Working together

IMD09120: Collaborative Media

Brian Davison 2011/12

Working together

• Synchronous co-located work• Loose/tight coupling• Communities of Practice• Awareness

Study of synchronous co-located work

• Observed the work of people in nine corporate sites• All normally share office space (a ‘war-room’ / ‘project-room’)• Posed the question - ‘what did these teams have that distant teams do

not?’

(Olson & Olson, 2000)

Distance matters

Co-located group divided into two subgroups: one working at the whiteboard, the other at a console.

The two groups merged to solve a particularly difficult problem together

10 minutes

• Identify 3 or more aspects of co-presence that would be absent or attenuated if you had to rely on media

• How could the use of media help?• Work in groups of 2-4.

Key characteristics of collocated synchronous work

Characteristic Description

Rapid feedback As interactions flow, feedback is as rapid as it can be

Personal information The identity of contributors to conversation is usually known

Nuanced informationThe kind of information that flows is often analog or continuous, with many subtle dimensions (e.g., gestures)

Shared local context Participants have a similar situation (time of day, local events)

Informal “hall” time before and after

Impromptu interactions take place among subsets of participants on arrival and departure

Coreference Ease of establishing joint reference to objects

Individual controlEach participant can freely choose what to attend to and change the focus of attention easily

Implicit cues A variety of cues as to what is going on are available in the periphery

Spatiality of reference People and work objects are located in spaceOlson & Olson, 2000

Four central concepts

• Coupling (dependencies) of group work

• Common ground

• Collaboration readiness—the motivation for coworkers to collaborate

• Collaboration technology readiness—the current level of groupware assimilated by the team

Loosely-coupled work

• Few dependencies between tasks• More routine• Can be captured as a process and implements as workflow

• Business processes

• e-Commerce• Portals• Specialist applications

Tightly-coupled work

• Interdependent tasks– eg. Collaborative design

• Frequent, complex communication between group members• Short feedback loops• Multiple streams of information

Social loafing

• People under-exert themselves in groups• Social loafing occurs more often

– Where individual output difficult to attribute– And/or the group is less meaningful or cohesive

• Social compensation: others may work harder if the group is important to them

• ‘Production blocking’ may also be a factor

• Ringelmann, 1913• Karau and Williams, 1993

Communities of Practice (CoP)

• Focused on a domain of knowledge• Accumulate expertise in this domain over time• Develop shared practice by interacting around problems, solutions,

and insights, and building a common store of knowledge.

• Three components:Domain

PracticeCommunity

Specific language, category of problem,

value system

Shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems

Domain expertise / shared competence. Mutual interest and support

Time and Space (Wenger, 2001)

1. Presence and visibility– A community needs to have a presence in the lives of its members and

make itself visible to them.

2. Rhythm– Communities live in time and they have rhythms of events and rituals that

reaffirm their bonds and value.

Presence and visibility

Principle Technology implications

In collocated communities, people meet each other in the hallway or in the cafeteria. The community reminds itself to membersin many ways. It is also more visible. At meetings, they can see who is there, even if people do not say anything.

• Presence of community in the organization

• Presence of community to members• Presence of members to the community• Visibility of the community• Knowing what others know, do or care

about• Impromptu interactions

• Pointers to the community• Directories of communities• Some “push” distribution, such as

electronic newsletters, reminders, questions

• Member directories• Who is doing what• Presence awareness• Instant messaging• Virtual coffee smell

Rhythm

Principle Technology implications

Communities exist in time and theyneed a rhythm of events and rituals that reasserts their existence over time.

• Regular meetings bring a sense ongoing routine

• Unusual meetings break the routine and bring some excitement

• Milestones• Projects underway• Waves of hot topics

• Community calendar• Reminders• Synchronization of calendars• Synchronous events, such as

teleconferences, virtual conferences or online meetings

• Invitations• Minutes of recent events made

available quickly afterwards• Hot topics

CoP support

Constraints on grounding

Clarke and Brennan, 1991

Short break

Awareness

• Difficult to define – the unconscious absorption of information

• Schmidt (2002) proposes 4 types of awareness …– Social awareness– Action awareness– Workspace awareness– Situation awareness

Workplace studies

• Reuters - study by Heath & Luff (2000)• Piper Alpha disaster recreation • London underground - study by Heath & Luff (1992)

Ethnography

• Ethnographic methods are a research approach that looks at: – people in their cultural setting– their deeds as well as their words– the implicit as well as the explicit– the way in which they interact with one another and with their social and

cultural environment– what is not said as much as what is said– their language, and the symbols, rituals and shared meanings that populate

their world, with the object of producing a narrative account of that particular culture, against a theoretical backdrop

– Emerald How to... Guide: How to use ethnographic methods and participant observation

Reuters (I)

• The setting is Reuters which provides a news service to organisations (newspapers, TV and commerce - dealers and traders)

• Reuters’ desks receives news stories from across the world

• Desks are topic specific and subdivided• The Financial News Section desk is divided into 4 desks

– money & capital, equities, oil minerals & commodities• Journalists are expected to identify news of interests and tailor it to the

specific needs of their clients

Reuters (II)

• The technology– Workstations with small (14”)

monitors with the consequence that others were unable to read the displayed text

• At peak time 4-5 messages were received every minute

• Desk staff highly pressured

Reuters (III)

• Heath and Luff describe the behaviour of ‘Peter’

Things are quiet in the newsroom. Peter is working on a story on a fall in Israeli interest rates and begins to make a joke about it in a pronounced Jewish accent to the room as a whole.

Peter: Bank of Israel interest rate drops.

Peter: Down, down, down

Peter: Didn’t it do this last week.

He continues working and then 12 seconds later, Alex who is 6 feet away turns to Peter and then back again. Peter then utters “er”, pauses and then, not as a joke but as a précis:

Reuters (IV)

Peter: er…

Peter: Bank of Israel er. Cuts its er daily the rate on its daily money tender to commercial banks

Alex: Yeah. Got that now. Thanks Peter.

Peter: Okay

• Note• The text-to-voice transformation as a mediating mechanism• The level of detail in ethnographic studies

Awareness as shared mental models

• The term mental model refers to internalised representations of a device, idea or situation

• Shared mental models: knowledge in common• The key idea is to isolate task-relevant knowledge shared by all team

members-knowledge about task relevant objects, knowledge of how to carry out domain procedures, knowledge about domain goals and constraints.

Mohammed and Dumville (2001)

• Carroll et al. (2006) extend the idea to include activities• Example using firefighters

The four facets of activity awareness

Facet Description

Common ground A communication protocol for testing and signalling shared knowledge and beliefs

Communities of practice The tacit understanding of community-specific behaviours shared through enactment

Social capital The creation of persistent social goods through networks of mutually beneficial or satisfying interaction

Human development Innovative behaviour or decisions entrained by open-ended, complex problem solving, and evolving skills of both members and teams

Carroll et al. (2006)

Implications

Facet Implied design goal Example awareness techniques

Common ground Public availability of shared information

Radar view or workspace overview, media spaces, virtual representations of physical environment

Communities of practice

Integration of team members' behavior or decisions into best practices or patterns

Community annotations, social networks, community discussions, recommender systems

Social capital Aggregation of individual contributions into collective achievement

Activity log visualizations; resource usage indicators; recognition for selfless or altruistic behaviors

Human development

Contrast of individual capabilities and roles played through time

Personal profiles (including historical views), annotated workflow, first-person stories, critical episodes

Carroll et al. (2006)

Simple awareness mechanisms

• ‘Do not disturb’• An alarm clock• The out of office assistant in Outlook• The ring / vibration of a phone• The use of alerts on the flight deck

New mail alert

Running applications

Portholes I

• First study reported by Dourish and Bly (CHI 1992)• Several studies & implementations since• An awareness mechanism for distributed workgroups• Original studies conducted at Rank Xerox research labs in the UK &

USA

• Experimental study of awareness using video technology• Used a video snapshot rather than continuous video-feed (refreshed

every 10 minutes) - to minimise bandwidth requirements• In addition to video - email, audio & status information was available

Portholes structure

Portholes screenshot I

31

Portholes screenshot II

32

Anecdotes

• A participant at PARC was spending many late nights working in his office; his presence was not only noted by EuroPARC participants but also led them to be quite aware of his dissertation progress

• Another late night worker at PARC was pleased to tell his local colleagues that he had watched the sun rise in England

• I remember seeing [a colleague] in his office and going down to ask him something - checking for [that colleague] over the system is a common event

• I also liked [a colleague’s] message when he sang happy birthday to himself …

User reaction

• The sense of whether people were around and seeing my friends; knowing who’s around; feeling some connection to folks at the remote site, sharing a community with them

• Awareness is ubiquitous in CSCW– All successful CSCW application embody an awareness mechanism– All successful cooperative working situations embody an awareness

mechanism

Example application: AT&T Connect