COOP 2014: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems

This volume presents the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (COOP 2014). The conference is a venue for multidisciplinary research contributing to the design, assessment and analysis of cooperative systems and their integration in organizations, public venues, and everyday life. COOP emerged from the European tradition of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Cognitive Ergonomics as practiced in France.

These proceedings are a collection of 28 papers reflecting the variety of research activities in the field, as well as an increasing interest in investigating the use and design of ICT in all aspects of everyday life and society, and not merely in the workplace. The papers represent a variety of research topics, from healthcare to sustainable mobility to disaster response, in settings from all over the world. For the first time, the proceedings include papers presented in an Early-Career Researchers Track which was organized in order to give young researchers the opportunity to discuss their work with an international community.

This collection of papers provides a picture of new developments and classic topics of research around cooperative systems, based on the principle that a deep knowledge of cooperative practices is a key to understanding technology impacts and producing quality designs. The articles presented will appeal to researchers and practitioners alike, as they combine an understanding of the nature of work with the possibilities offered by novel digital technologies.

27-30 May 2014, Nice (France)

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  • Text Document
    User and Group Behavior in Computer Support for Collaborative Reflection in Practice: An Explorative Data Analysis
    (COOP 2014 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 2014) Prilla, Michael
    Although reflection in groups has been shown to be beneficial for many workplaces, there are little insights on how such collaborative reflection can be supported and how users apply the support in practice. This paper aims to diminish this lack by analyzing usage figures and qualitative information from four cases of using a tool supporting collaborative reflection. From the analysis, it derives means to describe individual user and group behavior as well as implications for the design and application of support for collaborative reflection in practice.
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    From Crowdsourced Mapping to Community Mapping: The Post-Earthquake Work of OpenStreetMap Haiti
    (COOP 2014 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 2014) Soden, Robert; Palen, Leysia
    The earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 catalyzed a nascent set of efforts in then-emergent “volunteer technology communities.” Among these was the response from OpenStreetMap, a volunteer-driven project that makes geospatial data free and openly available. Following the earthquake, remotely located volunteers rapidly mapped the affected areas to support the aid effort in a remarkable display of crowdsourced work. However, some within that effort believed that the impact and import of open and collaborative mapping techniques could provide much richer value to humanitarian aid work and the long-term development needs of the country. They launched an ambitious project that trialed methods for how to create sustainable and locally-owned communitymapping ecosystems in at-risk regions of the world. This paper describes how an organization that emerged out of the response—the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team—formalized their practices in relation to many different stakeholder needs with the aim for setting a model for how the potential of participatory, community mapping could be realized in Haiti and beyond.
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    Lessons Learnt Working with Performance Data in Call Centres
    (COOP 2014 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 2014) Colombino, Tommaso; Hanrahan, Benjamin; Castellani, Stefania
    This paper details the treatment of performance data in outsourced call centre operations, as encountered by a team of researchers throughout the course of a project. This project aimed at improving support for performance and motivation management in an outsourced customer care contact centre for a large telecommunications company. In particular, we focus on how the practices of capturing, aggregating, and presenting data reflect the operation's overall concern with "reporting upstream" and accountability. As well as, how the technological and organizational infrastructure of the call centre is shaped accordingly. We then discuss some emergent consequences of this organization of data management, which in particular take the form of some tensions between the emergent needs for data at certain levels of granularity and aggregation within the actual operations of the call centre, and its relative accuracy and availability.
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    Ethnography in parallel
    (COOP 2014 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 2014) Gajera, Rinku; O’Neill, Jacki
    Ethnography has been introduced into technology design lifecycles to help sensitise new technologies to the work practices of their intended users. This paper reports on how ethnography was used in parallel to technology prototyping in the design of a workflow system to improve accuracy and efficiency in banking in India. Unlike previously largely positive reports of how ethnography helps to shape design, the case study presented here highlights the difficulty of conducting ethnography in parallel to prototype development. The tight contingencies of the prototyping cycle meant that only some of the ethnographic findings were incorporated into the design – those that fitted easily with the envisaged prototype. However, the findings from the ethnography suggested more fundamental changes were required. In this case, there was no way to incorporate such changes. We discuss the impact of this on the solution and lessons drawn for future interventions.
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    Observing the Work Practices of an Interprofessional Home Care Team - Supporting a Dynamic Approach for Quality Home Care Delivery
    (COOP 2014 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 2014) Amsha, Khuloud Abou; Lewkowicz, Myriam
    We are reporting an observational study conducted as part of a larger French research project called PiCADOi. The study explores collaborative activities in work practices of inter-professional teams aiming to deliver quality home care. The findings show the use of a variety of dynamic coordination mechanisms depending on patients’ conditions. We suggest that future system design process consider the flexibility and the dynamicity of team-based care to support quality home care.
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    Orality, Gender & Social Audio in Rural Africa
    (COOP 2014 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 2014) Bidwell, Nicola J; Reitmaier, Thomas; Jampo, Kululwa
    We claim that digital platforms designed for people in low-income, low-literacy rural communities to share locally relevant, voice-based content did not widen dissemination because they were incompatible with the nuances of cooperation. We base this on a long-term study of interactions with prototypes to record, store and share voice files via a portable, communally owned display in South Africa. We discuss how men and women used, appropriated and interacted with the prototypes, and how the prototypes and use contexts supported different genres of orality and nonverbal elements of co-present interactions. Rhythm and mimicry of nonverbal elements participated in cooperation and, we argue, that engaging with such qualities enriches creativity in designing media sharing systems.
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    Collaborative Work and Its Relationship to Technologically-mediated Nomadicity
    (COOP 2014 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 2014) Pinatti de Carvalho, Aparecido Fabiano
    This paper explores the relationship between technologically-mediated nomadicity (Tm-N) and issues of computer supported collaborative work. It presents findings from a four-year research project, which set out to investigate issues of Tm-N in academic settings. The findings herein presented support the argument that Tm-N can be seen as a dynamic and emergent process, which unfolds through the enactment of an ecology of practices and permeates both the work and nonwork dimension of the lives of those whose jobs allow or demand some flexibility as to when and where work assignments should be carried out. The main contributions of the paper are: (i) a holistic and in-depth frame to understanding technologically- mediated nomadicity, which provides a more fine-grained and nuanced account of assorted aspects of the notion, and (ii) an analysis on how collaborative activities and computer-mediated remote interactions are related to the spectrum of motivational forces that people draw on to engage in nomadicity.
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    Bug Reproduction: A Collaborative Practice within Software Maintenance Activities
    (COOP 2014 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 2014) Vyas, Dhaval; Fritz, Thomas; Shepherd, David
    Software development settings provide a great opportunity for CSCW researchers to study collaborative work. In this paper, we explore a specific work practice called bug reproduction that is a part of the software bug-fixing process. Bug reproduction is a highly collaborative process by which software developers attempt to locally replicate the ‘environment’ within which a bug was originally encountered. Customers, who encounter bugs in their everyday use of systems, play an important role in bug reproduction as they provide useful information to developers, in the form of steps for reproduction, software screenshots, trace logs, and other ways to describe a problem. Bug reproduction, however, poses major hurdles in software maintenance as it is often challenging to replicate the contextual aspects that are at play at the customers’ end. To study the bug reproduction process from a human-centered perspective, we carried out an ethnographic study at a multinational engineering company. Using semi-structured interviews, a questionnaire and half-a-day observation of sixteen software developers working on different software maintenance projects, we studied bug reproduction. In this paper, we present a holistic view of bug reproduction practices from a real-world setting and discuss implications for designing tools to address the challenges developers face during bug reproduction.
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    Suffering Beyond Negotiation: Towards a Biographic Perspective on Cooperative Design for Therapy
    (COOP 2014 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 2014) Bertelsen, Olav W.
    In this paper we argue that design in therapeutic domains (in a broad sense) depends on an understanding of the background for the engagement of the various users involved. It is specifically argued that an understanding of the life transforming process, or trajectory as opposed to design process and rational process of therapy has to be understood and that a possible cornerstone in such an understanding is a biographic concept inspired by Strauss’ concepts of suffering. “Suffering” is discussed as a frame for enabling a subjective perspective to have a voice in design. That is to put a perspective center stage that is not based in the negotiation between rationalities. The paper draws examples from design based research projects over the last 5 years.
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    "Through the glassy box": supporting appropriation in user communities.
    (COOP 2014 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 2014) Cabitza, Federico; Simone, Carla
    Communities present considerable challenges for the design and application of supportive information technology (IT), especially in loosely- integrated and informal contexts, as it is often the case of Communities of Practice (CoP). An approach that actively supports user communities in the process of IT appropriation can help alleviate the impossibility of their members to rely on continuous professional support, and even enable complex forms of cooperative tailoring of their artifacts. The paper discusses the property of the accountability of IT applications as one of the basic enabling conditions for the appropriation of the technologies by their end-users, and for its most mature and sustainable form, that is End-User Development (EUD). We illustrate a framework, called Logic of Bricolage (LOB), proposed to both end-users and interested designers to describe (and make accountable) their EUD environments and systems, and facilitate both local appropriation and the sharing of experiences of IT adoption in CoPs.