42 research outputs found
Creativity support tools: report from a U.S. National Science Foundation sponsored workshop
International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 20(2): pp. 61-77.Creativity support tools is a research topic with high risk but potentially very high
payoff. The goal is to develop improved software and user interfaces that empower
users to be not only more productive but also more innovative. Potential users include
software and other engineers, diverse scientists, product and graphic designers, architects,
educators, students, and many others. Enhanced interfaces could enable more
effective searching of intellectual resources, improved collaboration among teams,
and more rapid discovery processes. These advanced interfaces should also provide
potent support in hypothesis formation, speedier evaluation of alternatives, improved
understanding through visualization, and better dissemination of results. For
creative endeavors that require composition of novel artifacts (e.g., computer programs,
scientific papers, engineering diagrams, symphonies, artwork), enhanced interfaces
could facilitate exploration of alternatives, prevent unproductive choices, and
enable easy backtracking. This U.S. National Science Foundation sponsored workshop
brought together 25 research leaders and graduate students to share experiences,
identify opportunities, and formulate research challenges. Two key outcomes
emerged: (a) encouragement to evaluate creativity support tools through multidimensional
in-depth longitudinal case studies and (b) formulation of 12 principles for design
of creativity support tools.
As Galileo struggled to view Jupiter through his newly built telescope, he adjusted
the lenses and saw four twinkling points of light nearby. After recording
their positions carefully, Galileo compared them to his drawings from
previous nights. His conclusion that Jupiter had four moons circling it was a
profound insight with far reaching implications
Applying the 3C Model to FLOSS communities
Publicado em "Collaboration and technology: 22nd International Conference, CRIWG 2016, Kanazawa, Japan, September 14-16, 2016, proceedings". ISBN 978-3-319-44798-8How learning occurs within Free/Libre Open Source (FLOSS)
communities and what is the dynamics such projects (e.g. the life cycle
of such projects) are very relevant questions when considering the use of
FLOSS projects in a formal education setting. This paper introduces an
approach based on the 3C collaboration model (communication, coordination
and cooperation) to represent the collaborative learning dynamics
within FLOSS communities. To explore the collaborative learning potential
of FLOSS communities a number of questionnaires and interviews
to selected FLOSS contributors were run. From this study a 3C collaborative
model applicable to FLOSS communities was designed and
discussed.Programa Operacional da RegiĂŁo Norte, NORTE2020, in the context of project NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000037FCT under grant SFRH/BSAB/113890/201
Public Sector Open Source Software Projects -- How is development organized?
Background: Open Source Software (OSS) started as an effort of communities of
volunteers, but its practices have been adopted far beyond these initial
scenarios. For instance, the strategic use of OSS in industry is constantly
growing nowadays in different verticals, including energy, automotive, and
health. For the public sector, however, the adoption has lagged behind even if
benefits particularly salient in the public sector context such as improved
interoperability, transparency, and digital sovereignty have been pointed out.
When Public Sector Organisations (PSOs) seek to engage with OSS, this
introduces challenges as they often lack the necessary technical capabilities,
while also being bound and influenced by regulations and practices for public
procurement. Aim: We aim to shed light on how public sector OSS projects, i.e.,
projects initiated, developed and governed by public sector organizations, are
developed and structured. We conjecture, based on the challenges of PSOs, that
the way development is organized in these type of projects to a large extent
disalign with the commonly adopted bazaar model (popularized by Eric Raymond),
which implies that development is carried out collaboratively in a larger
community. Method: We plan to contrast public sector OSS projects with a set of
earlier reported case studies of bazaar OSS projects, including Mockus et al.'s
reporting of the Apache web server and Mozilla browser OSS projects, along with
the replications performed on the FreeBSD, JBossAS, JOnAS, and Apache Geronimo
OSS projects. To enable comparable results, we will replicate the methodology
used by Mockus et al. on a purposefully sampled subset of public sector OSS
projects. The subset will be identified and characterized quantitatively by
mining relevant software repositories, and qualitatively investigated through
interviews with individuals from involved organizations.Comment: Registered Report accepted at MSR'2
How Are Communication Channels on GitHub Presented to Their Intended Audience? -- A Thematic Analysis
Communication is essential in software development, and even more in
distributed settings. Communication activities need to be organized and
coordinated to defend against the threat of productivity losses, increases in
cognitive load, and stress among team members. With a plethora of communication
channels that were identified by previous research in open-source projects,
there is a need to explore organizational issues in how these communication
channels are introduced, explained, and motivated for use among all project
members. In this study, we wanted to understand which communication channels
are used in GitHub projects and how they are presented to the GitHub project
audience. We employed thematic analysis to analyze 151 artifacts in 90 GitHub
projects. Our results revealed 32 unique communications channels that can be
divided into nine different types. Projects mostly provide channels of
different types, but for some types (e.g., chat) it is common to provide
several channels. Maintainers are aware that channels have different properties
and help the developers to decide which channel should be used in which case.
However, this is not true for all projects, and often we have not found any
explicit reasons why maintainers chose to provide one channel over another.
Different channels can be used for different purposes and have different
affordances, so maintainers have to decide wisely which channels they want to
provide and make clear which channel should be used in which case. Otherwise,
developers might feel overwhelmed of too many channels and information can get
fragmented over multiple channels.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for presentation at the International
Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE) 202
Paths Explored, Paths Omitted, Paths Obscured: Decision Points & Selective Reporting in End-to-End Data Analysis
Drawing reliable inferences from data involves many, sometimes arbitrary,
decisions across phases of data collection, wrangling, and modeling. As
different choices can lead to diverging conclusions, understanding how
researchers make analytic decisions is important for supporting robust and
replicable analysis. In this study, we pore over nine published research
studies and conduct semi-structured interviews with their authors. We observe
that researchers often base their decisions on methodological or theoretical
concerns, but subject to constraints arising from the data, expertise, or
perceived interpretability. We confirm that researchers may experiment with
choices in search of desirable results, but also identify other reasons why
researchers explore alternatives yet omit findings. In concert with our
interviews, we also contribute visualizations for communicating decision
processes throughout an analysis. Based on our results, we identify design
opportunities for strengthening end-to-end analysis, for instance via tracking
and meta-analysis of multiple decision paths
Identifying Engagement in Children's Interaction whilst Composing Digital Music at Home
Identifying points of engagement from a personâs interaction with computers could be used to assess their experience and to adapt user interfaces in real-time. However, it is difficult to identify points of engagement unobtrusively; HCI studies typically use retrospective protocols or rely on cumbersome sensors for real-time analysis. We present a case study on how children compose digital music at home in which we remotely identify points of engagement from patterns of interaction with a musical interface. A mixed-methods approach is contributed in which video recordings of childrenâs interactions whilst composing are labelled for engagement and linked to i) interaction logs from the interface to identify indicators of engagement in interaction, and ii) interview data gathered using a remote video-cued recall technique to understand the experiential qualities of engaging interactions directly from users. We conclude by speculating on how the suggested indicators of engagement inform the design of adaptive music systems
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Newcomersâ Barriers. . . Is That All? An Analysis of Mentorsâ and Newcomersâ Barriers in OSS Projects
Newcomersâ seamless onboarding is important for open collaboration communi- ties, particularly those that leverage outsidersâ contributions to remain sustainable. Nevertheless, previous work shows that OSS newcomers often face several barriers to contribute, which lead them to lose motivation and even give up on contributing. A well-known way to help newcomers overcome initial contribution barriers is men- toring. This strategy has proven effective in offline and online communities, and to some extent has been employed in OSS projects. Studying mentorsâ perspectives on the barriers that newcomers face play a vital role in improving onboarding pro- cesses; yet, OSS mentors face their own barriers, which hinder the effectiveness of the strategy. Since little is known about the barriers mentors face, in this thesis, we investigate the barriers that affect mentors and their newcomer mentees. We interviewed mentors from OSS projects and qualitatively analyzed their answers.
We found 44 barriers: 19 that affect mentors; and 34 that affect newcomers (9 af- fect both newcomers and mentors). Interestingly, most of the barriers we identified (66%) have a social nature. Additionally, we identified 10 strategies that mentors indicated to potentially alleviate some of the barriers. Since gender-related chal- lenges emerged in our analysis, we conducted nine follow-up structured interviews to further explore this perspective. The contributions of this thesis include: iden- tifying the barriers mentors face; bringing the unique perspective of mentors on barriers faced by newcomers; unveiling strategies that can be used by mentors to support newcomers; and investigating gender-specific challenges in OSS mentor- ship. Mentors, newcomers, online communities, and educators can leverage this knowledge to foster new contributors to OSS projects
Collective knowledge and collective strategy : a function of symbiotic knowledge for business-university alliances (Working paper series ; no.57)
This paper combines the concept of Collective Knowledge with the one of Collective Strategy, which will be to give new foundations on the theory of knowledge management.Depending on four types of Collective Strategies, corres ponding types of Collective Knowledge is created. One type of Collective Knowledge, Symbiotic Knowledge, stands out as it embodies a new dimension for problem solving by a usage of collaboration with different field of expertise. The applicability of Symbiotic Knowledge is exemplified by the business-university-government alliances in Toyama, Japan. The selection of who to invite as participants plays a decisively important role in knowledge creation. The symbiotic knowledge creation is limited by those who are allowed to participate in the organization. In this process, the coordinators play the most important role for the performance of inter-organizational alliances
Cultivating a Team Mindset about Productivity with a Nudge: A Field Study in Hybrid Development Teams
While there has been significant study of both individuals and teams of knowledge workers, research has focused largely on one or the other, with less focus on the interaction between the two. In this paper, we explore the tensions between the individual and their team, focusing on the choices an individual makes towards their own productivity versus their team's productivity. We developed a technology probe with a team nudge that fosters recurring reflection and prompts individuals to consider how their team helps them to be productive. We examined its impact through a longitudinal field study with 48 participants. We chose to undertake this study with software development teams as they are examples of knowledge workers who collaborate on a shared set of tasks with specific goals. Our exploration took place with hybrid development teams, which have increasingly become the norm. Our analysis of a total of 8338 hourly self-reports and 1389 daily diary entries found that the team nudge increased participants' productivity ratings and team awareness, led to participants spending more time on their own tasks, reshaped their perceptions of themselves and their team, yet, in general, did not increase team cohesion or affect well-being
Exploring usability evaluation of localised software in Malaysia
This thesis postulates the theory that software usability evaluation should be adapted to the culture in which it is carried out. An experiment has been conducted to explore the effectiveness of usability assessment tools (UATs). These UATs are studied in the context of usability evaluation phase of the global software development life-cycle. In particular, the study investigates whether imported UATs were appropriate in the usability evaluation of a localised spreadsheet in Malaysia. The experiment reveals that there is some support for the thesis and recommends a further large-scale formal study