ECSCW 2013 Adjunct Proceedings The 13th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 21 - 25. September 2013, Paphos, Cyprus

This volume presents the adjunct proceedings of ECSCW 2013.While the proceedings published by Springer Verlag contains the core of the technical program, namely the full papers, the adjunct proceedings includes contributions on work in progress, workshops and master classes, demos and videos, the doctoral colloquium, and keynotes, thus indicating what our field may become in the future

Technology appropriation in transnational networks of social activists : a study of the European Social Forum

Civil society organizations and other networks of social activists have gained significant importance in supporting citizens, as states are rolling back from their duties. In order to be an effective force, these networks have become transnational in their operations. These transnational networks are typically characterized by a lack of resources, an absence of formal hierarchical structures and differences in languages and culture among the activists. Modern technologies could help these networks in improving their working. Technology support for transnational social movements and civil society organizations is an important field of research not only due to the increased political importance of this sector in a globalizing world but also due to their organizational characteristics. In order to design appropriate technological support for social activists' etworks, it is important to understand their work practices, which widely differ from traditional businessorganizations. In this thesis, I present results from a long-term ethnographical field study of the European Social Forum (ESF), a network of heterogeneous political activist organizations. In this network different actors organize a periodic (biannual) event. During my data collection phase, the 5th and 6th European Social Fora were held in Malmo (2008) and Istanbul (2010), in which some 13,000 and 3,000 activists participated, respectively. I particularly focused on the usage of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in preparing and conducting ESF events and knowledge sharing practices during the transition phase. I specifically highlighted coordination and knowledge management practices to understand the potential for ICT support. The thesis describes complex social practice of organizing ESF events. I use the term fragmented meta-coordination to highlight coordination in this type of practice. Mundane ICT 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 lack of resources, organizational distribution, and technical limitations hamper the preparation process and reduce transparency of political decision-making. I also present a specific type of knowledge, termed as nomadic knowledge. It is required periodically by different actors and travels along foreseeable paths between groups or communities of actors. This type of knowledge lets us question generally held assumptions about the way knowledge is enacted. Nomadic knowledge is a specialized type of knowledge, which is enacted in a discontinuous pattern by a changing set of actors and further flows on a defined trajectory. This knowledge is quite important but is required sporadically, so it has varying levels of importance for stakeholders at different instances of time. The limited interest of knowledge holders after the creation of knowledge makes knowledge sharing process complex. Furthermore, new actors overloaded by the tasks at hand often ignore the knowledge sharing aspect due to urgency. The thesis provides insights into the complexity of managing nomadic knowledge and implications for organizational processes. Moreover, the issues, which make the transfer of nomadic knowledge complex, are also discussed and the potentials for ICT support for management and transfer of nomadic knowledge are also highlighted. Moreover, the thesis provides a historic perspective on the evolution of ICT artifacts in the organizational boundaries. A user-centered evaluation of two technology artifacts (European mailing list and OpenESF) is also carried out to identify design improvements. The empirical findings highlight how the mailing list is used for a variety of different activities such as collaborative work, decision-making, coordination and information sharing. I discuss the findings with regard to the discourse on cooperative work and come up with implications for design. The analysis highlights central organizational and technological challenges related to ICT appropriation in transnational networks of social activists. As a next step it is important to design appropriate prototypes aligned with highlighted work practices to evaluate them in the field and realign if necessary. In order to better support this application domain universities and community-based organizations need to work jointly on action research projects to improve organizational processes of civil society organizations

Expert Finding in Disparate Environments

Providing knowledge workers with access to experts and communities-of-practice is central to expertise sharing, and crucial to effective organizational performance, adaptation, and even survival. However, in complex work environments, it is difficult to know who knows what across heterogeneous groups, disparate locations, and asynchronous work. As such, where expert finding has traditionally been a manual operation there is increasing interest in policy and technical infrastructure that makes work visible and supports automated tools for locating expertise. Expert finding, is a multidisciplinary problem that cross-cuts knowledge management, organizational analysis, and information retrieval. Recently, a number of expert finders have emerged; however, many tools are limited in that they are extensions of traditional information retrieval systems and exploit artifact information primarily. This thesis explores a new class of expert finders that use organizational context as a basis for assessing expertise and for conferring trust in the system. The hypothesis here is that expertise can be inferred through assessments of work behavior and work derivatives (e.g., artifacts). The Expert Locator, developed within a live organizational environment, is a model-based prototype that exploits organizational work context. The system associates expertise ratings with expert’s signaling behavior and is extensible so that signaling behavior from multiple activity space contexts can be fused into aggregate retrieval scores. Post-retrieval analysis supports evidence review and personal network browsing, aiding users in both detection and selection. During operational evaluation, the prototype generated high-precision searches across a range of topics, and was sensitive to organizational role; ranking true experts (i.e., authorities) higher than brokers providing referrals. Precision increased with the number of activity spaces used in the model, but varied across queries. The highest performing queries are characterized by high specificity terms, and low organizational diffusion amongst retrieved experts; essentially, the highest rated experts are situated within organizational niches

Expertise Sharing in a Heterogeneous Organizational Environment

Abstract. The term knowledge management (KM) has lost most of its magic during the past few years: While knowledge has been identified as an important resource and key factor for productivity gains and innovation in organizations, there seems to be no generally applicable (and easy) way to utilize this resource. In this paper we present results of a field study that was conducted within a major European industrial association. The study focused on knowledge intense processes among the association and its member companies which were supposed to be improved by KM strategies and systems. The organizational setting appears to be unique in different ways: A grown and highly decentralized organizational structure, goods that exclusively consist of human and social capital and a distinct mutual unawareness of competencies and responsibilities within the organization define our field of application