The reconstruction and interpretation of work practices--with or without computers--is based on the desire to understand human activities and group communications. Compared to the American quantitative statistics-oriented approach, European computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) research heavily (if not exclusively) employs multidisciplinary ethnographic and workplace studies, in order to examine cooperation “in the wild.”
This research pattern is present in almost all of the 23 papers, together with a strong sociological and anthropological grounding in the European research strand. Findings are often based on a single study, and conclusions typically either relate the (somewhat isolated) discoveries to prior research or plainly generalize them. With the exception of a single paper, business process management (BPM) and workflow automation are entirely missing, as is Enterprise 2.0, even though Web 2.0 technology is employed in several of the studies. The content is rendered almost inaccessible due to the lack of a keyword index.
This volume is directed strongly toward the active researcher within this particular paradigm. Moreover, the fourteenth paper actively questions the viability of the paradigm itself. Based on an introspective and historical review of why the CSCW field is in its current fragmented state, Schmidt maintains that CSCW is currently unable to systematically and constructively contribute to the development of new technology. Practitioners with information needs in one of the domains covered by the conference can turn to a specific contribution, but they should expect nothing more than material at the level of a typical case study, albeit dressed up in academic language.
The conference covers e-health (five papers), design practices (four papers), software development (four papers), and gaming (two papers); the rest of the papers do not fit neatly into a specific category. A short and fairly subjective characterization of all of the contributions follows.
It is often thought that Web 2.0 tears down boundaries between citizens and government. The first paper argues for a differentiated view that employs the so-called (highly viable) boundary-objects approach--“objects and information that cross boundaries between communities.” Additionally, an individual’s interaction with Web 2.0 applications does not happen in a solipsistic manner, but within a social context. Therefore, the construct of a tribe--a group organized by local and common experiences, ethics, and customs, such as parents applying for parental leave--provides better explanatory power. The second paper also uses boundary objects to re-tell, literally and highly theoretically, the details of a somewhat ill-founded international software development project.
The third paper demonstrates the design and evaluation of an electronic paper-and-pen prototype that supports the information flow of nurses for electronic health records. The final evaluation yields some improvement potential. The fourth paper features an e-diary prototype that connects pregnant women with diabetes and their healthcare providers. The pilot study and evaluation reveals how new technology may change the traditionally very asymmetric power structure of the health domain. The fifth paper describes a prototype tool and its evaluation for clinical users navigating and manipulating documents associated with activities in formalized clinical pathways. The use of social networking applications, including mobile telephony, by a young adult with cancer is at the center of the sixth paper. However, the in-depth study (in an interpretative approach) remains inconclusive; usage may vary and depends on almost every conceivable parameter, including time, state of one’s illness, treatment, and context.
The seventh paper analyzes the relation between trust and control in a small software company’s supposedly failed offshoring project. It claims that social capital seemed to hinder conflict resolution mechanisms of the two partners, leading to the eventual dissolution of the partnership (albeit after six productive years). However, the re-telling of the story and the interpretation in the framework of “articulation work” do not support this conclusion; social capital remained high, but the shared profit motive and a synchronized strategy simply eroded over time.
The eighth paper suggests using return on contribution (ROC)--the ratio of information producers (or resource originators if you think of other artifacts such as videos) to information consumers--as a metric for measuring the return on investment (ROI) of enterprise social software.
I missed specific links to computer-mediated work in the ninth paper, an ethno-methodological approach toward understanding collaborative practices in industrial design. This also holds true for the tenth paper, another ethno-methodological ethnography of designers. The paper also promises (but fails) to thoroughly explain creativity.
In the eleventh paper, a psychological and ergonomic study of the use of annotations to three-dimensional (3D) models during the design of a bicycle trailer yields an interesting statistic: contrary to the results of prior studies, 90 percent of the annotations were graphical, not textual. The next paper deals with the problem of merging unified modeling language (UML) models that have been developed concurrently. It describes the prototypical extension of a version control system by incorporating a collaborative conflict resolver. The thirteenth paper explores how the refactoring of software code affects communication within the developer community--core developers send significantly more email messages during refactoring than during normal development work.
The fifteenth paper discusses shared metagenomic research databases as a boundary negotiation artifact, and the sixteenth paper presents the development of a meeting support system for creating and maintaining meeting agendas within an ethnographic study of the meeting culture at an automotive supplier. The authors reframe well-known (and fairly trivial) factors for efficient meetings.
The seventeenth paper provides an in-depth analysis of multimodal communication between a medical doctor and deaf people, using a shared tabletop display (including automatic text-to-speech conversion). The evaluation is quite promising, but some tradeoffs remain. The eighteenth paper features a five-month field trial of the usage patterns that arise with an application that displays personal status messages--such as “absent” and “working”--to the public. In some cases, richer status messages--for example, “busy working on an NSF grant”--created entirely new experiences for the users.
While examining object-focused collaboration in Second Life, the nineteenth paper reveals that old and well-known problems still prevail in current software applications, and identifies some new modes that might help, such as a shared cursor. Interestingly, players actively rejected some of the suggested improvements, finding them useless. The twentieth paper analyzes character sharing in World of Warcraft--a forbidden practice--based on a Web-based survey; it determines the extent (over 50 percent), motivation, and usage patterns.
The twenty-first paper simply describes work practices observed in an oil and gas plant. The twenty-second paper lists challenges that arise in the automotive industry when different companies try to build a (distributed) product model. However, apart from relating the difficulties to theoretical constructs, no solutions or strategies are presented. The last paper identifies the information curator’s new role in file-sharing applications: someone who prepares and describes assemblies of materials for known audiences.
