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- Journal ArticleI’m Trying to Find my Way of Staying Organized: the Socio-Technical Assemblages of Personal Health Information Management(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 28, No. 6, 2019) Willis, MatthewPersonal health information management (PHIM) is a broad endeavor that requires the patient to navigate many different types of information. Including patients performing a variety of tasks and roles to make information useful. I ask the question: what practices constitute a patient’s personal health information management socio-technical assemblage? By doing this I am interested in understanding how PHIM is an assemblage of different actors, tools, technologies, information, and materialities that form a heterogeneous network to motivate the patient’s health maintenance and wellbeing. I describe information practices, planning and sense making practices that patients engage to begin to define this assemblage, and the social actors and materialities that manifest and stabilize. Then, I discuss three key commitments learned from this approach, namely: the personal aspect of PHIM, the role of physical and digital materials on PHIM, and the role of information practice materialities.
- Journal ArticleRescueGlass: Collaborative Applications involving Head-Mounted Displays for Red Cross Rescue Dog Units(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 28, 43570) Reuter, Christian; Ludwig, Thomas; Mischur, PatrickOn-site work of emergency service teams consists of highly cooperative tasks. Especially during distributed search and rescue tasks there is a constant mix of routinized and non-routinized activities. Within this paper we focus on the work practices of the German Red Cross Rescue Dog Units who deal with several uncertainties regarding the involved dogs, the fragility of the respective situations as well as issues of using technologies under enormous time pressure. Smart glasses provide possibilities for enhanced and hands-free interaction in various contexts and a number of approaches have already been applied, aiming at efficient use of the respective technological innovation in private and professional contexts. However, the collaborative potential of smart glasses in time-critical and uncertain situations is still unexplored. Our design case study examines how the on-site work of emergency service teams can be supported by smart glasses: Based on examining the work practices of the German Red Cross Rescue Dogs, we introduce ‘RescueGlass’ as a coordinative concept, encompassing hands-free head-mounted display (HMD) application as well as a corresponding smartphone application. Finally, we describe the evaluation of its use in the field of emergency response and management. We show how current features such as ‘fog of war’ or various sensors support the cooperative practices of dog handlers, and outline current technical limitations offering future research questions. Our paper provides an initial design probe using smart glasses to engage in the field of collaborative professional mobile tasks.
- Journal ArticleOvercoming Social Barriers When Contributing to Open Source Software Projects(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 28, 43570) Steinmacher, Igor; Gerosa, Marco; Conte, Tayana U.; Redmiles, David F.An influx of newcomers is critical to the survival, long-term success, and continuity of many Open Source Software (OSS) community-based projects. However, newcomers face many barriers when making their first contribution, leading in many cases to dropouts. Due to the collaborative nature of community-based OSS projects, newcomers may be susceptible to social barriers, such as communication breakdowns and reception issues. In this article, we report a two-phase study aimed at better understanding social barriers faced by newcomers. In the first phase, we qualitatively analyzed the literature and data collected from practitioners to identify barriers that hinder newcomers’ first contribution. We designed a model composed of 58 barriers, including 13 social barriers. In the second phase, based on the barriers model, we developed FLOSScoach, a portal to support newcomers making their first contribution. We evaluated the portal in a diary-based study and found that the portal guided the newcomers and reduced the need for communication. Our results provide insights for communities that want to support newcomers and lay a foundation for building better onboarding tools. The contributions of this paper include identifying and gathering empirical evidence of social barriers faced by newcomers; understanding how social barriers can be reduced or avoided by using a portal that organizes proper information for newcomers (FLOSScoach); presenting guidelines for communities and newcomers on how to reduce or avoid social barriers; and identifying new streams of research.
- Journal ArticleCivic Technology for Social Innovation(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 28, 2019) Saldivar, Jorge; Parra, Cristhian; Alcaraz, Marcelo; Arteta, Rebeca; Cernuzzi, LucaThe recent surge of investment in Civic Technologies represents a unique opportunity to realize the potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for improving democratic participation. In this review, we study what technologies are proposed and evaluated in the academic literature for such goal. We focus our exploration on how civic technology is used in the collaborative creation of solutions for social issues and innovations for public services (i.e., social innovation). Our goal is to provide researchers, designers, and practitioners a starting point to understand both the academic state of the art and the existing opportunities for ICT in a democracy.
- Journal ArticleA trajectory for technology-supported elderly care work(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 28, 2019) Woll, Anita; Bratteteig, ToneTo enable elderly people to live independently in their homes, the government aims to de-institutionalize elderly care services by upscaling home care services and care housing and downscaling long-term stays at nursing homes. Increasing use of assistive technologies will play a significant role in the ongoing transformation of care services, however our empirical data shows how difficult appropriation and use of technology are for elderly end-users. In this paper, we suggest a comprehensive elderly care trajectory model that includes the collaborative work of self-care, formal care, informal care and technology. We build our trajectory on empirical studies of elderly people using assistive technology in a care housing and in nursing homes, in addition to Corbin and Strauss’ classic work. Our proposal of an elderly care trajectory fits with the municipal care staircase, but challenges its minimalist service level focus, as well as its late and limited introduction of technology.
- Journal ArticleAligning Concerns in Telecare: Three Concepts to Guide the Design of Patient-Centred E-Health(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 28, No. 6, 43739) Andersen, Tariq Osman; Bansler, Jørgen Peter; Kensing, Finn; Moll, Jonas; Mønsted, Troels; Nielsen, Karen Dam; Nielsen, Olav Wendelboe; Petersen, Helen Høgh; Svendsen, Jesper HastrupThe design of patient-centred e-health services embodies an inherent tension between the concerns of clinicians and those of patients. Clinicians’ concerns are related to professional issues to do with diagnosing and curing disease in accordance with accepted medical standards. In contrast, patients’ concerns typically relate to personal experience and quality of life issues. It is about their identity, their hopes, their fears and their need to maintain a meaningful life. This divergence of concerns presents a fundamental challenge for designers of patient-centred e-health services. We explore this challenge in the context of chronic illness and telecare. Based on insights from medical phenomenology as well as our own experience with designing an e-health service for patients with chronic heart disease, we emphasise the importance – and difficulty – of aligning the concerns of patients and clinicians. To deal with this, we propose a set of concepts for analysing concerns related to the design of e-health services: A concern is (1) meaningful if it is relevant and makes sense to both patients and clinicians, (2) actionable if clinicians or patients – at least in principle – are able to take appropriate action to deal with it, and (3) feasible if it is easy and convenient to do so within the organisational and social context. We conclude with a call for a more participatory and iterative approach to the design of patient-centred e-health services.
- Journal ArticleThe Evolution of Power and Standard Wikidata Editors: Comparing Editing Behavior over Time to Predict Lifespan and Volume of Edits(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 28, No. 5, 43709) Sarasua, Cristina; Checco, Alessandro; Demartini, Gianluca; Difallah, Djellel; Feldman, Michael; Pintscher, LydiaKnowledge bases are becoming a key asset leveraged for various types of applications on the Web, from search engines presenting ‘entity cards’ as the result of a query, to the use of structured data of knowledge bases to empower virtual personal assistants. Wikidata is an open general-interest knowledge base that is collaboratively developed and maintained by a community of thousands of volunteers. One of the major challenges faced in such a crowdsourcing project is to attain a high level of editor engagement. In order to intervene and encourage editors to be more committed to editing Wikidata, it is important to be able to predict at an early stage, whether an editor will or not become an engaged editor. In this paper, we investigate this problem and study the evolution that editors with different levels of engagement exhibit in their editing behaviour over time. We measure an editor’s engagement in terms of (i) the volume of edits provided by the editor and (ii) their lifespan (i.e. the length of time for which an editor is present at Wikidata). The large-scale longitudinal data analysis that we perform covers Wikidata edits over almost 4 years. We monitor evolution in a session-by-session- and monthly-basis, observing the way the participation, the volume and the diversity of edits done by Wikidata editors change. Using the findings in our exploratory analysis, we define and implement prediction models that use the multiple evolution indicators.
- Journal ArticleRating Working Conditions on Digital Labor Platforms(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 28, No. 5, 2019) Harmon, Ellie; Silberman, M. SixThe relations between technology, work organization, worker power, workers’ rights, and workers’ experience of work have long been central concerns of CSCW. European CSCW research, especially, has a tradition of close collaboration with workers and trade unionists in which researchers aim to develop technologies and work processes that increase workplace democracy. This paper contributes a practitioner perspective on this theme in a new context: the (sometimes global) labor markets enabled by digital labor platforms. Specifically, the paper describes a method for rating working conditions on digital labor platforms (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk, Uber) developed within a trade union setting. Preliminary results have been made public on a website that is referred to by workers, platform operators, journalists, researchers, and policy makers. This paper describes this technical project in the context of broader cross-sectoral efforts to safeguard worker rights and build worker power in digital labor platforms. Not a traditional research paper, this article instead takes the form of a case study documenting the process of incorporating a human-centered computing perspective into contemporary trade union activities and communicating a practitioner’s perspective on how CSCW research and computational artifacts can come to matter outside of the academy. The paper shows how practical applications can benefit from the work of CSCW researchers, while illustrating some practical constraints of the trade union context. The paper also offers some practical contributions for researchers studying digital platform workers’ experiences and rights: the artifacts and processes developed in the course of the work.
- Journal ArticleExamining Community Dynamics of Civic Crowdfunding Participation(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 28, No. 5, 43709) Mayer, MartinOver the past decade, crowdfunding has emerged as a legitimate, albeit niche, resource for public service delivery. Predicated on utilizing the resources of the crowd to address public issues, civic crowdfunding has the potential to offer citizens a greater role in service delivery and community development. This study investigates community dynamics and their potential impact on project success in jurisdictions proposing civic crowdfunding proposals. The results highlight the dynamics and characteristics of communities where project proposals are likely to find funding success. The results further highlight several potential opportunities for future research to better understand how and why these projects truly work.
- Journal ArticleCrowd Anatomy Beyond the Good and Bad: Behavioral Traces for Crowd Worker Modeling and Pre-selection(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 28, No. 5, 43709) Gadiraju, Ujwal; Demartini, Gianluca; Kawase, Ricardo; Dietze, StefanThe suitability of crowdsourcing to solve a variety of problems has been investigated widely. Yet, there is still a lack of understanding about the distinct behavior and performance of workers within microtasks. In this paper, we first introduce a fine-grained data-driven worker typology based on different dimensions and derived from behavioral traces of workers. Next, we propose and evaluate novel models of crowd worker behavior and show the benefits of behavior-based worker pre-selection using machine learning models. We also study the effect of task complexity on worker behavior. Finally, we evaluate our novel typology-based worker pre-selection method in image transcription and information finding tasks involving crowd workers completing 1,800 HITs. Our proposed method for worker pre-selection leads to a higher quality of results when compared to the standard practice of using qualification or pre-screening tests. For image transcription tasks our method resulted in an accuracy increase of nearly 7% over the baseline and of almost 10% in information finding tasks, without a significant difference in task completion time. Our findings have important implications for crowdsourcing systems where a worker’s behavioral type is unknown prior to participation in a task. We highlight the potential of leveraging worker types to identify and aid those workers who require further training to improve their performance. Having proposed a powerful automated mechanism to detect worker types, we reflect on promoting fairness, trust and transparency in microtask crowdsourcing platforms.