ECSCW 2017 Exploratory Papers

https://dl.eusset.eu/handle/20.500.12015/2840

For this 2017 edition of the ECSCW conference, we are excited to introduce the Exploratory Papers venue. The goal for this new conference genre was to attract focused studies, works-in-progress, critical literature reviews, early results, and provocative ideas that are not yet ready for a journal submission, but could benefit from presentation and discussion within the ECSCW community.

This inaugural year, we received 27 submissions from 14 countries, and accepted 16 papers. All submissions were reviewed by the ECSCW Program Committee members without the involvement of external reviewers. Reviewing was conducted in two rounds. During the first round, all committee members served exclusively as “reviewers”. In the second round, one reviewer on each paper was assigned the “leading reviewer” role and asked to lead an online discussion of the paper, and write a meta-review based on the reviews and discussion. The goal of the discussion and meta-review was to generate a proposed accept or reject decision. As the venue chairs, we then considered all of the review scores and comments, and made final decisions. We hope that the selected papers will be both inspirational and provocative, inciting constructive discussions around topics such as workplace digitization, privacy and identity in the IoT era, leading digital lives in the ever expanding online sharing domains, or designing in the “smart city” and “smart building” contexts.

Creating this program was a truly collaborative and international effort, and we would like to extend our thanks to many people who have helped along the way. First, thank you to Luigina Ciolfi and David Randall for inviting us to co-chair the Exploratory Papers venue. It was a great experience working with you as we were brainstorming and launching this new venue. We would also like to thank Charlotte Lee for her valuable input about the venue goals. The idea for having a venue like exploratory papers at ECSCW was initially discussed among the members of the ECSCW taskforce during the first EUSSET International Summer School on CSCW in Como, Italy, in 2015. The proposition was validated by the ECSCW Foundation and its organization proceeded under the auspices of EUSSET - European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies. Our last discussion with the late David Martin was about naming this venue. We hope he would have liked the results.

This volume would not be possible without contributions from all authors who have sent their work, as well as without Michael Koch, who put the EUSSET Digital Library in place. We also express our gratitude to the international program committee for helping us make the best possible decisions and providing constructive feedback to all authors.

News

Published in:
Reports of the European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (ISSN: 2510-2591) Volume 1, Issue 2.

Authors with most documents  

Ludwig, Thomas
2
Ackerman, Mark
1
Aitamurto, Tanja
1
Bansler, Jørgen P.
1
Barijough, Sanam Mirzazad
1
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Recent Submissions

1 - 10 of 18
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    Conference Paper
    Enterprise Assistant Service: Supporting Employees in the Digital Enterprise
    (Proceedings of 15th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work - Exploratory Papers, 2017) Chander, Ajay; Barijough, Sanam Mirzazad; Okubo, Yuko
    Enterprises globally are seeking out and leveraging digital technologies to improve their performance and competitiveness. As data-driven personalization becomes an increasingly ubiquitous aspect of our digital experience, we believe it is likely that the rapidly digitizing workplace will explore systems for personalizing the support their employees receive. In this paper, we present our experience designing and experimenting with a pilot service that provided personalized digital tool recommendations to enterprise users, for work-related issues. This Enterprise Assistant service, or EAS, was offered for 10 weeks and served 24 users within the same enterprise. Users emailed the EAS with their questions and received personalized suggestions and follow-ups until their issue was resolved. The service addressed a variety of issues during the experiment, with a majority of users expressing interest in continuing to use it. One key finding is that user awareness of friction points in their daily workflows is quite low, leading to significant communication overhead simply to uncover an actionable issue for the EAS. We channel our findings towards design guidelines and opportunities for systems that aim to empower employees with personalized tools in our rapidly digitizing workplaces.
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    Conference Paper
    Batching, Error Checking and Data Collecting: Understanding Data Entry in a Financial Office
    (Proceedings of 15th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work - Exploratory Papers, 2017) Borghouts, Judith; Brumby, Duncan; Cox, Anna
    Data entry is a core computing activity performed by office workers every day. Prior research on this topic has tended to study data entry in controlled lab environments. In this paper, we interviewed nine financial administrators from two large universities to learn about their practices for conducting data entry work. We found that financial information often has to be retrieved from multiple electronic and paper sources, and involves briefly keeping items in memory when switching between sources. Interviewees reported that they batched a lot of data entry tasks into a single session to complete the work quickly, and mitigated the risk of data entry errors by time-consuming practices of double-checking. However, prior lab studies suggest that double-checking is a poor strategy as it takes time and people are poor at spotting errors. This work has implications for how future data entry research should be conducted.
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    The Ludic Takes Work
    (Proceedings of 15th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work - Exploratory Papers, 2017) Koutsouras, Panagiotis; Martindale, Sarah; Crabtree, Andy
    Games that revolve around user-generated content have been explored mainly from a ludic perspective, leaving the work practices that are entailed in content production underexplored. What we argue in this paper is that there is an underlying economy in Minecraft’s community, which plays a significant role in the game’s current form. Our ethnographic fieldwork revealed the various aspects of the work of producing in-game content, by teasing out the discrete segments of the arc of work of commissioning, creating and delivering a Minecraft map. The infrastructure this work relies on is fragmented though, with the various accountability systems in place being appropriations by the players themselves. This raises a number of design implications related to how members coordinate tasks and articulate their work.
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    A Stick with a Handle at Each End: Socially Implicated Work Objects for Design of Collaborative Systems
    (Proceedings of 15th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work - Exploratory Papers, 2017) Muller, Michael; Dugan, Casey; Sharma, Aabhas; Geyer, Werner; Erickson, Thomas
    We propose an analytic approach – Socially Implicated Work Objects (SIWOs) – to describe and unify diverse shared virtual objects and work practices in organizations. SIWOs are virtual objects that connect two or more people. SIWOs provide support to coordinate work, especially across distances. Examples of relevant types of work include collaborative scheduling through calendars, collaborative task management, collaborative request management, and co-authoring of documents. Beginning with familiar features from calendars, we build the more general case for SIWOs as a strong concept describing an under-supported class of coordinative artifacts in organizations. With a theoretical background combining Schmidt’s work on coordinative practices with Bjørn’s and Chistensen’s concept of relation work, we explore how work practices and work virtual objects could be configured and interrelated through a common and extensible abstraction.
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    Conference Paper
    Exploratory Papers: A New Venue for ECSCW 2017
    (Proceedings of 15th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work - Exploratory Papers, 2017) Lewkowicz, Myriam; Sarcevic, Aleksandra
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    The Roots of Bias on Uber
    (Proceedings of 15th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work - Exploratory Papers, 2017) Hanrahan, Benjamin; Ning, Ma; Chien Wen, Yuan
    In the last decade, there has been a growth in, what we call, digitally mediated workplaces. A digitally mediated workplace is one where interactions between stakeholders are primarily managed by proprietary, algorithmically managed digital platform. The replacement of the relationships between the stakeholders by the platform is a key feature of these workplaces, and is a contributing factor to the decrease in contractual responsibilities each stakeholder has to one another. In this paper, we discuss some of the ways in which this structure and lack of accountability serves as a root of, or at least an enabler to, the realization of biases in the ridesharing application Uber, a digitally mediated workplace.
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    Conference Paper
    Bots Mind the Social-technical Gap
    (Proceedings of 15th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work - Exploratory Papers, 2017) Lee, Minha; Frank, Lily; Beute, Femke; de Kort, Yvonne; Ijsselsteijn, Wijnand
    Mobile workers experience the social-technical gap when moral dilemmas occur on communication platforms, and technology cannot adapt to social contexts on ethical matters. On messaging applications, bots are non-human team members and/or assistants that can aid mobile workers manage ethical challenges. We present excerpts from qualitative interviews with mobile workers that illuminate examples of moral challenges across communication channels. We then discuss how bots may be helpful intermediaries on these channels. Bots bridge the gap between mobile workers’ need for moral support and the communication medium’s incapability of having an intentionally moral stance.
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    Parental controls: reimagining technologies for parent-child interaction
    (Proceedings of 15th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work - Exploratory Papers, 2017) Nouwen, Marije; Jafarinaimi, Nassim; Zaman, Bieke
    This article questions existing approaches in designing parental controls and puts forward a hypothesis to reimagine technologies to mediate parent-child interactions. First, we present an overview of the current parental controls. Second, we explain the gradual shift away from the idea of ‘harmful’ digital media in parental mediation studies and introduce previous work in CSCW and HCI that has proposed solutions to support discussions about digital media between parents and children. Then, we hypothesize that an emphasis on collaboration and mutual learning might help researchers and designers to rethink and reimagine technologies that support parent-child interactions with and through digital media. Finally, we share our findings of two co-creation workshops with children and parents on ways to instill parental involvement in children’s digital media use. The workshop yielded insights on the differing views between parents and children about how technologies might instill long-term negotiations based on parents’ and children’s experiences, enriched by real-use data.
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    Cities of Otherness: the smart city as a heterotopia
    (Proceedings of 15th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work - Exploratory Papers, 2017) Wang, Ding
    This paper provides an exploratory dimension to the current smart city discussion by regarding the smart city as a heterotopia space – a space of otherness. By adopting a Foucauldian approach, this paper briefly describes the ‘discursive formation’ of the smart city by analysing its ‘surfaces of emergence’, ‘authorities of delimitation’, and ‘grids of specification’, in order to capture the smart city discourse trajectory. It then focuses on analysing the smart city as a heterotopia space by applying Foucault’s six principles of heterotopias to the data gathered through twenty-seven ethnographic interviews with the smart city experts. In so doing, the paper intends to explore the possible implications for design – and ‘design’ in its widest sense – in the smart city context.
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    From the Internet of Things to an Internet of Practices
    (Proceedings of 15th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work - Exploratory Papers, 2017) Ludwig, Thomas; Tolmie, Peter; Pipek, Volkmar
    In his ground-breaking work on the habitus Bourdieu (1977) understands practices as the permanent internalization of the social order in the human body. Others have taken this idea and described practices as ‘normatively regulated activities’ (Schmidt, 2014). Our own interests here arise from the fact that during the performance of all of these various activities, which may implicate and draw upon the material environment, the surrounding context, their own capabilities, interests and preferences, people often use supportive devices and technologies that help to enable and support their realization. Where these supportive technologies make up a part of the Internet of Things (IoT) they are usually small, interconnected cyber-physical devices and are typically used in social/collaborative settings. As a consequence, the (re-)appropriation of these new devices and technologies is not only a technical, but also a social process. Within this exploratory paper we focus on the potential of IoT technologies for supporting collaborative appropriation within Communities of Practice (CoP) from a practice-oriented perspective. We outline the vision of an Internet of Practices (IoP). This vision encompasses and addresses a range of phenomena that has been associated with how CoPs evolve and the resonance activities that can arise as specific bodies of practice adapt, by adding integrated support for the documentation of practices and the sharing of relevant representations such that mutual improvements in practice may take place. Based on our vision of the IoP, we outline some directions CSCW research could take regarding the potential of the IoT and new emerging technologies, thereby expanding the scope of CSCW’s areas of interest.