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

Social Technologies and Informal Knowledge Sharing within and across Organizations

This doctoral dissertation is focused on both empirical and conceptual contributions relative to the roles social technologies play in informal knowledge sharing practices, both within and across organizations. Social technologies include (a) traditional social technologies (e.g., email, phone and instant messengers), (b) emerging social networking technologies commonly known as social media, such as blogs, wikis, major public social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn), and (c) enterprise social networking technologies controlled by a host organization ( e.g., SocialText). The rapid uptake of social technologies, combined with growing interest in their broader social implications, raises pertinent questions about uses for knowledge sharing in organizations. The work reported in this thesis is motivated by two broad phenomena: (1) the importance of informal knowledge-sharing in organizations and (2) the rapid rise in the variety and prevalence of social technologies. The empirical basis of this research is a field study focused on the uses of social technologies by knowledge workers, specifically those in consulting firms. Building from the theoretical lenses of sociomateriality, structuration, and technological frames, the findings from this work advances our understanding of: (1) the ways social technologies are used in combination as a suite of tools, (2) the ways in which organizational norms, policies, and arrangements shape the uses of social technologies for knowledge practices, and (3) the variations in uses of social technologies by different groups of knowledge workers. The theoretical contribution of this work is to conceptualize the suite of social technologies used to support and enable knowledge workers is a more useful approach than the single-technological-tool-in-isolation approach, which is the norm in studies of computing. A second contribution of this work is to situate social technologies-in-use through incorporating complementary theoretical concepts: technology-mediated knowledge practices, social structures of organizations, and workers\u27 distinct interpretations of social technologies (technological frames). Practical implications arising from this study both inform the ways social technologies can be collectively integrated in work practices and inform the design and implementation of social technologies for accommodating different needs and preferences of knowledge workers. This research also generates insight into how organizations can craft policies that realistically regulate the use of social technologies, while empowering individual workers to optimize their knowledge sharing capacity by supporting informal engagement via social technologies

Patient Sociotechnical Assemblages: The Distributed Cognition of Health Information Management

Personal health records (PHR) are shifting the capabilities and responsibilities of both patients and providers. Influenced by health IT, concepts like patient-centered care, meaningful use, and patient empowerment are commonplace in the healthcare system. As the popularity of personal health records increases, medical providers, healthcare organizations, and health information system stakeholders require a thorough understanding of how patients use these patient facing information portals in conjunction with other artifacts, objects, and practices to manage and maintain their health. Exploring health information management as a distributed sociotechnical assemblage is the conceptual approach of this research. A distributed cognition perspective lends insight to drawing boundaries and establishing connections of personal health information management practices in conjunction with PHR use. The Department of Veterans Affairs provides a unique setting to further understand PHR use and personal health information management practice through the observation of U.S. military veterans enrolled in the My HealtheVet PHR. This context and conceptual framework lead to the research questions for the proposed study: RQ1a: What are the personal health information management practices of veterans who use a personal health record? RQ1b: What health information management practices become distributed beyond the veteran patient? RQ2a: What health information management assemblages emerge from the distributed work of Veterans that use a personal health record? RQ2b: What are key functions of the health information management assemblages of veterans? Through the use of semi-structured in depth interviews, observations, and surveys, data were collected on 22 patients along with their primary care providers and caretakers. Results from a two cycle qualitative coding analysis and analytical cognitive mapping technique reveal bundles of practices for creating reminders, organizing information, and creating information for asking questions and working with primary care providers. Distributed practices emerged that detail the managing of medication, information that is socially distributed, and patient-provider communication through secure messaging. Three health information management assemblage components emerged from the analysis: health events and experiential information, information techniques, and technology and material practices. Each of these components is understood by the ways they become stabilized or destabilized. This research contributes to implications for the design of patient-focused personal health records and informs clinical practice of patient-centered care. The research also makes conceptual and empirical contributions to the practice of health information management and a patient-centered care model of healthcare delivery

ECSCW 2011 Conference Supplement: European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Aarhus, 24.-28. September 2011

Dual eye-tracking (DUET) is a promising methodology to study and support collaborative work. The method consists of simultaneously recording the gaze of two collaborators working on a common task. The main themes addressed in the workshop are eye-tracking methodology (how to translate gaze measures into descriptions of joint action, how to measure and model gaze alignment between collaborators, how to address task specificity inherent to eye-tracking data) and more generally future applications of dual eye-tracking in CSCW. The DUET workshop will bring together scholars who currently develop the approach as well as a larger audience interested in applications of eye-tracking in collaborative situations. The workshop format will combine paper presentations and discussions. The papers are available online as PDF documents at http://www.dualeyetracking.org/DUET2011/

Improving groupware design for loosely coupled groups

Loosely coupled workgroups are common in the real world, and workers in these groups are autonomous and weakly interdependent. They have patterns of work and collaboration that distinguish them from other types of groups, and groupware systems that are designed to support loose coupling must address these differences. However, they have not been studied in detail in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), and the design process for these groups is currently underspecified. This forces designers to start from scratch each time they develop a system for loosely coupled groups, and they must approach new work settings with little information about how work practices are organized. In this dissertation, I present a design framework to improve the groupware design process for loosely coupled workgroups. The framework has three main parts that add a new layer of support to each of the three stages in the general groupware design process: data collection about the target work setting, analysis of the data, and system design based on the analysis results. The framework was developed to provide designers with support during each of these stages so that they can consider important characteristics of loosely coupled work practice while carrying out design for the target group. The design framework is based on information from CSCW and organizational research, and on real-world design experiences with one type of loosely coupled workgroup—home care treatment teams. The framework was evaluated using observations, interviews, and field trials that were carried out with multidisciplinary home care treatment teams in Saskatoon Health Region. A series of field observations and interviews were carried out with team members from each of the home care disciplines. The framework was then used to develop Mohoc, a groupware system that supports work in home care. Two field trials were carried out where the system was used by teams to support their daily activities. Results were analyzed to determine how well each part of the design framework performed in the design process. The results suggest that the framework was able to fill its role in specializing the general CSCW design process for loosely coupled groups by adding consideration for work and collaboration patterns that are seen in loosely coupled settings. However, further research is needed to determine whether these findings generalize to other loosely coupled workgroups

Encounters with Authority: Tactics and negotiations at the periphery of participatory platforms

Digital participatory platforms like Wikipedia are often celebrated as projects that allow anyone to contribute. Any user can sign up and start contributing immediately. Similarly, projects that engage volunteers in the production of scientific knowledge create easy points of entry to make contributions. These low barriers to entry are a hallmark feature in digital participatory labor, limiting the number of hoops a new volunteer has to jump through before they can feel like they are making a difference. Such low barriers to participation at the periphery, or edges of participatory platforms, have presented a problem for organizational scholars as they wonder how such projects can achieve consistent results when opportunities to train and socialize newcomers are constrained by a need for low barriers. As a result, scholarship has focused on answering the question of newcomer learning and socialization by examining how newcomers make sense of their new digital workspaces rather than focus on how institutional constraints are imposed. In this research, I draw on a growing body of scholarship that pushes against the perception of openness and low barriers on digital participatory platforms to unpack the constraints on participation that newcomers confront and, in particular, to show how such constraints resemble characteristics of institutionalized newcomer onboarding tactics. To approach this question, I conducted 18 months of participant observation and conducted 36 interviews with experts, newcomers, and project leaders from the crowdsourced citizen science platform Planet Hunters and the peer produced encyclopedia, Wikipedia. I analyzed my data using a grounded theory research design that is sensitized using the theoretical technology of Estrid Sørensen’s Forms of Presence as a way to pay attention to the sociomaterial configurations of newcomer practice, attending to the actors (both human and nonhuman) that play a part in the constraints and affordances of newcomer participation. By drawing on Sørensen’s Forms of Presence, the analytical focus on the newcomer experience shifts from looking at either top-down institutional tactics of organizations or bottom-up individual tactics of newcomers to thinking about the characteristics of relationships newcomers have with other members and platform features and the effects of these relationships as they relate to different opportunities for learning and participation. Focusing on the different ways that learning and participation are made available affords the exploration of how the authority of existing practices in particular settings are imposed on learners despite the presence of low barriers to participation. By paying attention to the sociomaterial configuration of newcomer participation, my findings unpack the tactics that newcomers encounter at the periphery, or edges of participatory platforms, as well as how they find their work being included or excluded from the platform. I use the findings to develop a taxonomy of encounters that describes how newcomers can participate in a self-guided experience as the existing literature describes, but also experience moments of guided and targeted encounters. What this taxonomy of encounters suggests is that the periphery of participatory platforms can be at once an open space for exploration and experimentation but also a well-managed space where, despite low barriers to initial participation, a newcomer must negotiate what I describe as the guardrails of participation that define the constraints and affordances that shape their experience

Institutional and Individual Influences on Scientists\u27 Data Sharing Behaviors

In modern research activities, scientific data sharing is essential, especially in terms of data-intensive science and scholarly communication. Scientific communities are making ongoing endeavors to promote scientific data sharing. Currently, however, data sharing is not always well-deployed throughout diverse science and engineering disciplines. Disciplinary traditions, organizational barriers, lack of technological infrastructure, and individual perceptions often contribute to limit scientists from sharing their data. Since scientists\u27 data sharing practices are embedded in their respective disciplinary contexts, it is necessary to examine institutional influences as well as individual motivations on scientists\u27 data sharing behaviors. The objective of this research is to investigate the institutional and individual factors which influence scientists\u27 data sharing behaviors in diverse scientific communities. Two theoretical perspectives, institutional theory and theory of planned behavior, are employed in developing a conceptual model, which shows the complementary nature of the institutional and individual factors influencing scientists\u27 data sharing behaviors. Institutional theory can explain the context in which individual scientists are acting; whereas the theory of planned behavior can explain the underlying motivations behind scientists\u27 data sharing behaviors in an institutional context. This research uses a mixed-method approach by combining qualitative and quantitative methods: (1) interviews with the scientists in diverse scientific disciplines to understand the extent to which they share their data with other researchers and explore institutional and individual factors affecting their data sharing behaviors; and (2) survey research to examine to what extent those institutional and individual factors influence scientists\u27 data sharing behaviors in diverse scientific disciplines. The interview study with 25 scientists shows three groups of data sharing factors, including institutional influences (i.e. regulative pressures by funding agencies and journals and normative pressure); individual motivations (i.e. perceived benefit, risk, effort and scholarly altruism); and institutional resources (i.e. metadata and data repositories). The national survey (with 1,317 scientists in 43 disciplines) shows that regulative pressure by journals; normative pressure at a discipline level; and perceived career benefit and scholarly altruism at an individual level have significant positive relationships with data sharing behaviors; and that perceived effort has a significant negative relationship. Regulative pressure by funding agencies and the availability of data repositories at a discipline level and perceived career risk at an individual level were not found to have any significant relationships with data sharing behavior

Changing Higher Education Learning with Web 2.0 and Open Education Citation, Annotation, and Thematic Coding Appendices

Appendices of citations, annotations and themes for research conducted on four websites: Delicious, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook

COLLABORATIVE SCIENCE ACROSS THE GLOBE: THE INFLUENCE OF MOTIVATION AND CULTURE ON VOLUNTEERS IN THE UNITED STATES, INDIA, AND COSTA RICA.

Reliance on volunteer participation for collaborative scientific projects has become extremely popular in the past decade. Cutting across disciplines, locations, and participation practices, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world are now involved in these studies, and are advancing tasks that scientists cannot accomplish alone. Although existing projects have demonstrated the value of involving volunteers to collect data, few projects have been successful in maintaining volunteer involvement over long periods of time. Therefore, it is important to understand the unique motivations of volunteers and their effect on participation practices, so that effective partnerships between volunteers and scientists can be established. This study provides a first look into the relationship between motivation and culture in the context of ecology-focused collaborative scientific projects around the world. Projects in three distinct cultures - the United States, India, and Costa Rica - were examined by triangulating qualitative and quantitative methods followed by a cross-cultural comparison. The findings reveal a temporal process of participation that is highly dependent on motivation and culture. Initial participation stems in most cases from self-directed motivations. However, as time progresses, the motivational process becomes more complex and includes both self-directed motivations and collaborative motivations. In addition, motivation is strongly modulated by local cultural norms, expectations, and practices. Collaborative and scientific cultures also have an impact throughout the course of the volunteers' participation. This research provides theoretical and practical contributions: its findings extend current understanding of theories of motivation by showing the connection between culture and motivation, and demonstrate how cultural effects lie at the core of motivation and participation practices in volunteer-based collaborative scientific projects. These findings will also inform scientists, project leaders, educators, administrators, and designers on ways to entice and maintain long-term volunteer participation in collaborative scientific projects that are situated in different cultures