Browsing by Subject "collaborative work"

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    Conference Paper
    Algorithmic Decision Making in Public Administration: A CSCW-Perspective
    (Companion Proceedings of the 2020 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2020) Flügge, Asbjörn Ammitzböll
    In this paper, I propose a study of algorithmic decision making in public administration from a computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) perspective. Each day the public administration makes thousands of decisions with consequences for the welfare of its citizens. An increasing number of such decisions are supported or made by algorithmic decision making (ADM) systems, yet in the scientific and public sphere there is a growing concern that these algorithms become a 'black box' possibly containing hidden bias (Olsen et al., 2019), obstacles for human discretion (Rason, 2017), low transparency (Alkhatib and Bernstein, 2019) or trust (Mittelstadt et al. 2016). For example, ADM is currently tested in public administration in job placement for the prediction of a citizen's risk of long-term unemployment. Following prior research questioning the usefulness of the black box metaphor, my interest is to understand how caseworkers' and citizens understand ADM, as a basis for design of CSCW technologies employing ADM.
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    Conference Paper
    Algorithmic Decision Making in Public Services: A CSCW-Perspective
    (Companion Proceedings of the 2020 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2020) Flügge, Asbjörn William Ammitzböll; Hildebrandt, Thomas; Möller, Naja Holten
    Each day the public administration makes thousands of decisions with consequences for the welfare of its citizens. An increasing number of such decisions are supported or made by algorithmic decision making (ADM) systems, yet there is a widespread concern that these algorithms create a 'black box' of embedded bias, lack of human discretion, transparency or trust. For example, ADM is currently tested in public administration in job placement for prediction of a citizen's risk of long-term unemployment. This research project focus on bringing about research on citizens' 'trust' and 'transparency' from a practice-oriented perspective when algorithms are increasingly introduced in public services such as job placement. We propose a study of citizen-government relations to begin to uncover how computational systems and semi-automated decisions affect the relationship between citizens and caseworker, as they work through the collaborative processes around casework. In this context, our question is: What are citizens and caseworkers' different concepts of trust and transparency? How are casework processes affected as we are beginning to see a closer integration between legal guidelines and computational systems in casework? These questions are of huge importance to get a better understanding of how algorithms are changing the ways society makes decisions in core areas of public services in order to inform the responsible design of technologies in areas such as job placement.
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    Journal Article
    Beyond Boundary Objects: Collaborative Reuse in Aircraft Technical Support
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 16, No. 3, 39234) Lutters, Wayne G.; Ackerman, Mark S.
    Boundary objects are a critical, but understudied, theoretical construct in CSCW. Through a field study of aircraft technical support, we examined the role of boundary objects in the practical achievement of safety by service engineers. Their resolution of repair requests was preserved in the organization’s memory via three compound boundary objects. These crystallizations did not manifest a static interpretation, but instead were continually reinterpreted in light of meta-negotiations. This suggests design implications for organizational memory systems which can more fluidly represent the meta-negotiations surrounding boundary objects.
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    Journal Article
    Boundary Negotiating Artifacts: Unbinding the Routine of Boundary Objects and Embracing Chaos in Collaborative Work
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 16, No. 3, 39234) Lee, Charlotte P.
    Empirical studies of material artifacts in practice continue to be a rich source of theoretical concepts for CSCW. This paper explores the foundational concept of boundary objects and questions the conception that all objects that move between communities of practice are boundary objects. This research presents the results of a year-long ethnographic study of collaborative work, specifically the multidisciplinary collaborative design of a museum exhibition. I suggest that artifacts can serve to establish and destabilize protocols themselves and that artifacts can be used to push boundaries rather than merely sailing across them. Artifacts used for collaboration do not necessarily exist within a web of standardized processes and disorderly processes should not be treated as “special cases”.
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    Journal Article
    Information needs in technical work settings and their implications for the design of computer tools
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 5, No. 1, 35125) Paepcke, Andreas
    We interviewed information workers in multiple technical areas of a large, diverse company, and we describe some of the unsatisfied information needs we observed during our study. Two clusters of issues are described. The first covers how loosely coupled work groups use and share information. We show the need to structure information for multiple, partly unanticipated uses. We show how the construction of information compounds helps users accomplish some of this restructuring, and we explain how structuring flexibility is also required because of temperamental differences among users. The second cluster of issues revolves around collections of tightly coupled work groups. We show that information shared within such groups differs from information shared across group boundaries. We present the barriers to sharing which we saw operating both within groups and outside, and we explain the function of resource and contact broker which evolved in the settings we examined. For each of these issues we propose implications for information tool design.
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    Journal Article
    Making a Case in Medical Work: Implications for the Electronic Medical Record
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 12, No. 3, 37865) Hartswood, Mark; Procter, Rob; Rouncefield, Mark; Slack, Roger
    The introduction of theelectronic medical record (EMR) is widely seenby healthcare policy makers and servicemanagers alike as a key step in the achievementof more efficient and integrated healthcareservices. However, our study of inter-servicework practices reveals important discrepanciesbetween the presumptions of the role of the EMRin achieving service integration and the waysin which medical workers actually use andcommunicate patient information. These lead usto doubt that technologies like the EMR candeliver their promised benefits unless there isa better understanding of the work they areintended to support and the processes used inits development and deployment becomesignificantly more user-led.
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    Journal Article
    NetWORKers and their Activity in Intensional Networks
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 11, 37316) Nardi, Bonnie A.; Whittaker, Steve; Schwarz, Heinrich
    Through ethnographic research, we document therise of personal social networks in theworkplace, which we call intensionalnetworks . Paradoxically, we find that the mostfundamental unit of analysis forcomputer-supported cooperative work is not at the group level for many tasks andsettings, but at the individual level aspersonal social networks come to be more andmore important. Collective subjects areincreasingly put together through theassemblage of people found through personalnetworks rather than being constituted as teamscreated through organizational planning andstructuring. Teams are still important butthey are not the centerpiece of labormanagement they once were, nor are they thechief resource for individual workers. We drawattention to the importance of networks as mostCSCW system designs assume a team. We urge thatdesigners take account of networks and theproblems they present to workers.
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    Journal Article
    Productive Interrelationships between Collaborative Groups Ease the Challenges of Dynamic and Multi-Teaming
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 21, 2012) Matthews, Tara; Whittaker, Steve; Moran, Thomas P.; Helsley, Sandra Y.; Judge, Tejinder K.
    Work organization and team membership is highly complex for modern workers. Teams are often dynamic as personnel change during a project. Dynamic team members have to be actively recruited and personnel changes make it harder for participants to retain group focus. Workers are often members of multiple groups . Though prior work has identified the prevalence of multi-teaming and dynamic teams, it has been unable to explain how workers cope with the challenges the new style of work should cause. This paper systematically characterizes the modern organizational landscape from an individual perspective, by studying how people typically organize work across their multiple collaborative groups. A unique contribution of our work is to examine the interrelationships between the collaborative groups individuals typically participate in. We introduce the notion of a collaboration profile to characterize these interrelations. We expected workers to be overburdened by contributing to multiple teams often with shifting personnel. However, we found that multi-teaming involves productive interrelationships between collaborative groups that ease some of the documented challenges of dynamic teams, such as goal setting, recruiting, and group maintenance. We define a typology that describes the various types of collaborative groups workers participate in, and provide examples of productive interrelations between collaborations. In characterizing interrelations between collaborations, we provide detailed examples of how people exploit resources across their different collaborations to address the problems of working in multiple dynamic teams.
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    Text Document
    Requirements for a Virtual Collocation Environment
    (Proceedings of the 1997 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 1997) Poltrock, Steven E.; Engelbeck, George
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    Text Document
    The Role of Narratives in Collaborative Information Seeking
    (Proceedings of the 2012 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2012) Karunakaran, Arvind; Reddy, Madhu
    There has been a growing interest within the CSCW community to understand how actors in organizations collaboratively seek information. This focus had led to the emergence of the research area of collaborative information seeking (CIS). Despite an increasing number of conceptual as well as technical studies related to CIS, many fundamental questions still remain unanswered. For example, researchers within this space have argued that CIS goes beyond two or more individuals posing question and answers" to each other in their attempt to seek the needed information. If CIS is not just about "question and answers", then what does it exactly constitute? We propose that one way to answer these questions is to conceptualize CIS as being constituted through, and orchestrated via, "narratives". In this research note, we elaborate upon the notion of "narratives", and talk about the potential usefulness of such a conceptualization for furthering CIS research and advancing CSCW scholarship."
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    Journal Article
    Temporality in Medical Work: Time also Matters
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 15, No. 1, 38749) Reddy, Madhu C.; Dourish, Paul; Pratt, Wanda
    CSCW has long been concerned with the distribution of activities in time and in space, but the problems of distributed work have often taken analytic and technical precedence. In this paper, we are interested in the issue of temporality in collaborative work. In particular, we want to examine how the temporal organization of action is experienced by those who are involved in it. To investigate this phenomenon, we conducted a field study of medical workers in a surgical intensive care unit. Through this study, we highlight the temporal organization of the work. In particular, we introduce and describe three temporal features – temporal trajectories, temporal rhythms, and temporal horizons – that emerge from and influence the work of healthcare providers as they attempt to seek, provide, and manage information during the course of their daily work.
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    Journal Article
    Video-as-data: Technical and social aspects of a collaborative multimedia application
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 4, No. 1, 1995) Nardi, Bonnie A.; Kuchinsky, Allan; Whittaker, Steve; Leichner, Robert; Schwarz, Heinrich
    We studied the use of a collaborative multimedia system for coordinating teamwork among members of a neurosurgical team. We analyze the use of video within the operating room and the use of broadcast audio and video to other locations in the hospital to enable remote neurophysiological monitoring. We describe how the multimedia system was used in a real world work context, including its benefits and problems. We argue that video can be useful as more than just pictures of people talking to one another; video can be a rich tool to enable analysis and problem solving. We discuss privacy problems inherent in collaborative multimedia technology and describe how they played out in the hospital during the course of our study.
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    Conference Paper
    When Social Norms Fail
    (Companion Proceedings of the 2020 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2020) Dym, Brianna; Fiesler, Casey
    Within online communities, social norms that both set expectations for and regulate behavior can be critical to the overall welfare of the community--particularly in the context of the privacy and safety of its members. For communities where the cost of regulatory failure can be high, it is important to understand both the conditions under which norms might be effective, and when they might fail. As a case study, we consider transformative fandom, a creative community dedicated to reimagining existing media in subversive ways. Due to the vulnerability of many members, this community has strong, longstanding norms to keep its members safe. Through an interview study with 25 fandom participants, we investigate this complex array of implicit norms that have been largely effective over time, but have also begun to break down. Catalysts for these breakdowns include value tensions between sub-communities and an increasing presence of outsiders, though most prominently, we identify a disconnect between the norms the community needs to support and the design of the platforms they occupy.
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    Journal Article
    “You Are Well Clear of Friendlies”: Diagnostic Error and Cooperative Work in an Iraq War Friendly Fire Incident
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 18, 39965) Nevile, Maurice
    This paper considers diagnostic error in cooperative work as a contributing factor for a military ‘friendly fire’ incident. It emphasises aspects of the moment-to-moment sequential organisation of interaction, and turn design, to explore the significance for the error of a loss of intersubjectivity and joint understanding. The paper uses as data the cockpit video recording from a US Air Force aircraft that fired on a British armoured vehicle convoy in March 2003, in the early days of the Iraq War. The analytic approach is grounded in concerns of ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA) for uncovering the language, practices and processes of reasoning by which people accomplish social actions, particularly for conducting cooperative work. The paper highlights the impact for the participants’ perception, understanding and action of varying forms of participation, for example as speaker, addressed recipient, or as potential overhearing non-addressed recipient, and relative to participants’ involvement in the task at hand, and to their possibilities for accessing relevant phenomena (i.e. the vehicles and their visible features). Diagnosis in cooperative work demands that participants act relative to one another’s diverse perspectives and representations of the scene and its objects and events. Diagnosis requires participants to manage situations of ambiguity and uncertainty, and to resolve apparent conflicts of understanding and perceptual evidence. The paper examines the social character of diagnostic work by showing how processes of cooperation can be vulnerable and ultimately go wrong, particularly when multiple participants are physically distributed and interaction is mediated by communication technologies such as radio.