Working together

1. Working together IMD09120: Collaborative Media Brian Davison 2011/12

2. Working together • Synchronous co-located work • Loose/tight coupling • Communities of Practice • Awareness

3. Study of synchronous co-located work • Observed the work of people in nine corporate sites • All normally share office space (a ‘war-room’ / ‘project-room’) • Posed the question - ‘what did these teams have that distant teams do not?’ (Olson & Olson, 2000)

4. Distance matters Co-located group divided into two subgroups: one working at the whiteboard, the other at a console. The two groups merged to solve a particularly difficult problem together

5. 10 minutes • Identify 3 or more aspects of co-presence that would be absent or attenuated if you had to rely on media • How could the use of media help? • Work in groups of 2-4.

6. Key characteristics of collocated synchronous work Olson & Olson, 2000

7. Four central concepts • Coupling (dependencies) of group work • Common ground • Collaboration readiness—the motivation for coworkers to collaborate • Collaboration technology readiness—the current level of groupware assimilated by the team

8. Loosely-coupled work • Few dependencies between tasks • More routine • Can be captured as a process and implements as workflow • Business processes • e-Commerce • Portals • Specialist applications

9. Tightly-coupled work • Interdependent tasks • eg. Collaborative design • Frequent, complex communication between group members • Short feedback loops • Multiple streams of information

10. Social loafing • People under-exert themselves in groups • Social loafing occurs more often • Where individual output difficult to attribute • And/or the group is less meaningful or cohesive • Social compensation: others may work harder if the group is important to them • ‘Production blocking’ may also be a factor • Ringelmann, 1913 • Karau and Williams, 1993

11. Communities of Practice (CoP) • Focused on a domain of knowledge • Accumulate expertise in this domain over time • Develop shared practice by interacting around problems, solutions, and insights, and building a common store of knowledge. • Three components: Specific language, category of problem, value system Domain expertise / shared competence. Mutual interest and support Shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems

12. Time and Space (Wenger, 2001) • Presence and visibility • A community needs to have a presence in the lives of its members and make itself visible to them. • Rhythm • Communities live in time and they have rhythms of events and rituals that reaffirm their bonds and value.

13. Presence and visibility

14. Rhythm

15. CoP support

16. Constraints on grounding Clarke and Brennan, 1991

17. Short break

18. Awareness • Difficult to define – the unconscious absorption of information • Schmidt (2002) proposes 4 types of awareness … • Social awareness • Action awareness • Workspace awareness • Situation awareness

19. Workplace studies • Reuters - study by Heath & Luff (2000) • Piper Alpha disaster recreation • London underground - study by Heath & Luff (1992)

20. Ethnography • Ethnographic methods are a research approach that looks at: • people in their cultural setting • their deeds as well as their words • the implicit as well as the explicit • the way in which they interact with one another and with their social and cultural environment • what is not said as much as what is said • their language, and the symbols, rituals and shared meanings that populate their world, with the object of producing a narrative account of that particular culture, against a theoretical backdrop • Emerald How to... Guide: How to use ethnographic methods and participant observation

21. Reuters (I) • The setting is Reuters which provides a news service to organisations (newspapers, TV and commerce - dealers and traders) • Reuters’ desks receives news stories from across the world • Desks are topic specific and subdivided • The Financial News Section desk is divided into 4 desks • money & capital, equities, oil minerals & commodities • Journalists are expected to identify news of interests and tailor it to the specific needs of their clients

22. Reuters (II) • The technology • Workstations with small (14”) monitors with the consequence that others were unable to read the displayed text • At peak time 4-5 messages were received every minute • Desk staff highly pressured

23. Reuters (III) • Heath and Luff describe the behaviour of ‘Peter’ Things are quiet in the newsroom. Peter is working on a story on a fall in Israeli interest rates and begins to make a joke about it in a pronounced Jewish accent to the room as a whole. Peter: Bank of Israel interest rate drops. Peter: Down, down, down Peter: Didn’t it do this last week. He continues working and then 12 seconds later, Alex who is 6 feet away turns to Peter and then back again. Peter then utters “er”, pauses and then, not as a joke but as a précis:

24. Reuters (IV) Peter: er… Peter: Bank of Israel er. Cuts its er daily the rate on its daily money tender to commercial banks Alex: Yeah. Got that now. Thanks Peter. Peter: Okay • Note • The text-to-voice transformation as a mediating mechanism • The level of detail in ethnographic studies

25. Awareness as shared mental models • The term mental model refers to internalised representations of a device, idea or situation • Shared mental models: knowledge in common • The key idea is to isolate task-relevant knowledge shared by all team members-knowledge about task relevant objects, knowledge of how to carry out domain procedures, knowledge about domain goals and constraints. Mohammed and Dumville (2001) • Carroll et al. (2006) extend the idea to include activities • Example using firefighters

26. The four facets of activity awareness Carroll et al. (2006)

27. Implications Carroll et al. (2006)

28. Simple awareness mechanisms • ‘Do not disturb’ • An alarm clock • The out of office assistant in Outlook • The ring / vibration of a phone • The use of alerts on the flight deck Running applications New mail alert

29. Portholes I • First study reported by Dourish and Bly (CHI 1992) • Several studies & implementations since • An awareness mechanism for distributed workgroups • Original studies conducted at Rank Xerox research labs in the UK & USA • Experimental study of awareness using video technology • Used a video snapshot rather than continuous video-feed (refreshed every 10 minutes) - to minimise bandwidth requirements • In addition to video - email, audio & status information was available

30. Portholes structure

31. Portholes screenshot I

32. Portholes screenshot II

33. Anecdotes • A participant at PARC was spending many late nights working in his office; his presence was not only noted by EuroPARC participants but also led them to be quite aware of his dissertation progress • Another late night worker at PARC was pleased to tell his local colleagues that he had watched the sun rise in England • I remember seeing [a colleague] in his office and going down to ask him something - checking for [that colleague] over the system is a common event • I also liked [a colleague’s] message when he sang happy birthday to himself …

34. User reaction • The sense of whether people were around and seeing my friends; knowing who’s around; feeling some connection to folks at the remote site, sharing a community with them • Awareness is ubiquitous in CSCW • All successful CSCW application embody an awareness mechanism • All successful cooperative working situations embody an awareness mechanism

35. Example application: AT&T Connect