develops in time (per-month bar chart with color coding of sources in the bars). Additionally there are some network visualizations and a list view of the data that went into the calculation of a connection.
The whole application is implemented in Lotus Sametime – just for reference implementation issues.
As you might have guessed from the sources listed above, the application is implemented for the IBM intranet (only). This makes matching identities easy since all the systems are using the same employee email identifier.
Nevertheless, it should be possible to migrate this to the Internet – perhaps using OpenId? However, there are no such plans from IBM Research (yet) – what a pitty …
More information:
ECSCW 2007 – Day 2 – Paper Session 3
- “Asymmetrical collaboration in print shop-customer relationships”, Jacki O’Neill – a paper from Xerox Research Centres Europe and Webster: customers (design shops) have to collaborate with print shop to get consistent colors (color managed workflow); the “standard” system intended for the task (color spaces, CMYK, …) does not work; there are several ad hoc solutions that have developed to address this task (practical color management) – tailored to real practicalities, but costly!!!
interesting application area, the main message was that automation (color management) may not be the best solution for such areas; better support communication and collaboration with sets of tools and technologies … - “Dressing up for school work – supporting a collaborative environment with heterogeneous technology”, Ole Sejer Iversen: studying children in schools with CSCW methodology (work practice studies, field studies, interaction design); presented some of the interaction design that was done in the project; heterogeneity in school work: multiple intelligences (Gardner 1993), 20 stimuli that influence school work (Dunn and Dunn 1993); participatory design with children and teachers to build heterogeneous technologies to support children’s collaborative school work; four IT concepts developed; The Wisdom Well – an interactive floor for kinesthetic collaboration (combine learning and physical exercise) – interesting ubiquitous computing application (well integrated in learning environment); The Hycon:Explorer – a geo-spatial hypermedia system for nomadic learning: an application for mobile phones combining context awareness (GPS) with documentation facilities, outside assignments, annotate and document places they go to; eCELL – a niche for collaboration in adhocracies; eBAG – a personal, digital repository for school work, carry electronic files from device to device using mobile phone and bluetooth
alltogether some very nice ubiquitous computing applications for school – well rooted in ethnographic research and participatory design – and well implemented
evaluation of tools was done in school; quote: “this was the second day of evaluation; on the third day things went crazy; children discovered completely new ways of using the technologies, …”
Link to group: http://www.interactivespaces.net/ - “Exploring cooperation through a binder: A context for IT tools in elderly care at home”, Alexandra Petrakou: agenda: 1) explore the complex cooperation in elderly care at home, 2) the focus is on the actual use of a (non-digital) binder – as tool for cooperation and coordination between care personal, 3) through focusing on the binder, issues crucial to cooperation in general become visible; ad 2) binder is placed in the care receivers homes, different types of documents in binder; problem: binder only accessible in care receivers homes; cannot be used for preparation;
summary: a nice analysis of artefact based collaboration and coordination (in a particular setting); but in my opinion too little results that might inform future design/development
Btw: One observation: I see MacBooks and PowerBooks everywhere – seems to me that two thirds (or more) of all laptops here are Macs …
ECSCW 2007 – Day 2 – Paper Session 2
The session started with a “demo madness” – five demos presented in five minutes (altogether) – just teasers but I found it very helpful to decide what I should have a closer look at. Here my “decission”:
- BubbleBoard: a visual answering machine – touchscreen, annotations, possibility to arrange messages … very nice
- SONAR: social network aggregation
More to come after I have visited the demos.
And then the papers in the session:
- “Tag-based Metonymic Search in an Activity-centric Aggregation Service”, Michael Muller (IBM): activity-centric collaboration history: instant collaboration, activity explorer, unified activity management, Lotus Connections Activities (commercial software now); it is about connecting awareness/alerts with objects; problem: activity flood (“yet another inbox”); problem: too many inboxes/information/activity overload; we need an activity-based aggregation service; very interesting/important work!; Malibu “surf board” to address these problems; input is external feeds (RSS, ATOM, SNA, …); in the demo he showed aggregation from activities, bookmarks (Dogear) and external feeds with links into IBM Blue Pages (social networking service); I surely will have a closer look at this … and I really have to install Lotus Connections soon – it is on my todo list for too long now ;-)
Comments on this talk in other blogs: ECOSpace blog - “The Distributed Work of Local Action: Interaction amongst virtually collocated research teams”, Dylan Tutt: MiMeG – A system for analysing video data remotly (synchronously)
- “Bringing Round-Robin Signature to Computer-Mediated Communication”, T. Nishida: background: chat system as a back channel during presentations at conferences; problem with missing anonymity; pros and cons of anonymity; goal: exploring the design space between anonymity and non-anonymity: round-robin signature (a kind of group signature): protocol: anonymous post – other users can support post – if post gathered sufficient number of supporters names of the supporters are revealed as a round-robin signature; hypothesis: this protocol has the best properties of anonymous and non-anonymous discussions; prototype application: Lock-On-Chat
ECSCW 2007 – Day 2 – Paper Session 1
Finally pictures from day 0 and day 1 start to appear on flickr – have a look.
And then to day 2 which started with paper session – as usual here some comments on the ones I found worth commenting ;-)
- “‘… and do it the usual way’: fostering awareness of work conventions in document-mediated collaboration”, Federico Cabitza, Carla Simone: “without conventions work could be hardly be done by practitioners (and be hardly understood by researchers)” – goal: supporting conventions through a “learning device”, need to understand their nature to create a common ground, clarifying ambiguities – conventions vs. business rules (spring from practice, not necessary a best practice, generated locally from the bottom, to solve local problems) – this seems to be quite important! use to support awareness (browsing awareness, alerting/reminding awareness, provisionality awareness, inconsistency awareness, amending awareness, accounting awareness, enabling awareness); “conventions are about action you are expected to do”, “conventions are about interpretation this means that”, conventions and awareness are expressed in terms of condition -> effects; further developed (visualization of awareness) in the WOAD approach … comparable to the approach of expectation awareness (by Prinz et al.) – the paper is surely worth reading in more detail (at least for me ;-)) – interesting idea to use conventions to support awareness event filtering and visualization …
Other blog postings on this talk: ECOSpace Blog - “A safe space to vent: Conciliation and Conflict in Distributed Teams”, L. Watts: conflict as potentially destructive (e.g. storing bad feelings for future interactions) vs. conflict as a creative process; conversations through CMC technologies are prone to conflict escalations, polarisation and entrenchment (Thomson & Nadler 2002) but also can encourage disclosure and reduce uncertainty! very good analysis of recent work on conflict in CMC
- “Semi-Synchronous Conflict Detection and Resolution in Asynchronous Software Development”, Prasun Dewan and Rajesh Hegde: Problem in software development: adding people to the team does not add to productivity in the same way; one reason for this: conflicts; not adequately addressed by versioning systems; solving problem: change virtual environment by new conflict management model (no synchronous pair programming!, but asynchronous work); they built a new systeme CollabVS = Visual Studio + Semi Synchronous Conflict Management and evaluated it; the core idea is somehow providing awareness by automatically detecting concurrent activities (editing code files that are somehow related) and visualizing the information.
One comment in the discussion: “Great and I would like to have it” ;-)
Other blog postings on this talk: ECOSpace Blog
ECSCW 2007 – Day 1 – Panel
The first day ends with the regular/famous panel on “ECSCW: Where are we? Reflections and Prognostications” – Here some comments from the presentations and the discussion.
Geraldine Fitzpatrick
- we have to remember how the (computer) world looked like when we started (20 years ago) …
- questions/issues: 1) what sorts of influences have we had in the world? (what problems have we solved) – at the beginning engineers without any ethnographic studies, new things/tools developed; 2) a lot of different conferences dealing with CSCW topics (in particular topics like mobile systems etc) – do we still have something to say/contribute? Yes!
Ina Wagner
- social science side of CSCW research
- several fields/social science theories are not well represented in CSCW, e.g.: industrial sociology (technology as mediating skills, control, employment, …); organizational theory (role of technology in organizational change/knowledge creation); social studies of technology (the “making” of technology) – where we can find lots of lots of interesting things about technology and technology in organizations
- Where is CSCW research?
- CSCW has unique focus: work practices – technology use (interaction, coordination, artefacts); design and implementation
- What is special about CSCW? CSCW course outline: case studies (health care, manufacturing, design, domestic environments), concepts (awareness, common information spaces, articulation work, coordination mechanisms, coordinative artefacts, standards and cs – problem: they are not really connected, CSCW systems – design principles, theories in the background (ethnomethodology, phenomenology, some organizational theory)
- Open issues: the need for a theory of cooperative work; the need to pay attention to organizational issues; is there a socio-political perspective, the need for one; how to connect to STS – studies of technology construction/use, the community; how and if to integrate a concern for skill, control, employment issues
Wolfgang Prinz
- ECSCW started with large initiatives/projects (sponsored by the European Commission and others)
- Influences: Speech Acts, Multi-user VR, Awareness, Ubiquitous Collaboration, Communities, Social Web – We looked at particular/isolated issues – that was the easy time – Now these areas have separate conferences … We have influenced these areas, but they left us, they do not bring anything back
- problems to face: collaboration as a commodity? All we have thought about 1) left us to start its own life, 2) is now part of MS Sharepoint, 3) and what we haven’t thought about is Web 2.0 ;-)
- Problems with funding (CWE and Living Lab initiative of the EC): We are viewed as doing nothing constructive …
- “We have contributed the broomsticks, now we need to support their management” – solve the complexity – The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: “Spirits that I’ve cited, my commands ignore …”
Kjeld Schmidt
- What CSCW set out to do? Starting point were disappointing experiences with office automation movement. Understand how machines can be used in complex work settings.
- Where are we now? A lot of fascinating technologies appeared. We have not managed to stay focussed. We have not managed to stay involved in the development of the technologies (e.g. workflow management systems)
- Has the ECSCW community become risk aversive? (no large scale systems in complex settings …)
Discussion
- The technologies now used to organize work are not addressed in CSCW – Is CSCW left behind? – Industry took over (Sharepoint, IBM Lotus) – so we are escaping in niches – we have to look into how the large systems are used – but this is quite complex/complicated (too complicated for the usual PhD project?)
- CSCW has influence in new areas like Web 2.0 etc (former CSCW research is relevant today) – look at notes on CSCW and Web 2.0 workshop
- Core achievement of CSCW is that it has brought practice to computing
- Organizations are different now … earlier we started out to bring organizations computer support tools … now they have computer support tools … and they have problems with them … the second phase of CSCW should be to help organizations to solve the problems they have with the computer support tools
ECSCW 2007 – Day 1 – Papers
After the first keynote the paper program started. Just some thoughts on these:
- “What Did I Miss? – Visualizing the Past through Video Traces” – A work from Saul Greenbergs group on awareness in video media spaces – They presented the Timeline System which tries to provide an overview of a video stream while at the same time addressing privacy issues. See videos of Saul Greenbergs group.
- “Social bookmarking and exploratory search”, David R. Millen (IBM): A very nice report from the Dogear project at IBM – an intranet social bookmarking service. They presented a lot of material (both numbers and quotes) from the internal usage of Dogear. An interesting information was also the list of upcoming papers on Dogear – One which seems to be especially interesting is on “Expertise Search” (using social bookmarking) by Shami, Ehrlich and Millen – Sadly, there was no reference to where this paper will show up – sometimes in 2008. Another interesting idea briefly mentioned in the discussion: Use Dogear to generate personal tag clouds to be printed on the name badges for conferences.
- “Instrumental action: the timely exchange of implements during surgical operations”, Marcus Sanchez Svensson: A piece of work looking at how coordination around objects happens in the operating theatre. Nice examples and some conceptual reflections, but little new insights (that inform design) – as it was mentioned during discussion …
- “Designing Family Photo Displays”, A. Taylor et al.: Thinking about the display of photos, what do they do, how do they achieve their “goal” (end up doing certain sorts of things); some nice ideas (informed by ethnographic research) on how to design family photo display.
- “The Awareness Network: Should I display my actions to whom? And, whose actions should I monitor?”, C. de Souza: Work about filtering incoming and outgoing awareness events – which they call “awareness network” – the sum of incoming and outgoing links. The basis of the work are observations of two software development teams – analyzed using grounded theory techniques – which more or less shows some dependencies in the teams (depending on the system developed – modular vs. non-modular) – which affected the awareness network (no big surprise …).