JCSCW Vol. 23 (2014)

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  • Journal Article
    Book Review
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 23, No. 1, 2014) Paay, Jeni
  • Journal Article
    Book Review
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 23, No. 1, 2014) Lehn, Dirk
  • Journal Article
    Identifying Seekers and Suppliers in Social Media Communities to Support Crisis Coordination
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 23, No. 4-6, 2014) Purohit, Hemant; Hampton, Andrew; Bhatt, Shreyansh; Shalin, Valerie L.; Sheth, Amit P.; Flach, John M.
    Effective crisis management has long relied on both the formal and informal response communities. Social media platforms such as Twitter increase the participation of the informal response community in crisis response. Yet, challenges remain in realizing the formal and informal response communities as a cooperative work system. We demonstrate a supportive technology that recognizes the existing capabilities of the informal response community to identify needs ( seeker behavior ) and provide resources ( supplier behavior ), using their own terminology. To facilitate awareness and the articulation of work in the formal response community, we present a technology that can bridge the differences in terminology and understanding of the task between the formal and informal response communities. This technology includes our previous work using domain-independent features of conversation to identify indications of coordination within the informal response community. In addition, it includes a domain-dependent analysis of message content (drawing from the ontology of the formal response community and patterns of language usage concerning the transfer of property) to annotate social media messages. The resulting repository of annotated messages is accessible through our social media analysis tool, Twitris. It allows recipients in the formal response community to sort on resource needs and availability along various dimensions including geography and time. Thus, computation indexes the original social media content and enables complex querying to identify contents, players, and locations. Evaluation of the computed annotations for seeker-supplier behavior with human judgment shows fair to moderate agreement. In addition to the potential benefits to the formal emergency response community regarding awareness of the observations and activities of the informal response community, the analysis serves as a point of reference for evaluating more computationally intensive efforts and characterizing the patterns of language behavior during a crisis.
  • Journal Article
    Information Sharing Among Disaster Responders - An Interactive Spreadsheet-Based Collaboration Approach
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 23, No. 4-6, 2014) Ginige, Athula; Paolino, Luca; Romano, Marco; Sebillo, Monica; Tortora, Genoveffa; Vitiello, Giuliana
    Recent natural disasters have led crisis management organizations to revise their protocols so as to rely on the contribution of a wider range of actors, including simple citizens as well as expert operators, to support decision making activities. Reliable and timely information sharing among members of distributed teams of disaster responders has become paramount for the success of the overall crisis management process. In this paper we propose a crisis management system based on spreadsheet-mediated collaboration among on-site responders and decision makers. To share data a common spreadsheet artifact has been developed by using a participatory design approach which is accessed through mobile user interfaces. The evaluation results showed that the use of the spreadsheet artifact has resulted in more effective decision making relating to set of earthquake management scenarios in high-risk areas located in Italy.
  • Journal Article
    Interactional Order and Constructed Ways of Seeing with Touchless Imaging Systems in Surgery
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 23, No. 3, 41791) O’Hara, Kenton; Gonzalez, Gerardo; Penney, Graeme; Sellen, Abigail; Corish, Robert; Mentis, Helena; Varnavas, Andreas; Criminisi, Antonio; Rouncefield, Mark; Dastur, Neville; Carrell, Tom
    While surgical practices are increasingly reliant on a range of digital imaging technologies, the ability for clinicians to interact and manipulate these digital representations in the operating theatre using traditional touch based interaction devices is constrained by the need to maintain sterility. To overcome these concerns with sterility, a number of researchers are have been developing ways of enabling interaction in the operating theatre using touchless interaction techniques such as gesture and voice to allow clinicians control of the systems. While there have been important technical strides in the area, there has been little in the way of understanding the use of these touchless systems in practice. With this in mind we present a touchless system developed for use during vascular surgery. We deployed the system in the endovascular suite of a large hospital for use in the context of real procedures. We present findings from a study of the system in use focusing on how, with touchless interaction, the visual resources were embedded and made meaningful in the collaborative practices of surgery. In particular we discuss the importance of direct and dynamic control of the images by the clinicians in the context of talk and in the context of other artefact use as well as the work performed by members of the clinical team to make themselves sensable by the system. We discuss the broader implications of these findings for how we think about the design, evaluation and use of these systems.
  • Journal Article
    Sensework
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 23, No. 3, 2014) Haavik, Torgeir K.
    This article explores the nature of sociotechnical work in safety-critical operations as it unfolds in settings that are characterised by multidisciplinary interpretative work in high-tech environments, where direct access to the phenomena of interest is restricted and the dependence on sensor data and model support is high. The type of work that is described in the article—labelled ‘Integrated Operations’ in the petroleum industry—has some characteristic features that it shares with many other work settings which are becoming increasingly typical for managing complicated, sociotechnical work in our times. Sensework denotes a type of sociotechnical work in safety-critical operations where groups of professionals try to put together pieces of information to create a coherent picture to give meaning to familiar and unfamiliar situations. Although related to, sensework should not be confused with sensemaking; sensework is described as both something more and something less than sensemaking. Sensework is described as unfolding along three axes: a cognitive axis, a strategic axis and an organisational axis. Furthermore, through its fluctuation along these axes, sensework points towards two different views of work: work as imagined and work as done. Epistemologically, these dimensions may be understood as rationalist and constructivist dimensions of safe operations. Future research on sensework will hopefully challenge and develop both the empirical scope and the conceptual descriptions in this paper. The delimitation to safety-critical work in this article and the way in which sensework is conceptualised should not be seen as categorical constraints; these are starting points, not end points.
  • Journal Article
    Officing: Mediating Time and the Professional Self in the Support of Nomadic Work
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 23, No. 2, 41730) Humphry, Justine
    Today’s mobile knowledge professionals use a diversity of digital technologies to perform their work. Much of this daily technology consumption involves a variety of activities of articulation, negotiation and repair to support their work as well as their nomadic practices. This article argues that these activities mediate and structure social relations, going beyond the usual attention given to this work as a support requirement of cooperative and mobile work. Drawing on cultural approaches to technology consumption, the article introduces the concept of ‘officing’ and its three main categories of connecting , configuring and synchronizing, to show how these activities shape and are shaped by the relationship that workers have with their time and sense of professional self. This argument is made through research of professionals at a municipal council in Sydney and at a global telecommunications firm with regional headquarters in Melbourne, trialling a smartphone prototype. This research found that while officing fuels a sense of persistent time pressure and collapse of work and life boundaries, it also supports new temporal and spatial senses and opportunities for maintaining professional identities.
  • Journal Article
    Information and Expertise Sharing in Inter-Organizational Crisis Management
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 23, No. 4-6, 2014) Ley, Benedikt; Ludwig, Thomas; Pipek, Volkmar; Randall, Dave; Reuter, Christian; Wiedenhoefer, Torben
    Emergency or crisis management, as is well-attested, is a complex management problem. A variety of agencies need to collaborate and coordinate in real-time and with an urgency that is not always present in other domains. It follows that accurate information of varying kinds (e.g. geographical and weather conditions; available skills and expertises; state-of-play; current dispositions and deployments) needs to be made available in a timely fashion to the organizations and individuals who need it. By definition, this information will come from a number of sources both within and across organizations. Large-scale events in particular necessitate collaboration with other organizations. Of course, plans and processes exist to deal with such events but the number of dynamically changing factors as well as the high number of heterogeneous organizations and the high degree of interdependency involved make it impossible to plan for all contingencies. A degree of ongoing improvisation, which typically occurs by means of a variety of information and expertise sharing practices, therefore becomes necessary. This, however, faces many challenges, such as different organizational cultures, distinct individual and coordinative work practices and discrete information systems. Our work entails an examination of the practices of information and expertise sharing, and the obstacles to it, in inter-organizational crisis management. We conceive of this as a design case study, such that we examine a problem area and its scope; conduct detailed enquiries into practice in that area, and provide design recommendations for implementation and evaluation. First, we will present the results of an empirical study of collaboration practices between organizations and public authorities with security responsibilities such as the police, fire departments, public administration and electricity network operators, mainly in scenarios of medium to large power outages in Germany. Based on these results, we will describe a concept, which was designed, implemented and evaluated as a system prototype, in two iterations. While the first iteration focuses on situation assessment, the second iteration also includes inter-organizational collaboration functionalities. Based on the findings of our evaluations with practitioners, we will discuss how to support collaboration with a particular focus on information and expertise sharing.
  • Journal Article
    The Day-to-Day Co-Production of Ageing in Place
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 23, No. 3, 2014) Procter, Rob; Greenhalgh, Trisha; Wherton, Joe; Sugarhood, Paul; Rouncefield, Mark; Hinder, Sue
    We report findings from a study that set out to explore the experience of older people living with assisted living technologies and care services. We find that successful ‘ageing in place’ is socially and collaboratively accomplished – ‘co-produced’ – day-to-day by the efforts of older people, and their formal and informal networks of carers (e.g. family, friends, neighbours). First, we reveal how ‘bricolage’ allows care recipients and family members to customise assisted living technologies to individual needs. We argue that making customisation easier through better design must be part of making assisted living technologies ‘work’. Second, we draw attention to the importance of formal and informal carers establishing and maintaining mutual awareness of the older person’s circumstances day-to-day so they can act in a concerted and coordinated way when problems arise. Unfortunately, neither the design of most current assisted living technologies, nor the ways care services are typically configured, acknowledges these realities of ageing in place. We conclude that rather than more ‘advanced’ technologies, the success of ageing in place programmes will depend on effortful alignments in the technical, organisational and social configuration of support.
  • Journal Article
    Journalists as Crowdsourcerers: Responding to Crisis by Reporting with a Crowd
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 23, No. 4-6, 41974) Dailey, Dharma; Starbird, Kate
    Widespread adoption of new information communication technologies (ICTs) is disrupting traditional models of news production and distribution. In this rapidly changing media landscape, the role of the journalist is evolving. Our research examines how professional journalists within a rural community impacted by Hurricane Irene successfully negotiated a new role for themselves, transforming their journalistic practice to serve in a new capacity as leaders of an online volunteer community. We describe an emergent organization of media professionals, citizen journalists, online volunteers, and collaborating journalistic institutions that provided real-time event coverage. In this rural context, where communications infrastructure is relatively uneven, this ad hoc effort bridged gaps in ICT infrastructure to unite its audience. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective for characterizing these information-sharing activities: the “human powered mesh network” extends the concept of a mesh network to include human actors in the movement of information. Our analysis shows how journalists played a key role in this network, and facilitated the movement of information to those who needed it. These findings also note a contrast between how HCI researchers are designing crowdsourcing platforms for news production and how crowdsourcing efforts are forming during disaster events, suggesting an alternative approach to designing for emergent collaborations in this context.