Communixx

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 [...]

“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”; [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]