AcaWiki - User contributions [en]

Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of Participation in a Collaborative Online Encyclopedia

2017-11-28T08:29:48Z

Groceryheist: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of Participation in a Collaborative Online Encyclopedia |authors=Susan L. Bryant, Andrea Forte, Amy Bruckman |url=http://d..."

{{Summary
|title=Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of Participation in a Collaborative Online Encyclopedia
|authors=Susan L. Bryant, Andrea Forte, Amy Bruckman
|url=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1099203.1099205
|tags=Activity Theory, community, legitimate peripheral participation, qualitative, wikipedia
|summary=This early qualitative article on Wikipedia applies activity theory and legitimate peripheral participation theory to study how the Wikipedia community changes "as newcomers enter and become established" in the community.

This article was written during the period of intense excitement about Wikipedia. The literature review section Wikipedia summarizes a handful of research projects that compare Wikipedia to traditional encyclopedias and everything 2 and are mainly interested in evaluating the quality of Wikipedia content and getting a handle on how Wikipedia works. Researchers had noticed that cooperation and conflict, vandalism repair, and social norms are all important parts of how the Wikipedia community worked.

Legitimate peripheral participation is a theory that describes "how newcomers become members of communities of practice." The LPP model is essentially that newcomers start out making minor productive tasks and gradually move on to more central tasks. This is commonly observed in settings where people learn trades.

A community of practice a broad category that includes jobs, professions, and organizations but also extends to other social contexts like the home where practices are loosely defined. Wenger identified three characteristics of communities of practice (CoP):

# Community members are mutually engaged
# They actively negotiate the nature of the enterprise
# They have collected a repertoire of shared, negotiable resources

Bryant, Forte, and Bruckman say that Wikipedia clearly meets the criteria to be considered a community of practice. However different types of social organization might constrain how newcomers to the group can learn or participate. Some CoP like Alcoholics Anonymous have highly formalized practices around newcomer participation, and others might restrict the types of information that newcomers have access to that restricts their ability to become full participants. The object of this study is to find out how "social organization in Wikipedia regulate(s) the forms of participation that are available to newcomers.

They use Activity Theory, a framework for thinking about technology use to organize their data and their thinking. Activity theory is essentially a densely connected conceptual network with 6 concepts:

# Object (of the activity)
# Subject (the people doing the activity)
# Community (the social context)
# Division of Labor
# Tools (including concepts)
# Rules (regulation of the system)

Related to activity theory is another idea of Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development (ZPD). The ZPD is the set of activities that a person can perform but only with some support like a form of instruction.

The research method was telephone and email interviews with active Wikipedians recruited by leaving messages on their user talk pages and the interpretation of these interviews through the lens of activity theory.

They found that beginning editors:

# Came to Wikipedia to find information
# Began editing to fix weaknesses in topics they cared about
# Were cautious about shaking things up.

Expert editors on the other hand:

# Care about contributing to the greater good of Wikipedia
# Some do it for fun
# Some feel responsibility for the quality of their contributions and feel ownership
# Use watch lists to "become caretakers of large sections of Wikipedia"

The ease with which the "edit this page" button works made it really easy for people to start making small and casual contributions. As new editors become Wikipedians they become acquainted with and use more of the tools Wikipedia offers like page histories, watch lists, and talk pages.

Novices are not really aware of the community. They see Wikipedia as a ''collection of articles'', not as a ''collection of people''. A big part of moving from the periphery is to become aware of the community, the roles, and the rules that are important to the functioning of Wikipedia as an organization. However, engaging in peripheral activities brought newcomers into contact with experienced Wikipedians who would sometimes show them the ropes.

On the other hand Wikipedians often develop userpages where they present their Wikipedian identity which includes links to articles they have worked on or are interested in working on. They also used user talk pages to communicate with one another. They value having articles they worked on recognized and built upon. Recognition happens on user talk pages, when others work on the same article, and through featured article status. Experienced editors assume more advanced roles with special responsibilities like administrator or by serving on the arbitration committee. Others focus on "meta" tasks like monitoring, mediating disputes, and developing policy.

In conclusion they emphasize how Wikipedia seems opaque to outsiders and to new contributors. As new contributors move to the center they learn about the workings of this new form of collaborative activity.
|relevance=This early and influential qualitative paper on Wikipedia brought the concept of legitimate peripheral participation to Wikpedia and Open Collaboration research.
|journal=Proceedings of the 2005 International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work
|pub_date=2005
|doi=10.1145/1099203.1099205
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Cooperation and Quality in Wikipedia

2017-11-28T05:29:16Z

Groceryheist: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Cooperation and Quality in Wikipedia |authors=Dennis Wilkinson, Bernardo Huberman |url=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1296951.1296968 |tags=collaborative writing,..."

{{Summary
|title=Cooperation and Quality in Wikipedia
|authors=Dennis Wilkinson, Bernardo Huberman
|url=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1296951.1296968
|tags=collaborative writing, cooperation, groupware, Wikipedia, quantitative, complex systems
|summary=This article asks 'how can we measure the quality of a Wikipedia article?' and 'How are quality articles on Wikipedia produced.' Wikipedia is awesome! It is allowing collaboration at a scale never before seen. However, measuring the quality of articles remains an open problem. People have used the number of edits, the number of unique editors, or other measures as stand-ins for quality, but none of them seem quite right.

When it comes to producing quality articles. Some people, including influential Wikipedians seem to think that quality articles are often the product of a small number of dedicated editors. However in this study they find instead that articles with a larger number of distinct editors, and a large number of edits are the highest quality. Evidence of collaboration is more important than the number of edits per editor. They also use a stochastic process model (using a differential equation) in which edits beget edits to explain the process by which articles accrue edits. Instead of a power-law, they find that edits to articles (of a given age) follow a log-normal distribution. The authors claim that the fact that the distribution is lognormal not power law "means that a small but significant population of articles experience a disproportionately high number of edits and editors, while the vast majority of articles undergo far less activity."

They used featured articles as a benchmark for quality. They used statistical controls for topic popularity (google pagerank), edit and editor counts normalized by article age, they also removed edits from the two weeks before the article was featured. This let them make some interesting and impressive plots that showed that the featured articles had more edits and editors than other articles.

Next they use similar methods to compare the number of talk page edits between featured articles and other articles. This gives them an approximate measure of the amount of cooperation in the article work.

They also showed that the featured articles tended to have a much higher fraction of "quick-turnaround" edits compared to non-featured articles. This seems to be further evidence that collaboration is important for making high quality articles.

One nice thing about this paper is that it relies on simple measures and straightforward transformations of the data in order to produce compelling plots that make each of its points. Other studies might have used multiple regression instead.

In conclusion they reiterate that Wikipedia enables coordination and organization that facilitate cooperative work on articles. Their analysis points not to a small number of dedicated editors developing articles alone, but instead to the efforts of a larger numbers of cooperating editors.
|relevance=This early quantitative analysis of Wikipedia challenged the notion that quality Wikipedia articles are largely the produce of the efforts of a small number of dedicated editors. Instead, featured articles have a great number of contributing editors, more edits on talk pages, and more quick-turnaround edits. This paper helped establish the idea that Wikipedia is a truly collaborative project.
|journal=Proceedings of the 2007 International Symposium on Wikis
|pub_date=2007
|doi=10.1145/1296951.1296968
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Membership Size, Communication Activity, and Sustainability: A Resource-Based Model of Online Social Structures

2017-11-28T01:20:32Z

Groceryheist: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Membership Size, Communication Activity, and Sustainability: A Resource-Based Model of Online Social Structures |authors=Brian Butler |url=http://pubsonline.i..."

{{Summary
|title=Membership Size, Communication Activity, and Sustainability: A Resource-Based Model of Online Social Structures
|authors=Brian Butler
|url=http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/isre.12.4.346.9703
|tags=Online Communities; Electronic Groups; Membership; Dynamics; Social Resources
|summary=The article opens with an introduction to the emerging importance of digital communication networks for social interaction. These networks promise to "support significant social activity," but the availability of communication systems is not sufficient for social activity. Social structures are also needed. Electronic infrastructure does not automatically provide social structures. However, computer-mediated-communication systems can "encourage the emergence of sustainable online social structures."

This article draws from theories of social structures to develop a "resource-based model of social structure sustainability." The key idea behind the model is that social structures must confer benefits to members in order to persist. The development of sustainable social structures over communication networks depends on the ability of social structures to transform resources into benefits.

Group size in a key variable in the model. Since larger groups provide more resources, they may be more likely to survive. There is a feedback loop between members and benefits: Members are a key resource. The social activity of members transforms resources into benefits, but providing benefits is essential for attracting and retaining members. Membership also reflects the "audience resources" that provide benefits like visibility.

On the other hand, group size can also increase the cost of transforming resources into benefits. These derive from logistical and communication problems and from social loafing and free-riding.

Butler sees the advantages and disadvantages as very complex and nonlinear, affecting member attraction and retention in different ways, and leading to dynamics that are difficult to predict. In the end, empirical evidence from group studies suggests that sustainable social structures tend to be small. Larger groups often use internal structures like teams, internal organizations, and roles to enable larger sustainable social structures.

One of the big promises of computer mediated communication for organizations is the possibility of further enabling large sustainable social structures. Butler enumerates several ways CMC might do this:

# Enable "flatter" organizations with more fluid processes
# Using group support systems that draw together more knowledge and aggregate the efforts of more people
# Buffering and archiving to reduce logistical problems
# Anonymity and pseudo-anonymity reduce psychological effects of sizes

Social structures over digital networks use communication activity to transform resources into value. As with group size a larger amount of communication activity may increase the benefits to members, but may also create problems like increasing the amount of noise users experience. The interaction of communication volume and variation determines the benefits to each individual. The costs associated with communication activity includes the direct costs in time, energy, and attention used in communication. Even audience members who receive communication contribute resources and incure costs. Again as with group size, internal structures and technologies can be used to alter the cost structure of communication activity and enable sustainable structures. These include

# Jargon
# Formal summaries and agendas
# Content filtering
# new text-based communication technologies

The resource-based model has three components:

# Resource availability (e.g. membership size)
# Benefit Creation Process (e.g. communication activity)
# Member attraction/retention (membership growth and loss, sustainability).

The causal structure of model is a cycle that goes from ''member attraction/retention'' to ''resource availability'', from ''resource availability'' to ''member attraction/retention'' and to ''benefit creation process'' and from ''benefit creation process'' to ''member attraction/retention''. Instead of treating communication activity or group size as fixed and allowing the other to vary, this model sees both variables as dynamic.

To study how technologically mediated communication might be used to support sustainable social structures by mitigating some of the costs of communication activity and group size, Butler applies the model to analyze a sample of listservs. At the time (2001) these were perhaps the single most used medium for online communities. He used a stratified sample of 1066 listservs to make sure that his sample had a diversity of topics. He removed groups that had identifiable internal structures like moderators, newsletters, or "formal new-member screening." After applying these inclusion criteria, he had a sample of 206 listservs.

The key measures in the study are size (number of active members), communication activity (number of broadcast messages), communication variation (1 - the concentration of messages across threads), and membership gain and loss. The analysis is longitudinal with measures constructed for each month.

He used time-series log-linear, random-effect, regression models. He fit three models and used F-tests to find support for the structure of the model. According to the models, group size is positively related to communication activity, and to both member gain and member loss. Communication activity is positively related to member gain and member loss, while communication variation is only positively related to member loss. To check that the relationship between group size and member loss was not just because big groups have more to lose, he also fit a model predicting proportional member loss instead of the number of members lost and the results held up. This also lets him estimate how much of membership gain and membership loss is attributable to group size and how much is attributable to communication variance using a t-test between the two models. He estimates that about 23% of member attraction and 44% of membership loss are due to group size.

In discussion, Butler emphasizes that the central contribution of this framework and analysis is to treat resources like membership and the communication activity process not as "outcomes predicted by a set of factors" but as "a set of opposing forces that serve to simultaneously promote and hinder the processes of change. In particular he calls out critical mass theory for ignoring the role of communication activity and systems. It is important to think about both group size and "the type and volume of communication activity" when it comes to understanding the growth and survival of online communities. He suggests that future work add other aspects to the resource-based framework. For example you might consider the role of internal structures and variation between different sorts of technologies (e.g. whether messages are pushed like email or pulled like www). He doesn't think that CMC is going to fundamentally change the model. Even though it will change some parameters of the model like communication costs, online social structures still have to balance the positive and negative aspects of size and communication activity as do traditional groups.
|relevance=This is an early and very influential model that not only applies extant theories of group communication to study online communication, but actually develops a new and improved model of the survival of social structures inspired by online communities and tested using data from listservs.
|journal=Information Systems Research
|pub_date=2001
|doi=10.1287/isre.12.4.346.9703
|subject=Sociology
}}

Membership Turnover and Collaboration Success in Online Communities: Explaining Rises and Falls from Grace in Wikipedia

2017-11-27T23:01:49Z

Groceryheist: Groceryheist moved page Membershpi Turnover and Collaboration Success in Online Communities: Explaining Rises and Falls from Grace in Wikipedia to [[Membership Turnover and Collaboration Success in Online Communities: Explaining Rises and Falls fro...

{{Summary
|title=Membershpi Turnover and Collaboration Success in Online Communities: Explaining Rises and Falls from Grace in Wikipedia
|authors=Sam Ransbotham, Gerald C. (Jerry) Kane
|url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/23042799
|tags=Online communities, collaboration, longitudinal study, membership turnover, information generation, information retention
|summary=The authors open by describing the promise of open collaboration and social media communities to produce knowledge that might be appropriated by a brand (e.g. Threadless, Starbucks fan communities). However, the vast majority of attempts to build collaboration communities fail. These communities seem to experience high rates of membership turnover and perhaps this the high failure rates. Online communities have high rates of turnover since members are free to come and go as they please.

The predominant view on turnover in organizational science is that turnover has a negative effect on organizational performance because when people leave they take both their knowledge and their experience with the community with them. They can be costly to replace and disrupt the social fabric of the community. A second view is that the people who leave tend to be the least useful and that those who remain will benefit from their leaving. Information systems in organizations might mitigate the negative effects of turnover if the people leaving deposit all their knowledge in the knowledge-base.

On the other hand since social media platforms and wikis often record a history of every contribution and discussions in searchable archives that might serve as repositories of institutional knowledge preserved for future contributors. This might mitigate the loss of institutional knowledge form turnover. There might also be positive benefits of turnover if new members introduce new insights and knowledge. These features of online collaboration communities do not seem strong enough or universal enough to fully eliminate the negative effects of turnover. Instead the authors propose a curvilinear relationship between turnover and effective collaboration in which a moderate amount of turnover is best. Too little turnover and the community becomes rigid. Too much turnover and it becomes aimless and struggles to stay organized.

Kane et al. 2009 seems like a key citation to an earlier work by one of the authors that suggests two stages of collaboration:

# The ''creation stage'' introduces new information
# The ''retention stage'' preserves and refines the information through ongoing collaboration

The article finds evidence in support of this two stage model of collaboration.

They analyze the complete set of featured Wikipedia articles. A key fact about the way feature article status works is that articles may be demoted if their quality decreases like if they become out of date. This allows the authors to operationalize their two-stage model of collaboration. An article is in the creation stage before it has been featured and it is in the retention stage afterwards.

They test two hypotheses about the relationship between turnover and effective collaboration in each of the stages.

# There will be a curvilinear relationship between turnover and knowldge creation.
# There will be a curvilinear relationship between turnover and knowledge retention.

They use econometric methods to test these hypothesis. They use proportional hazards models predicting when an article reaches featured status (H1) and when a featured article is demoted (H2). The independent variable for both hypotheses is the ''average experience'' of editors on the article. This is the inverse of turnover in the team collaborating on the article. They also control for a number of other factors that they can measure that might be related to quality including length, the depth of the organizational structure, the ratio of external references to length, the ratio of internal references (wikilinks) to length, reading complexity, the number of multimedia elements, and the number of edits.

They also fit models using only the control variables. This allowed them to use F-tests to characterize how much turnover contributed to improving the model. They found good support for both hypotheses. The curvilinear effect during the creation stage is stronger than in the retentoin phase and improves the psuedo-R<sup>2</sup> statistic by 30%. During the retention phase the relationship is somewhat weaker, but they argue that the small effect size is still substantively important given the viewership and influence of featured articles. They standardize their independent variable when they plot the effects, this makes it easy to show that the average article is near has nearly the optimal level of turnover during the creation phase, but has less turnover than would be ideal during the retention phase. This suggests that members of the community might be more interested in generating new knowledge than in retaining and refining knowledge already created.

In their discussion they summarize their main theoretical contributions:

# A moderate level of turnover can be best for effective collaboration.
# Don't assume that turnover is bad
# Collaboration has multiple phases like knowledge creation and knowledge retention.

Also provide managerial implications suggesting that communities seek to cultivate a core group of contributions while remaining open to outsiders, and find a way to archive and maintain the knowledge contributions of members that leave.

They list a few empirical limitations of their study design.

# The study may not generalize beyond the Wikipedia setting
# The study may not even generalize to lower quality articles on Wikipedia
# They only looked at the creation stage for articles where the creation stage was successful (i.e. the article became featured).
|relevance=This is a rigorous analysis of turnover in collaborative projects that looks at featured articles on Wikipedia. The study design is pretty clever and clearly demonstrates that effective collaborations have a moderate level of turnover. This contrasts with the popular view that turnover is a bad thing for peer production communities.
|journal=Management Information Systems Quarterly
|pub_date=2011
|doi=10.2307/23042799
|subject=Sociology
}}

Membershpi Turnover and Collaboration Success in Online Communities: Explaining Rises and Falls from Grace in Wikipedia

2017-11-27T23:01:49Z

#REDIRECT [[Membership Turnover and Collaboration Success in Online Communities: Explaining Rises and Falls from Grace in Wikipedia]]

Membership Turnover and Collaboration Success in Online Communities: Explaining Rises and Falls from Grace in Wikipedia

2017-11-27T23:01:06Z

Groceryheist: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Membershpi Turnover and Collaboration Success in Online Communities: Explaining Rises and Falls from Grace in Wikipedia |authors=Sam Ransbotham, Gerald C. (Je..."

AcaWiki talk:Similar projects

2017-11-14T07:41:15Z

Groceryheist: Question about related projects.

== Leads ==

Discussion of https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/12/29/my-new-years-resolution-read-a-research-paper-every-weekday/ at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13278286 has some interesting links including http://outcomereference.com/ [[User:Mike Linksvayer|Mike Linksvayer]] ([[User talk:Mike Linksvayer|talk]]) 19:00, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

== Comparison of Acawiki to Similar projects ==
Hi, I am sort of new to Acawiki. I'm reading for my general exams and uploading a bunch of summaries right now. I found acawiki through [[User:Benjamin_Mako_Hill]]. But it seems like this community might be in potential competition with the others. Does anyone know which of them are relatively active and which others might have content we can merge in?
[[User:Groceryheist|Groceryheist]] ([[User talk:Groceryheist|talk]]) 07:41, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

Information Fortification: An Online Citation Behavior

2017-11-14T07:36:15Z

Groceryheist:

{{Summary
|title=Information Fortification: An Online Citation Behavior
|authors=Andrea Forte, Nazanin Andalibi, Tim Gorichanaz, Meen Chul Kim, Thomas Park, Aaron Halfaker
|url=http://andreaforte.net/ForteInformationFortification.pdf
|tags=Citation, Bibliometrics, Open Collaboration, Wikipedia, Computer Supported Cooperative Work
|summary=This paper that shows that the emic meanings of citation on Wikipedia are different from those of academic citation, because defending the presence and visibility of material on wikipedia is important. The main contribution is the concept of "information fortification" which means the use of citation to defend the presence of material on Wikipedia.

The paper aims to contribute to help us understand what citations mean why why people cite. Alex Csiszar, an Awesome historian of science who told us about how academic publishing, peer review, and citation came to have such stature. An early theory of citation came from Henry Small, who saw them not as merely devices for attribution, but also as referents to the ideas being cited. Latour and Woolgar's understanding of citation in science as a tool for defending knowledge claims and as a currency representing credit that is used to obtain grants and prestige. Citations in this way serve as means for distributing credit among players of the academic game.

However, since the rise of the Internet citation practices have become much more widespread. People cite things on Wikipedia, on Blogs, on Twitter, in online discussions and so on. Bibliometricists and Internet researchers study these citation graphs, but risk making incorrect assumptions if they think these citations mean the same things that academic citations do.

In their article, Forte et al. investigate citation practices on Wikipedia and find that citations have a quite different meaning in this setting.
Using a mixture of several methods including interviews with prolific citers, some simple data analysis of ref citations to compare practices on featured and non-featured articles, and inspection of 35 random articles "to develop an artifact-based understanding of how citations are used in the development of articles." They use humanistic methods in an attempt to construct a monomyth and to defamiliarize themselves with citation to enable the discover of novel meanings.

Unlike what Andrea Forte used to think, citing in Wikipedia isn't much about the marketplace of credibility associated with academic science. Instead it is more militaristic.

There are two kinds of controversy that lead to lots of citation activity.

1. Naturally arising controversy
2. Manufactured controversy (like during the review process)

Things that are widely known don't really need citations. Things that are likely to be challenged do. But like anything can be considered contentious.

Seems like some editors think it's the job of the original editor to fix {{citation needed}}.

Wikipedians preferred fewer, high quality citations.

Wikipedians often reffered to citation as a defensive act. This is citation activity designed to preserve the visibility content on Wikipedia.

Wikipedian's don't cite to signal membership in theoretical camps, appease reviewers, or prove expertise.

Facts may be eroded or incorporated in the academy (these are Latour and Merton's terms for how knowledge becomes taken for granted). But the same facts may still need citation for defense in the broad public that collaborates on WP.
|relevance=This is a forthcoming paper about the meaning of citation on Wikipedia. It makes a novel and interesting theoretical contribution to those interested in Wikipedia in and of itself, and in cultural practices surrounding knowledge production and online discourse. It is also notable for it wide-range of methods relying on interviews, but also including quantitative graphs, and humanistic methods
|journal=ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work 2018
|pub_date=2018
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Information Fortification: An Online Citation Behavior

2017-11-14T07:29:03Z

Groceryheist: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Information Fortification: An Online Citation Behavior |authors=Andrea Forte, Nazanin Andalibi, Tim Gorichanaz, Meen Chul Kim, Thomas Park, Aaron Halfaker |ur..."

Collaborative Activity and Technological Design: Task Coordination in London Underground Control Rooms

2017-11-09T03:09:14Z

Groceryheist:

{{Summary
|title=Collaborative Activity and Technological Design: Task Coordination in London Underground Control Rooms
|authors=Christian Heath, Paul Luff
|url=http://link.springer.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/chapter/10.1007/978-94-011-3506-1_5
|tags=Computer supported cooperative work, ethnography
|summary=While computer supported cooperative was making progress in technology development, Heath and Luff say that little is known about how collaborative technologies get used in actual workplace environments. They cite Galegher and Kraut who attribute the failure of systems to a lack of considering knowledge of social interaction. While studies of "technologically mediated cooperative work environments" have been emerging, they have lacked important implications for technology design. They aim to intervene with a study observing technologically mediated work in a Line Control Room on London Underground with implications for "distributed, intelligent systems ... to support cooperative work and the design process.

=== Methodological considerations ===

In this section they argue that using ethnographic "naturalistic" methods inspired by sociology lets you see the broader interaction between workers, technology, in realistic contexts. Much of work depends on the context that laboratories can't reproduce. They used field audio and video recordings as well as field observation and interviews.

=== The technology in the control room. ===

They focus on the control room for the Bakerloo Line. There are a number of technological elements in the room including a PA system, alarm, and CCTV monitors for viewing platforms. The people on the team sit 2 two a desk and there are two controllers, a DIA (divisional information assistant) and a trainee DIA.

There is a "paper timetable" which is a key artifact that everybody uses to define good service. The controller's main job is to manage gaps between trains on the line so as to keep up with the timetable. Severe problems can be managed by making temporary markings on the time table to signal disrupted service to the team. This kind of communication is essential so that the team can act in concert and not make things worse.

Even though roles are formally quite different in practice the Controller and DIA engage in complex and close collaboration. People in different roles practice "emergent and flexible division of labour" to support one another and "manage difficulties and crises".

=== Surreptitious monitoring and interrelating tasks. ===

The nature of work in the control room depends on amazingly subtle communication between Controller and DIA. They have to rapidly respond to events on the line by calling drivers, station managers, and issuing announcements. They overhear each others calls in order to infer the situation and make their own calls. They are able to simultaneously monitor their collaborator and perform their own tasks. They do all this while leaving one another a lot of elbow room and not directly interacting this is why Heath and Luff call it "surreptitious"

=== Rendering activities visible ===

The workers often perform tasks with implications to their collaborators, in doing so they make their activities visible through subtle non-interactive communication like talking to themselves about the decisions they have to make. This alerts collaborators that they will have to adapt to the change. Heath and Luff discuss modification of the timetable by the controller in particular and how the controller mutters numbers that make visible the thought process behind the reformation. They cite Goffman's participation framework in which their may be a 'primary recipient' of communication (e.g. the driver on the phone.), but communication with that recipient is modified in ways that communicate with those in the 'perceptual range of the event' (the DIA).

=== Overseeing the local environment of events and activities ===

The DIA and controller also monitor the other's activities in order to detect oversights or mistakes and to correct the others behavior. Corrections typically take the form of subtle or nonverbal signals to draw attention that avoid crossing boundaries or violating "territorial rights" of the others roles. For example, they provide an account of a controller on the phone ignoring a crisis on the line while the DIA rapidly glances back and forth between the hard line display and the monitor in attempt to attract attention.

=== Shaping tasks and coordinating activities ===

Work in the control room blurs the line between collaborative and individual. The prior sections showed how the workers collaborate through subtle and nuanced communication while primarily engaged in their own occupational tasks. In this section they discuss how the shared technological media displays in the control room including a hard line display showing the locations of trains and the CCTV system that shows the platforms create a shared information space that helps provide context for collaboration. However Heath and Luff argue that this information is not sufficient for them to make sense out of the others subtle cues. Instead, the context of daily crises and reformations, "natural history of the day" is also required. The subtle cues and interactions between the controller and DIA are needed to constitute the natural history of the day in the minds of the collaborators.

*** The design of tools to support collaborative work In conclusion they outline a number of insights they think this study contributes to design.

* Giving each person in the control room their own display would decrease awareness of the other by undermining the glancing at monitor signal.
* Given the increasing number of people who use the timetable, they think it is important to develop an electronic timetable system that uses electronic pens to fit into the existing workflow but allow changes to the time table to be immediately distributed.
* Subsequently an algorithm might predict the outcomes of timetable changes.

They also have more general insights for CSCW researchers and designers. These are to reconsider the dichotomy between individual and collaborative work, to consider shared resources that afford mutual monitoring and "a seamlessness between public and private activities."

In a more speculative turn, they imagine systems for awareness that move away from dependence on screen displays. They consider DigitalDesk which is a desk with a camera and a projector that allows work on paper documents but provides a resource for monitoring and awareness that could be distributed but also affords co-present, collaborative work.

They also speculate as to what methodological frameworks would be suitable for fieldwork design of technological work, calling the method used here 'structured ethnography.' It is not so clear what makes this different from normal ethnography. Although they don't mention it, they may be anticipating the rise of actor network theory.
|relevance=This was an early and influential paper during the ethnographic turn in studies of computers in work places. At the time, sociology was still at the margins of computer science and information systems. By showing how ethnographic methods could produce deep insights that show how technology is actually used in a setting of intricate coordination, this article helped legitimize ethnographic studies of the workplace in computer supported cooperative work. They also contributed to understanding the importance of awareness in CSCW.
|journal=Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work ECSCW ’91
|pub_date=1991
|doi=10.1007/978-94-011-3506-1_5
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Collaborative Activity and Technological Design: Task Coordination in London Underground Control Rooms

2017-11-09T03:05:18Z

Groceryheist: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Collaborative Activity and Technological Design: Task Coordination in London Underground Control Rooms |authors=Christian Heath, Paul Luff |url=http://link.sp..."

{{Summary
|title=Collaborative Activity and Technological Design: Task Coordination in London Underground Control Rooms
|authors=Christian Heath, Paul Luff
|url=http://link.springer.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/chapter/10.1007/978-94-011-3506-1_5
|tags=Computer supported cooperative work, ethnography
|summary=While computer supported cooperative was making progress in technology development, Heath and Luff say that little is known about how collaborative technologies get used in actual workplace environments. They cite Galegher and Kraut who attribute the failure of systems to a lack of considering knowledge of social interaction. While studies of "technologically mediated cooperative work environments" have been emerging, they have lacked important implications for technology design. They aim to intervene with a study observing technologically mediated work in a Line Control Room on London Underground with implications for "distributed, intelligent systems ... to support cooperative work and the design process.

=== Methodological considerations ===

In this section they argue that using ethnographic "naturalistic" methods inspired by sociology lets you see the broader interaction between workers, technology, in realistic contexts. Much of work depends on the context that laboratories can't reproduce. They used field audio and video recordings as well as field observation and interviews.

=== The technology in the control room. ===

They focus on the control room for the Bakerloo Line. There are a number of technological elements in the room including a PA system, alarm, and CCTV monitors for viewing platforms. The people on the team sit 2 two a desk and there are two controllers, a DIA (divisional information assistant) and a trainee DIA.

There is a "paper timetable" which is a key artifact that everybody uses to define good service. The controller's main job is to manage gaps between trains on the line so as to keep up with the timetable. Severe problems can be managed by making temporary markings on the time table to signal disrupted service to the team. This kind of communication is essential so that the team can act in concert and not make things worse.

Even though roles are formally quite different in practice the Controller and DIA engage in complex and close collaboration. People in different roles practice "emergent and flexible division of labour" to support one another and "manage difficulties and crises".

=== Surreptitious monitoring and interrelating tasks. ===

The nature of work in the control room depends on amazingly subtle communication between Controller and DIA. They have to rapidly respond to events on the line by calling drivers, station managers, and issuing announcements. They overhear each others calls in order to infer the situation and make their own calls. They are able to simultaneously monitor their collaborator and perform their own tasks. They do all this while leaving one another a lot of elbow room and not directly interacting this is why Heath and Luff call it "surreptitious"

=== Rendering activities visible ===

The workers often perform tasks with implications to their collaborators, in doing so they make their activities visible through subtle non-interactive communication like talking to themselves about the decisions they have to make. This alerts collaborators that they will have to adapt to the change. Heath and Luff discuss modification of the timetable by the controller in particular and how the controller mutters numbers that make visible the thought process behind the reformation. They cite Goffman's participation framework in which their may be a 'primary recipient' of communication (e.g. the driver on the phone.), but communication with that recipient is modified in ways that communicate with those in the 'perceptual range of the event' (the DIA).

=== Overseeing the local environment of events and activities ===

The DIA and controller also monitor the other's activities in order to detect oversights or mistakes and to correct the others behavior. Corrections typically take the form of subtle or nonverbal signals to draw attention that avoid crossing boundaries or violating "territorial rights" of the others roles. For example, they provide an account of a controller on the phone ignoring a crisis on the line while the DIA rapidly glances back and forth between the hard line display and the monitor in attempt to attract attention.

=== Shaping tasks and coordinating activities ===

Work in the control room blurs the line between collaborative and individual. The prior sections showed how the workers collaborate through subtle and nuanced communication while primarily engaged in their own occupational tasks. In this section they discuss how the shared technological media displays in the control room including a hard line display showing the locations of trains and the CCTV system that shows the platforms create a shared information space that helps provide context for collaboration. However Heath and Luff argue that this information is not sufficient for them to make sense out of the others subtle cues. Instead, the context of daily crises and reformations, "natural history of the day" is also required. The subtle cues and interactions between the controller and DIA are needed to constitute the natural history of the day in the minds of the collaborators.

3*** The design of tools to support collaborative work In conclusion they outline a number of insights they think this study contributes to design.

* Giving each person in the control room their own display would decrease awareness of the other by undermining the glancing at monitor signal.
* Given the increasing number of people who use the timetable, they think it is important to develop an electronic timetable system that uses electronic pens to fit into the existing workflow but allow changes to the time table to be immediately distributed.
* Subsequently an algorithm might predict the outcomes of timetable changes.

They also have more general insights for CSCW researchers and designers. These are to reconsider the dichotomy between individual and collaborative work, to consider shared resources that afford mutual monitoring and "a seamlessness between public and private activities."

In a more speculative turn, they imagine systems for awareness that move away from dependence on screen displays. They consider DigitalDesk which is a desk with a camera and a projector that allows work on paper documents but provides a resource for monitoring and awareness that could be distributed but also affords co-present, collaborative work.

They also speculate as to what methodological frameworks would be suitable for fieldwork design of technological work, calling the method used here 'structured ethnography.' It is not so clear what makes this different from normal ethnography. Although they don't mention it, they may be anticipating the rise of actor network theory.
}}

Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces

2017-11-09T03:03:36Z

Groceryheist:

{{Summary
|title=Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces
|authors=Paul Dourish, Victor Bellotti
|url=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/143457.143468
|tags=awareness, coordination, computer supported cooperative work, shared feedback, shared workspaces, qualitative, interaction
|summary=Dourish and Bellotti argue that ''awareness'' is a key property for collaborative systems that allow coordination on a shared workspace(e.g. Sharelatex or Google docs). They define awareness as "understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity." By knowing what others are doing we can more easily know what we should be doing. Systems that provide awareness are an alternative to cumbersome and brittle designs that force collaboration into a prescribed process.

They review several collaborative writing systems of the day that often provided limited forms of awareness through "user role restrictions." Some of the systems assigned users to particular roles (e.g. author, reviewer) which correspond with a set of abilities to modify different parts of the shared workspace. Dourish and Bellotti criticize this approach as not having a realistic correspondence to how roles operate socially. Roles are negotiated and renegotiated and can suddenly shift. By making transitioning roles necessary and cumbersome user role restrictions add a lot of overhead.

In contrast, explicit mechanisms for awareness require active work by collaborators to make others aware of what they are doing. Such mechanisms are likely to be under provisioned since they compete for attention and with the task at hand, and add overhead. To make matters worse, the person who benefits most from awareness is recipient not the sender of awareness communication. Therefore explicit provisioning of awareness information is likely to be under provisioned by explicit mechanisms.

As the main empirical contribution of their study, Dourish and Bellotti report a case study of a novel collaborative writing system called ShrEdit which afforded passive communication of editing activities to collaborators, which they term ''shared feedback''. This system seems similar to Google docs or Sharelatex, except that cursor position was not passively communicated, only editing activities. The users in the study were also using voice communication for explicit coordination, but made use of the shared workspace to passively communicate and made many subtle voice communications. Different teams used the shared workspace in innovative ways like for some team members to keep material they didn't want others to modify in separate documents. The users were a big fan of the passive awareness. This case study serves more of an illustration of their point than supporting evidence. The argument seems to stand on its own.

After presenting the case study, they turn to argue that shared feedback is not only import for synchronous collaboration, but also for asynchronous. They continue to point out that synchronous and asynchronous collaboration can actually be a blurry distinction. Semi-synchronous systems support both asynchronous and asynchronous use. Many systems we might think are synchronous can easily be made semi-synchronous if they are not already.

In conclusion, they summarize the three approaches to supporting awareness, explicit roles, explicit communication, and shared feedback. Shared feedback's strength is that it provides awareness information at very low cost, allows users to seek out the information most relevant to them and to concurrently work on the shared object while browsing awareness information.
|relevance=This paper introduced a brilliant conception of awareness as a property that can be designed into technical systems for collaborative work. They show how awareness can be powerful for helping people collaborate better.
|journal=Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work
|pub_date=1992
|doi=10.1145/143457.143468
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces

2017-11-09T02:59:55Z

Groceryheist: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces |authors=Paul Dour |summary=Dourish and Bellotti argue that ''awareness'' is a key property for collaborative..."

{{Summary
|title=Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces
|authors=Paul Dour
|summary=Dourish and Bellotti argue that ''awareness'' is a key property for collaborative systems that allow coordination on a shared workspace(e.g. Sharelatex or Google docs). They define awareness as "understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity." By knowing what others are doing we can more easily know what we should be doing. Systems that provide awareness are an alternative to cumbersome and brittle designs that force collaboration into a prescribed process.

They review several collaborative writing systems of the day that often provided limited forms of awareness through "user role restrictions." Some of the systems assigned users to particular roles (e.g. author, reviewer) which correspond with a set of abilities to modify different parts of the shared workspace. Dourish and Bellotti criticize this approach as not having a realistic correspondence to how roles operate socially. Roles are negotiated and renegotiated and can suddenly shift. By making transitioning roles necessary and cumbersome user role restrictions add a lot of overhead.

In contrast, explicit mechanisms for awareness require active work by collaborators to make others aware of what they are doing. Such mechanisms are likely to be under provisioned since they compete for attention and with the task at hand, and add overhead. To make matters worse, the person who benefits most from awareness is recipient not the sender of awareness communication. Therefore explicit provisioning of awareness information is likely to be under provisioned by explicit mechanisms.

As the main empirical contribution of their study, Dourish and Bellotti report a case study of a novel collaborative writing system called ShrEdit which afforded passive communication of editing activities to collaborators, which they term ''shared feedback''. This system seems similar to Google docs or Sharelatex, except that cursor position was not passively communicated, only editing activities. The users in the study were also using voice communication for explicit coordination, but made use of the shared workspace to passively communicate and made many subtle voice communications. Different teams used the shared workspace in innovative ways like for some team members to keep material they didn't want others to modify in separate documents. The users were a big fan of the passive awareness. This case study serves more of an illustration of their point than supporting evidence. The argument seems to stand on its own.

After presenting the case study, they turn to argue that shared feedback is not only import for synchronous collaboration, but also for asynchronous. They continue to point out that synchronous and asynchronous collaboration can actually be a blurry distinction. Semi-synchronous systems support both asynchronous and asynchronous use. Many systems we might think are synchronous can easily be made semi-synchronous if they are not already.

In conclusion, they summarize the three approaches to supporting awareness, explicit roles, explicit communication, and shared feedback. Shared feedback's strength is that it provides awareness information at very low cost, allows users to seek out the information most relevant to them and to concurrently work on the shared object while browsing awareness information.
}}

The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap Between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility

2017-11-09T02:56:59Z

Groceryheist: Created page with "{{Summary |title=The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap Between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility |authors=Mark Ackerman |url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/S15327..."

{{Summary
|title=The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap Between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility
|authors=Mark Ackerman
|url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/S15327051HCI1523_5t
|tags=essay overview social computing theory
|summary=Ackerman defines the "social-technical gap ... the divide between what we know we must support socially and what we can support technically."

This gap is one of the central problems for HCI.

He builds his argument by reviewing a large and organized set of findings from research in the area of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). First is that people have very nuanced behavior when it comes to social activity in work. He references Goffman's observation that decisions about information sharing are nuanced, complex and require care, yet access controls are typically coarse. He also references Interpretivists like Kling, Star, and Suchman emphasize the challenges of meaning making in heterogeneous, potentially conflicting groups, without shared histories, the use of boundary objects, and the fluidity of roles.

Other key findings are:

* The importance awareness of coworkers or managers in a shared space and how sharing shapes incentives.
* Users negotiated and renegotiated norms, and use back channels
* CSCW systems often require a critical mass of users
* People use systems in ways designers don't expect

=== P3P ===

Ackerman presents an account of the P3P proposed web privacy protocol as illustration of a design proposal with a significant social-technical gap. The ambition of the project was to have user's browsers be able to automatically negotiate the exchange of personal information with sites according to the user's wishes. Think of Facebook's expansive privacy settings, but for every site on the Internet. This design problem is intractable because the parameter space is nearly infinite and properties that might be desirable socially (e.g. allow sites to only keep my data for a limited amount of time) are enforceable technically or politically. A real world design problem of this kind cannot afford an ideal solution, it must be further constrained. "This is the social-technical gap."

He breaks down the social technical gap inherent to P3P into 3 issues:

# Systems do not capture the nuanced distinctions that people make.
# People implicitly switch roles but systems have explicit states.
# Systems are have discrete states, but people operate ambiguously.

=== Section 4 ===

He opens this section by engages with the book ''The Sciences of the Artificial'' (Simon 1969). CSCW is "science of the artificial" in the sense that it studies not the natural world, but an an artifice (i.e. human constructed technology and society). He criticizes Simon for ignoring the social technical gap, but sees CSCW as both an "engineering discipline attempting to construct suitable systems for groups organizations and other collectivities, and at the same time, CSCW is a social science attempting to understand the basis for that construction in the social world."

Next he describes three categories of interventions that might improve awareness and to address current problems. These are ideological initiatives which require design methods that "prioritize the needs of people using the systems," political solutions like mandating trade union participation, and incorporating CSCW into the computer science curriculum.

He subsequently turns to the question of how to build CSCW into a science / intellectually coherent research area. Drawing the analogy of "first order approximations," he describes a set of work around that don't bridge the gap, but "edge around it in ways that are not extremely odious and ... do so with known effects." FOAs include email, chat systems. These are not a solution, but they work because they allow people to work out norms, roles and how they will exchange information for themselves. A cool illustration of a novel FOA is Hudson and Smith (1996) who create a system that transmits muddles A/V feeds that produce awareness without explicit interaction or privacy disruption. Another FOA is like collaborative filtering, "architectures that neither require action nor delegate it."

As a FOA solution for P3P he suggests an architecture of "privacy critics" that warn users about sites that are not trustworthy or may not protect privacy. Think of privacy badger or an ad blocker.

In conclusion he emphasizes that the social-technical gap is a major intellectual contribution that CSCW can make. We aren't here to create cool toys, we are here to understand and produce usable systems for "groups, organizations, communities, and other forms of collective life."

=== Technical research in CSCW ===

In this section Ackerman begins to argue that CSCW is transitioning from a field where designers may have been limited by their poor understandings of the social world to a field with a good understanding of the requirements of the social world but lacking in design and technical solutions to social problems. These solutions are not likely to be easy to find and are not a problem of technical competency. Instead, "the gap is likely to endure." He spends a paragraph speculating that these problems are not specific to a particular computer architecture. Even advanced AI / neural networks are unlikely to solve the problem.

Another way you might think the gap could go away is if society changes to close the gap. Two ways this might happen are through a co-evolutionary process in which society and technology adapt to one another gradually and a "Neo-Taylorist" process in which humans adapt to computational rationality. Some coevolution is likely to happen, and CSCW are on the front lines of this process in a sense. Ackerman argues that "technological trajectories ... may also be responsive to intellectual direction" in order to guide the process of technological change.
|relevance=Ackerman's essay is a highly influential article that helps position the CSCW field in the gap between social science and engineering. This is important because it helps CSCW researchers define their collective goals problems. Seeing CSCW as a science of the artificial orients us to the importance of design and technology development. The notion of First Order Approximations is a useful guide toward how to connect social science and design.
|journal=Human Computer Interaction
|pub_date=2000
|doi=10.1207/S15327051HCI1523_5
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Making work visible

2017-11-09T02:44:48Z

Groceryheist:

{{Summary
|title=Making work visible
|authors=Lucy Suchman
|journal=Communications of the ACM
|journal_vol=38
|pub_date=1995
|doi=10.1145/223248.223263
|subject=Anthropology
|pub_open_access=No
|tags=MIS,CSCW
|summary=Suchman (1995) is a short piece, published in the Communications of the ACM, that can be seen as an argument for ethnography in the study of information systems and in workplaces more generally. It is ''extremely'' dense and rich and offers few concrete conclusions. In some ways, it can be read a sort of high-level summary -- or even a justification -- of Lucy Suchman's ethnographic work on office work and technology over the previous decade.

The paper explores the topic of "making work visible" and essentially an exploration of a contradiction at the heart of ethnography and in empirical studies of work in general. By representing work, we create limited abstractions of the work in question. These imperfect pictures both allow us to give a better idea of what is happening, so we can support work better, but also reduces the work to an incomplete picture which means that the actions taken may limit, rather than facilitate the nature of the work being done.

It turns out that scholars of work don't actually seem to know much about how people do their work. Some research methods are trying to make work visible by representing work in the service of productivity. However, Suchman suggests that one's ability to construct a representation of one's work is a form of empowerment.

Put another way, some kinds of work are "black boxed"; invisible to others in the organization. Making service work visible for example might provoke questions and criticisms of how work is recognized and rewarded.

Suchman's goal is not to understand organizational processes by constructing representations of it, but to interpret work representations in view of the politics of organizations and to practice design in a way that sees representations of work as /part of the work/ and "part of the fabric of meanings with and out of which all working practices--our own and others'--are made.

The paper cites a Wood's (1992) [[The power of maps]] repeatedly and at length and makes extensive use of the metaphor of mapping to explore the two different sides of work representation. Maps are representations created with purposes and they necessarily represent some things and not others. Similarly and representation of work is going to include some aspects of work and not others. When it comes to considering how work practices inform technology design, questions of membership and identity are often left out. This is a problem when the fact that these
selection choices are practical, political, and economic is sublimated beneath the ideological veneer of necessity.

For example, even video recordings of work practices are misinterpreted by viewers in ways that can reinforce status hierarchy and privilege the proper use of technology according to technologists above what is sensible from the worker's perspective.

Next she turns to the ways that technologies for coordinating work are often also technologies for measuring and constructing representations of work. "In this way technologies for the local coordination of work become incorporated into the interests of global control."
For example airlines use ground operations workers to track planes and produces accountability because planes are tracked so that workers can coordinate with one another and by management for evaluation. This system has some wiggle room for ground workers to "maintain a reasonable relation between prescriptive representations like schedules and the actual contingencies of getting airplanes off the ground." Work tracking technologies can change that space.

Representations of work are often simplistic and reductionistic. For example, Lawyers at a firm had a naive and simplified view of a complex interpretive task performed by paralegals. /Distance/ between the observer and the work makes this kind of problematic reductionism and stereotyping possible. Distance might be organizational, but also it can be a distance in social location, or boundaries between technology designers and technology users.

The problem of simplistic reductionism has motivated Suchman to innovate new representational forms. These have "basic assumptions and commitments, including in brief

# Specifics of how people work are crucial.
# Some details are tacit because of "what our social milieu sanctions"
# Designing requires shared understanding across conflicting perspectives
# Representing work is itself a kind of work
# (Most important) Valid representations are derived from knowledge of the work (not normative accounts).

Normative accounts are particularly useless because they massively idealize or typify work. They might be useful within an organization for use by workers, but when they are "generated at a distance from the sites" of work they lead to problems. Instead we should build new representations that "acknowledge the often power-differentiated dialogues in which design gets done and resist the appropriation of different voices and interests into one dominant logic or single representational form."

Designers should draw from ethnography, and critical ethnography in particular when working to construct representations of work because critical ethnography sees the "cultural positioning" of the ethnographer as a necessary aspect of representation. Our goal should be to achieve dialog about work practices based on understanding the relationships between designers, developers, workers, and researchers. That is, to contribute to the social construction of work.

In conclusion, she returns to maps and to the subjective and power-laden choices involved in constructing representations. Designers and researchers should not just be concerned with the "adequacy of representational forms" but also with the "dialog and debate regarding the various places of representations in work and system design."

The paper was inspired by, and is in some ways encapsulated in, a full page table included in the article that shows the two sides of representing work.
|relevance=The paper is highly cited and been used in wide variety of different literature. It is often included as a core theoretical or methodological text in CSCW curricula or readings lists on information systems in particular. It is perhaps most widely used in the knowledge management sub-field of the information systems literature.}}

Making work visible

2017-11-09T02:44:14Z

Groceryheist: Expand Summary

{{Summary
|title=Making work visible
|authors=Lucy Suchman
|journal=Communications of the ACM
|journal_vol=38
|pub_date=1995
|doi=10.1145/223248.223263
|subject=Anthropology
|pub_open_access=No
|tags=MIS,CSCW
|summary=Suchman (1995) is a short piece, published in the Communications of the ACM, that can be seen as an argument for ethnography in the study of information systems and in workplaces more generally. It is ''extremely'' dense and rich and offers few concrete conclusions. In some ways, it can be read a sort of high-level summary -- or even a justification -- of Lucy Suchman's ethnographic work on office work and technology over the previous decade.

The paper explores the topic of "making work visible" and essentially an exploration of a contradiction at the heart of ethnography and in empirical studies of work in general. By representing work, we create limited abstractions of the work in question. These imperfect pictures both allow us to give a better idea of what is happening, so we can support work better, but also reduces the work to an incomplete picture which means that the actions taken may limit, rather than facilitate the nature of the work being done.

It turns out that scholars of work don't actually seem to know much about how people do their work. Some research methods are trying to make work visible by representing work in the service of productivity. However, Suchman suggests that one's ability to construct a representation of one's work is a form of empowerment.

Put another way, some kinds of work are "black boxed"; invisible to others in the organization. Making service work visible for example might provoke questions and criticisms of how work is recognized and rewarded.

Suchman's goal is not to understand organizational processes by constructing representations of it, but to interpret work representations in view of the politics of organizations and to practice design in a way that sees representations of work as /part of the work/ and "part of the fabric of meanings with and out of which all working practices--our own and others'--are made.

The paper cites a Wood's (1992) [[The power of maps]] repeatedly and at length and makes extensive use of the metaphor of mapping to explore the two different sides of work representation. Maps are representations created with purposes and they necessarily represent some things and not others. Similarly and representation of work is going to include some aspects of work and not others. When it comes to considering how work practices inform technology design, questions of membership and identity are often left out. This is a problem when the fact that these
selection choices are practical, political, and economic is sublimated beneath the ideological veneer of necessity.

For example, even video recordings of work practices are misinterpreted by viewers in ways that can reinforce status hierarchy and privilege the proper use of technology according to technologists above what is sensible from the worker's perspective.

Next she turns to the ways that technologies for coordinating work are often also technologies for measuring and constructing representations of work. "In this way technologies for the local coordination of work become incorporated into the interests of global control."
For example airlines use ground operations workers to track planes and produces accountability because planes are tracked so that workers can coordinate with one another and by management for evaluation. This system has some wiggle room for ground workers to "maintain a reasonable relation between prescriptive representations like schedules and the actual contingencies of getting airplanes off the ground." Work tracking technologies can change that space.

Representations of work are often simplistic and reductionistic. For example, Lawyers at a firm had a naive and simplified view of a complex interpretive task performed by paralegals. /Distance/ between the observer and the work makes this kind of problematic reductionism and stereotyping possible. Distance might be organizational, but also it can be a distance in social location, or boundaries between technology designers and technology users.

The problem of simplistic reductionism has motivated Suchman to innovate new representational forms. These have "basic assumptions and commitments, including in brief

1. Specifics of how people work are crucial.
2. Some details are tacit because of "what our social milieu sanctions"
3. Designing requires shared understanding across conflicting perspectives
4. Representing work is itself a kind of work
5. (Most important) Valid representations are derived from knowledge of the work (not normative accounts).

Normative accounts are particularly useless because they massively idealize or typify work. They might be useful within an organization for use by workers, but when they are "generated at a distance from the sites" of work they lead to problems. Instead we should build new representations that "acknowledge the often power-differentiated dialogues in which design gets done and resist the appropriation of different voices and interests into one dominant logic or single representational form."

Designers should draw from ethnography, and critical ethnography in particular when working to construct representations of work because critical ethnography sees the "cultural positioning" of the ethnographer as a necessary aspect of representation. Our goal should be to achieve dialog about work practices based on understanding the relationships between designers, developers, workers, and researchers. That is, to contribute to the social construction of work.

In conclusion, she returns to maps and to the subjective and power-laden choices involved in constructing representations. Designers and researchers should not just be concerned with the "adequacy of representational forms" but also with the "dialog and debate regarding the various places of representations in work and system design."

The paper was inspired by, and is in some ways encapsulated in, a full page table included in the article that shows the two sides of representing work.
|relevance=The paper is highly cited and been used in wide variety of different literature. It is often included as a core theoretical or methodological text in CSCW curricula or readings lists on information systems in particular. It is perhaps most widely used in the knowledge management sub-field of the information systems literature.}}

Social Analyses of Computing: Theoretical Perspectives in Recent Empirical Research

2017-10-06T01:11:12Z

Groceryheist: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Social Analyses of Computing: Theoretical Perspectives in Recent Empirical Research |authors=Rob Kling |url=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=356806 |tags=So..."

{{Summary
|title=Social Analyses of Computing: Theoretical Perspectives in Recent Empirical Research
|authors=Rob Kling
|url=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=356806
|tags=Social Computing, Computer supported cooperative work, Social Computing, Human Computer Interaction,
|summary=In his introduction, Kling argues that speculative analysis of the roles computing will play in the social world is very important for informing decision making and planning for the potential consequences of technological development. However, to think that such speculations are objective and not based in prior beliefs about society is naive technological determinism. Social analysis of computing requires choosing assumptions about the nature of the social world. Configurations of assumptions are clustered into theoretical perspectives.

He focuses on two theoretical perspectives: systems rationalism and segmented institutionalism. Systems rationalists are optimistic about the roles technology will play in social life, they assume that there is consensus about social goals. They tend to be holistic, emphasize efficiency, and make computer users the center of their analysis.

Systems rationalists are concerned with "legitimate" aspects of social life (e.g. economic efficiency, the workplace as officially represented by managers). Segmented institutionalists are also concerned with "illegitimate" aspects like class (.e.g conflict, ambition). They value individual agency and social equity above economic efficiency. They consider broader implications of technology and how it may impact parties outside the workplace or firm.

Subtypes of systems rationalism include management scientists, who often place the interests of managers above subordinates; structural analysis are interested in the broader social world, but still focus on optimal decision making in the interests of the firm; and human-relations analysts, who see worker satisfaction as important for efficiency.

Segmented institutionalized include political analysts who focus on conflict between groups and power, interactions who focus on social construction of meaning through interaction, and Marxists who focus on how technology furthers labor exploitation or potentially liberating.

While Kling has lumped all these fields into two high level categories, he emphasizes that they actually differ in important ways about social assumptions. There is an amazing table on page 4 that summarizes the two theoretical perspectives and 6 sub-perspectives. He concludes the first section of the article with an example about the introduction of a new kind of organizational control system into a manufacturing company. The goal of this paper is to draw from prior empirical studies to learn the relative usefulness of the two perspectives.

=== Early studies of computing (50s and 60s) ===

During this period the systems rationalists mainly wrote speculative minded articles about how technological development might alter the work place and very few empirical studies of the "actual impacts of specific developments" on social life in or out of the workplace. On the other hand, the segmented institutionalists (Mann, Blum, Hoos, Mumford), found empirical evidence of the political roles of computer use, what happens to jobs that get automated (in the early days people were moved into different roles, but from the 70s on they got laid off), and how clerical jobs changed with the introduction of new technology.

=== Contemporary studies (70s) ===

In the 70s the systems rationalists finally got their act together. Whisler (1970) found that automation increased centralization of decision making in insurance firms. Gotlieb and Borodin (1973) "avoided largely speculative analyses" in their book reviewing empirical studies of computing in the workplace that refrains from the naive optimistic utopian accounts of the 60s.

=== Computing in organizations (70s) ===

Systems rationalists often assume that technological innovations diffuse in order to meet a "need of individuals or organizations." However defining "need" is a problem. Needs are not just economic conceptions, but also by "social features of an organization." Organizational efficiency is often subordinate to the private rationales of administrators. Computer systems can be introduced in order to "fit the political contours of existing organizations" and are selected as "instruments of bureaucratic politics" for their application to "ongoing conflicts and coalitions." For example computers can be used to impress auditors (who can't examine the code) in ways that and calculations can't. This fact is incongruous with the accounts provided by systems rationalists. Firms are much more than engines of economic production.

=== Work life ===

Although human relations people often suggest that work will be radically improved by technology, it turns out that computer use "did not profoundly alter the character" of jobs in the real world. Some jobs are made much more efficient through technology, but for others it has little effect. It seems most helpful for white collar workers and managers.

One common claim by structural analysis is that computing affords better monitoring of employees, but Kling didn't find strong evidence that this was common in settings like police detectives or accountants. Computers make records, but people were making manual records before. "Computing is selectively exploited as one strategy among many for organizing work and information." Political analysts have a better take because they consider the existing degrees of prior autonomy.

=== Operational problems. ===

Computers cause problems! While management analysts often think that computer problems have systematic solutions, this doesn't stop problems from happening. Kling suggests that we should think of computers not as tools but as packages of skills, organizational units, physical devises, and understandings of what computing is and means. The interactionist approach sees these as sociallly embedded. Kling and Kraemer did an empirical study to decide whether the tool or package concept is a better explination for why copmuter problems happen. They find that policies are retroactively not proactively and so cannot prevent new kinds of problems from arising and that new kinds of problems are more likely to arise in more technically and socially complex settings. They interpret this as a favorable to the segmented institutionalist perspective and in favor of the 'package' conception. Computing is not simply a 'tool'.

Automation can improve efficiency but it can also be uesd to produce an air of innovation and sophistication.

=== Decision making ===

Decision making is one of the most theoretically interesting applications of computing, but at the time a small share of computing resources were employed in decision making compared to the automation of mundane business operations.

Systems rationalists were interesed in technical problems with databases and when decisions could have used the data, but didn't. Interactionists and organizational-politics folks consider how computing systems interact with the external relations involved in decisions. "Computing was used because it convinced important parties that decisions were being carefully made."

When it comes to automating mundane tasks, there can be a surprising efficiency tradeoffs. People might spend more time doing less important work that can be partly automated. E.g. increasing police efficiency at minor offenses "further clogged the already jammed courts."

=== Management control ===

Systems rationalists usually focused on how well procedures worked. When a system is completely automated this is a Good approach, however when skill and cooperation are involved control systems can be "gamed" (see Campbell's law).

Control systems can exist for bureaucratic or political purposes and despite claims of importance may be basically useless. How 'efficacy' is constructed can be just as important as the capabilities of the technological system when it comes to whether models will be used or not. Computers can be sites of conflict between different groups, each seeking to enforce their desired forms of measurement by encoding them in the system.

Models are often only used when they justify already made decisions. They are often used rhetorically by advocates. They can be too difficult and expensive to develop and deploy quickly. Modelers rather than models become political tools because the modelers have an air of objective authority. "Computer-based analyses are a social resource used by political actors in the same manner as any other social resource."

=== Organizational Power ===

Introducing automation systems can alter power structures in organizations. Influence can shift and people's jobs cans change. These changes are not intended in the system design, or by managers. In politicized settings (e.g. municipal governments) computer systems can profoundly alter power relations. In municipal governments power shifted from the council to top administrators and data custodians.

=== Privacy ===

Lots of people, remembering McCarthyism are concerned about how computer use may lead to considerable loss of privacy because computers can collect a lot of information that can be shared. But according to studies by systems rationalist, "major institutional barriers ... prevent organizations from routinely pooling information about their data subjects." (Boy has this changed!!!)

Rule, a segmented institutionalist, was concerned with mass surveillance and social control by credit agencies. He studied TRW which was a highly centralized credit agency with 20 million records that collect and provide "derogatory information." While Rule anticipated the political abuse of such systems, he didn't find evidence of it being currently abused,

While the rationalists proposed "hygienic reform of record keeping systems," Rule thought that such mechanisms would not be able to limit the capacity of such information to "profoundly constrain" through organizations acting legitimately. "Rule is concerned that ''only'' economic costs serve as a barrier to collecting and using similarly delicate information." Kling argues that this is a much more serious consideration and that the rationalists misguidedly attempt to make their analyses "value free." The segmented institutionalizes do better by making their value commitments explicit.

=== Social Accountability ===

How are computer systems going to be made socially accountable? The public seems to have difficulties correcting errors encoded in computer systems. Systems rationalists tend to say that efficiency, authority and professionalism will be enough. Alternatives involve the state regulation, law, and citizen action. Because computer systems are often used for bureaucratic and political purposes not efficiency the systems rationalists are hopelessly naive. In settings like accounting where law already enforces accountability systems involving computers are likely to be accountable, but in other settings like police work they may be easily abused.

=== Conclusion ===

In conclusion, Kling reiterates that computers have little causal agency themselves, rather computer use is "purposive and varies between social settings." Impacts of computing cannot be decoupled from the social situations. Computer scientists need to learn that researchers is always informed by the researchers' prior theoretical commitments.

He ties up his argument that the two perspectives are complimentary but that as the focus becomes broader the segmented institutionalist perspective becomes more powerful.

With the development of the chip-based microprocessor (emerging at the time) the scope of computing is likely to become broader and more profound in the near future as email, ETF, and "wired societies" take off.

It is important that our theoretical assumptions correspond to reality not to some idealized utopian notions that can be easily analyzed.

This article shifted units of analysis (firm, municipality, broad social world, industry) in order to make a broad point about the kinds of theoretical assumptions on which analyses are based, but individual studies should be careful and explicit about levels of analyses.
|relevance=Rob Kling was an early researcher into studies of the role of computing in organizations. This seminal article argues for a theoretical approach that incorporates symbolic interactionism and political theory instead of assuming that organizations are rational and that systems can be uncritically designed to solve clearly defined problems. He reviews and synthesizes a lot of prior literature so this is a very good source for early perspectives into the role of computers in organizations.
|journal=ACM Computing Surveys
|pub_date=1980
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Taking CSCW seriously

2017-10-06T00:41:59Z

Groceryheist:

{{Summary
|title=Taking CSCW seriously
|authors=Kjeld Schmidt, Liam Bannon,
|url=https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00752449
|tags=Computer supported cooperative work, Human Computer Interaction, Social Computing
|summary=This article aims to argue that CSCW should be about "support requirements of cooperative work arrangements" not "computer support for groups."

They also discuss a concept called 'articulation work.' Many interesting problems are not important for small groups, but will be important for large scale CSCW systems.

The problem is that although CSCW is starting to take off as field, it doesn't have a coherent identity or conception. This paper isn't about defining CSCW but about a framework for identifying the important research issues in the field. The meaning of CSCW while something of an umbrella term is also hotly contested and this article needs to account for the politics of the situation.

They bring in Richard Whitley, who says "a research area is constituted by a ''problem situation''." Therefore the authors seek to identify a problem situation for CSCW, but it seems like just about any application, including stuff that used to be information systems or CMC seems to get lumped into CSCW. They say that CSCW is essentially an application area to support cooperative work, and therefore should not be organized around the development of specific technologies but instead to understand cooperative work and to design computing technologies to support the its requirements.

They see CSCW as a fundamentally design oriented area. They think social scientists coming into CSCW must explain how their findings are constructive and not merely descriptive. They also think it's important to actually construct working artifacts to demonstrate designs.

Interestingly, they note Kling preferred the term 'coordinated' work as opposed to the 'happy' term 'cooperation.' They see cooperation as coming from a long tradition in sociology including "Marx who defined it as 'multiple individuals working together in a conscious way in the same production process or indifferent but connected production processes." All work is social, but cooperative workers have to ''articulate'' their activities in order to distribute activities and accomplish a task. Cooperative work has communication and coordination overhead. They argue that this meaning of cooperative is neutral and general and divorced from the idealistic and high-minded notions of compromise. Cooperative work is not always better than individual work.

They argue that cooperative work is a better term than Groupwork, because 'group' can mean a lot of different things to different people and may imply certain assumptions about how work is organized. Their definition of cooperation is intended to be general enough to cover all kinds of interdependence in work. Some kinds of interdependent workers may not directly communicate, in other cases they may communicate only through the computer medium, or through and artifact like a database. Interdependent work may also cross organizational boundaries. For example, computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) aims to make systems that support distributed cooperation through a database on a company-wide scale, but CIM was not involved in CSCW. They make a similar argument about office information systems (OIS). Group work tends not to emphasize considerations of systems like OIS and CIM.

=== Articulation work ===

They say we need cooperative work by no omniscient and omnipotent agent exists and cooperation expands the range of tasks that are feasible. However interdependence creates the need for new work to manage coordination tasks. The term "articulation work" seems to come from Anselm Strauss who uses the word "meshing" to describe the relations involved in coordination work.

Communication facilities are an important requirement for distributing work, but CSCW systems for communication are not sufficient because articulation involves much more than communication. It is a very broad term that involves high levels of decisions making in an environment with many complex contingencies and uncertainties and solutions are satisfactory not ideal.

"A key issue for CSCW is how to support the cooperative management of mechanisms of interaction themselves." That is to say, the management of articulation work and communication systems.

=== Why CSCW Now? ===

What makes CSCW different from information systems?

Information systems can be seen as rudimentary CSCW systems if they for example provide a database as a shared object for indirect communication. But these don't really have much to do with supporting articulation work like "cooperative problem solving and discretion decision making".

But why should CSCW exist as a field?

Organization work is transforming to meed the needs of the modern business and and workforce. CSCW can empower organizations with 'advanced information systems that can facilitate the coordination of distributed decision making.' This involves enabling local decision making with multiple strategies among agents with incompatible conceptualizations of the work.

The wide availability of computer workstations in the office provides an infrastructure ready for the widespread adoption of CSCW systems in the workplace.

They emphasize that office work is extremely difficult to fully automate and that rigid systems often do not fair well. For example "XCP, assumes that what people do in many work settings is to follow procedures." Instead good systems are flexible but afford new kinds of interaction like GROVE (a multiuser text editor).

Trying to build systems that are tightly coupled to organizational procedures are likely to fail because "procedures are not executable code but rather heuristic and vague statements to be interpreted, instantiated, and implemented." Organizational models are just limited abstractions and imperfect reproductions. So systems based on an underlying organizational model should allow users to tweak and interact with the model.

=== Supporting the management of a common information space ===

Complex organizations have to construct shared understandings of work, what the authors call a "common information space." This space is constructed through interpretation work. Database objects are also representations used by workers. Different departments have different jargon and the same words can take on quite different meanings. A common information space is a negotiated translation between such disparate areas.

A common information space is not just a shared view system which shows multiple users the same display. That's a shared object not a shared information space. "A shared information space requires an interpretive activity on the part of the recipients."

One of the big challenges both for workers and for CSCW is that common information spaces are often constructed 'at arm's length' as workers independently and asynchronously interact with information objects.

Engelbart and Lehtman 1988 proposed a virtual handbook which would be collaboratively produced by knowledge workers that seems to anticipate Wikis. Schmidt and Bannon thoughtfully criticize the claim that the handbook would be "uniform, complete, consistent, and up-to-date." Because distributed workers are not co-present, a shared understanding will be quite difficult to produce.

Even though an ideal handbook will not be possible, the idea of a handbook is still a good one. They discuss some important design considerations for the handbooks.

1. Identifying the originator of the information

The origin of information is often important to its interpretation, for example reputable doctors are trustworthy sources of medical information. In workplace settings the identity of decision makers is important for how decisions will be evaluated and critiqued. How identity should be constructed, represented, and engineered in different CSCW contexts remains an open question.

2. Identifying the context of information

They provide an example of a policy application that would use hypertext to make visible information about policy documents to policy makers. Knowledge of the strategies and perspectives employed in organizing the hypertext are important for users of the system to interpret and navigate the system.

3. Identifying the politics of the information

Information is not value free. Organizations have factions and power centers that find themselves in conflict. Information in organizations gets misrepresented and distorted by politics. "The realities of organizational life must be investigated seriously if CSCW is to be turned from a laboratory research activity into an activity producing useful real world systems."
|relevance=This article aims to articulate a vision for the emerging field of CSCW, which is now a major interdisciplinary area intersecting computer and social science. Their concern is to distinguish CSCW from information systems and to define it as more broad than just developing systems for group work. They see CSCW as a field with a focus on informing technology design by understanding the needs of cooperative work in the ever shifting work place.
|journal=Computer Supported Cooperative Work
|pub_date=1992
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Taking CSCW seriously

2017-10-06T00:40:42Z

Groceryheist: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Taking CSCW seriously |authors=Kjeld Schmidt, Liam Bannon, |url=https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00752449 |tags=Computer supported cooperative work..."

{{Summary
|title=Taking CSCW seriously
|authors=Kjeld Schmidt, Liam Bannon,
|url=https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00752449
|tags=Computer supported cooperative work, Human Computer Interaction, Social Computing
|summary=This article aims to argue that CSCW should be about "support requirements of cooperative work arrangements" not "computer support for groups."

They also discuss a concept called 'articulation work.' Many interesting problems are not important for small groups, but will be important for large scale CSCW systems.

The problem is that although CSCW is starting to take off as field, it doesn't have a coherent identity or conception. This paper isn't about defining CSCW but about a framework for identifying the important research issues in the field. The meaning of CSCW while something of an umbrella term is also hotly contested and this article needs to account for the politics of the situation.

They bring in Richard Whitley, who says "a research area is constituted by a ''problem situation''." Therefore the authors seek to identify a problem situation for CSCW, but it seems like just about any application, including stuff that used to be information systems or CMC seems to get lumped into CSCW. They say that CSCW is essentially an application area to support cooperative work, and therefore should not be organized around the development of specific technologies but instead to understand cooperative work and to design computing technologies to support the its requirements.

They see CSCW as a fundamentally design oriented area. They think social scientists coming into CSCW must explain how their findings are constructive and not merely descriptive. They also think it's important to actually construct working artifacts to demonstrate designs.

Interestingly, they note Kling preferred the term 'coordinated' work as opposed to the 'happy' term 'cooperation.' They see cooperation as coming from a long tradition in sociology including "Marx who defined it as 'multiple individuals working together in a conscious way in the same production process or indifferent but connected production processes." All work is social, but cooperative workers have to ''articulate'' their activities in order to distribute activities and accomplish a task. Cooperative work has communication and coordination overhead. They argue that this meaning of cooperative is neutral and general and divorced from the idealistic and high-minded notions of compromise. Cooperative work is not always better than individual work.

They argue that cooperative work is a better term than Groupwork, because 'group' can mean a lot of different things to different people and may imply certain assumptions about how work is organized. Their definition of cooperation is intended to be general enough to cover all kinds of interdependence in work. Some kinds of interdependent workers may not directly communicate, in other cases they may communicate only through the computer medium, or through and artifact like a database. Interdependent work may also cross organizational boundaries. For example, computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) aims to make systems that support distributed cooperation through a database on a company-wide scale, but CIM was not involved in CSCW. They make a similar argument about office information systems (OIS). Group work tends not to emphasize considerations of systems like OIS and CIM.

Articulation work

They say we need cooperative work by no omniscient and omnipotent agent exists and cooperation expands the range of tasks that are feasible. However interdependence creates the need for new work to manage coordination tasks. The term "articulation work" seems to come from Anselm Strauss who uses the word "meshing" to describe the relations involved in coordination work.

Communication facilities are an important requirement for distributing work, but CSCW systems for communication are not sufficient because articulation involves much more than communication. It is a very broad term that involves high levels of decisions making in an environment with many complex contingencies and uncertainties and solutions are satisfactory not ideal.

"A key issue for CSCW is how to support the cooperative management of mechanisms of interaction themselves." That is to say, the management of articulation work and communication systems.

Why CSCW Now?

What makes CSCW different from information systems?

Information systems can be seen as rudimentary CSCW systems if they for example provide a database as a shared object for indirect communication. But these don't really have much to do with supporting articulation work like "cooperative problem solving and discretion decision making".

But why should CSCW exist as a field?

Organization work is transforming to meed the needs of the modern business and and workforce. CSCW can empower organizations with 'advanced information systems that can facilitate the coordination of distributed decision making.' This involves enabling local decision making with multiple strategies among agents with incompatible conceptualizations of the work.

The wide availability of computer workstations in the office provides an infrastructure ready for the widespread adoption of CSCW systems in the workplace.

They emphasize that office work is extremely difficult to fully automate and that rigid systems often do not fair well. For example "XCP, assumes that what people do in many work settings is to follow procedures." Instead good systems are flexible but afford new kinds of interaction like GROVE (a multiuser text editor).

Trying to build systems that are tightly coupled to organizational procedures are likely to fail because "procedures are not executable code but rather heuristic and vague statements to be interpreted, instantiated, and implemented." Organizational models are just limited abstractions and imperfect reproductions. So systems based on an underlying organizational model should allow users to tweak and interact with the model.

Supporting the management of a common information space

Complex organizations have to construct shared understandings of work, what the authors call a "common information space." This space is constructed through interpretation work. Database objects are also representations used by workers. Different departments have different jargon and the same words can take on quite different meanings. A common information space is a negotiated translation between such disparate areas.

A common information space is not just a shared view system which shows multiple users the same display. That's a shared object not a shared information space. "A shared information space requires an interpretive activity on the part of the recipients."

One of the big challenges both for workers and for CSCW is that common information spaces are often constructed 'at arm's length' as workers independently and asynchronously interact with information objects.

Engelbart and Lehtman 1988 proposed a virtual handbook which would be collaboratively produced by knowledge workers that seems to anticipate Wikis. Schmidt and Bannon thoughtfully criticize the claim that the handbook would be "uniform, complete, consistent, and up-to-date." Because distributed workers are not co-present, a shared understanding will be quite difficult to produce.

Even though an ideal handbook will not be possible, the idea of a handbook is still a good one. They discuss some important design considerations for the handbooks.

# Identifying the originator of the information

The origin of information is often important to its interpretation, for example reputable doctors are trustworthy sources of medical information. In workplace settings the identity of decision makers is important for how decisions will be evaluated and critiqued. How identity should be constructed, represented, and engineered in different CSCW contexts remains an open question.

# Identifying the context of information

THey provide an example of a policy application that would use hypertext to make visible information about policy documents to policy makers. Knowledge of the strategies and perspectives employed in organizing the hypertext are important for users of the system to interpret and navigate the system.

# Identifying the politics of the information

Information is not value free. Organizations have factions and power centers that find themselves in conflict. Information in organizations gets misrepresented and distorted by politics. "The realities of organizational life must be investigated seriously if CSCW is to be turned from a laboratory research activity into an activity producing useful real world systems."
|relevance=This article aims to articulate a vision for the emerging field of CSCW, which is now a major interdisciplinary area intersecting computer and social science. Their concern is to distinguish CSCW from information systems and to define it as more broad than just developing systems for group work. They see CSCW as a field with a focus on informing technology design by understanding the needs of cooperative work in the ever shifting work place.
|journal=Computer Supported Cooperative Work
|pub_date=1992
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Making Work Visible.

2017-10-04T08:49:52Z

Groceryheist: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Making Work Visible. |authors=Lucy Suchman, |url=https://doi.org/10.1145/223248.223263 |tags=Organizational Theory, Computer supported cooperative work, desig..."

{{Summary
|title=Making Work Visible.
|authors=Lucy Suchman,
|url=https://doi.org/10.1145/223248.223263
|tags=Organizational Theory, Computer supported cooperative work, design methodology, Ethnography, Science and Technology Studies,
|summary=== Suchman Making work visible 1995 ==

It turns out that scholars of work don't actually seem to know much about how people do their work. Some research methods are trying to make work visible by representing work in the service of productivity. However, Suchman suggests that one's ability to construct a representation of one's work is a form of empowerment.

Put another way, some kinds of work are "black boxed"; invisible to others in the organization. Making service work visible for example might provoke questions and criticisms of how work is recognized and rewarded.

Suchman's goal is not to understand organizational processes by constructing representations of it, but to interpret work representations in view of the politics of organizations and to practice design in a way that sees representations of work as ''part of the work'' and "part of the fabric of meanings with and out of which all working practices--our own and others'--are made.

She turns next to consider ''maps'' which "work by serving interests" (Denis Wood). Maps are representations created with purposes and they necessarily represent some things and not others. Similarly and representation of work is going to include some aspects of work and not others. When it comes to considering how work practices inform technology design, questions of membership and identity are often left out. This is a problem when the fact that these selection choices are practical, political, and economic is sublimated beneath the ideological veneer of necessity.

For example, even video recordings of work practices are misinterpreted by viewers in ways that can reinforce status hierarchy and privilege the proper use of technology according to technologists above what is sensible from the worker's perspective.

Next she turns to the ways that technologies for coordinating work are often also technologies for measuring and constructing representations of work. "In this way technologies for the local coordination of work become incorporated into the interests of global control." For example airlines use ground operations workers to track planes and produces accountability because planes are tracked so that workers can coordinate with one another and by management for evaluation. This system has some wiggle room for ground workers to "maintain a reasonable relation between prescriptive representations like schedules and the actual contingencies of getting airplanes off the ground." Work tracking technologies can change that space.

Representations of work are often simplistic and reductionistic. For example, Lawyers at a firm had a naive and simplified view of a complex interpretive task performed by paralegals. ''Distance'' between the observer and the work makes this kind of problematic reductionism and stereotyping possible. Distance might be organizational, but also it can be a distance in social location, or boundaries between technology designers and technology users.

The problem of simplistic reductionism has motivated Suchman to innovate new representational forms. These have "basic assumptions and commitments, including in brief

# Specifics of how people work are crucial.
# Some details are tacit because of "what our social milieu sanctions"
# Designing requires shared understanding across conflicting perspectives
# Representing work is itself a kind of work
# (Most important) Valid representations are derived from knowledge of the work (not normative accounts).

Normative accounts are particularly useless because they massively idealize or typify work. They might be useful within an organization for use by workers, but when they are "generated at a distance from the sites" of work they lead to problems. Instead we should build new representations that "acknowledge the often power-differentiated dialogues in which design gets done and resist the appropriation of different voices and interests into one dominant logic or single representational form."

Designers should draw from ethnography, and critical ethnography in particular when working to construct representations of work because critical ethnography sees the "cultural positioning" of the ethnographer as a necessary aspect of representation. Our goal should be to achieve dialog about work practices based on understanding the relationships between designers, developers, workers, and researchers. That is, to contribute to the social construction of work.

In conclusion, she returns to maps and to the subjective and power-laden choices involved in constructing representations. Designers and researchers should not just be concerned with the "adequacy of representational forms" but also with the "dialog and debate regarding the various places of representations in work and system design."
|relevance=This short article summarizes some of Lucy Suchman's scholarship on "invisible work." It calls into question normative, simplistic, and stereotypical representations of work that are often generated a distance from the site of work and considers the nature of representation and maps to argue that work researchers and technology designers should seek to construct new forms of representation that put knowledge from different perspectives into dialog. Lucy Suchman's idea's are very influential in science and technology studies and computer supported cooperative work.
|journal=Communications of the ACM
|pub_date=1995
|doi=https://doi.org/10.1145/223248.223263
|subject=Computer Science
}}

GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews

2017-10-04T01:16:42Z

Groceryheist:

{{Summary
|title=GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews
|authors=Paul Resnick, Neophytos Iacovou , Mitesh Suchak, Peter Bergstrom, John Riedl
|url=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=192905
|tags=Human Computer Interaction, Collaborative Filtering, Computer Science, Social Computing, Computer supported cooperative work
|relevance=This seminal work on collaborative filtering presents Grouplens, a system for crowdsourcing ratings of news articles. The hugely influential system laid the foundation for recommendation engines based on correlating user behaviors. The work anticipates the rise of the systems that aggregate small contributions like rating an article into information about quality, decisions about what content to recommend, and how such systems may structure the ways that humans interact in computer mediated sites.
|journal=Proceeding CSCW '94 Proceedings of the 1994 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work Pages 175-186
|pub_date=1994
|subject=Computer Science
|summary=
They introduce their collaborative filtering system by discussing the setting in which they make an intervention. Usenet news groups were a big deal, over 100MB in traffic per day, with up to 140,000 participants! They were very popular and were becoming important for computing professionals and for academics.

Yet there was a lot of junk on the newsgroups and many found it difficult to receive feedback on what they were sharing. Existing mechanisms for managing the volume of news included the bifurcating tree structure of usenet groups and moderation that filtered out articles that the moderator thought were not appropriate. Newsreaders collapsed articles allowing readers to select titles, and collapse threads so only the top comments are shown. They also allowed readers to blacklist subjects and authors. Some even provided rudimentary search.

Group lens provides a social mechanism for predicting what articles people will like using collaborative filtering.

=== Related Work ===

They situate their system in broader work on information filtering. There are 3 categories of filtering techniques: cognitive, social, and economic (Malone et al.). Content blacklists and search are simple cognitive filters; they look at the content of the documents. Cognitive filters could be made more complex by taking user feedback into account and applying machine learning. Social filtering is like the author blacklist. Collaborative filtering is an advanced kind of social filtering. Social filtering as an advantage because humans are good at reading, understanding, and judging text. Moderation is a primitive form of collaborative filtering.

Tapestry was a prior collaborative filtering system. It accepts evaluations from many people to socially filter news, but it was monolithic and did not aggregate ratings into personalized recommendations.

Economic filtering recommend articles based on the costs and benefits.

=== Design of Grouplens ===

They built Grouplens: a system consisting of Unix and Macintosh clients and servers they call "Better Bit Bureaus."

Their design goals are openness - to allow any Usenet client to participate in Grouplens and the creation of alternative BBBs; Ease of User; Compatibility with Usenet; Scalability, and Privacy.

Usenet is a distributed system, but articles have global identifiers which they can use to track articles.

The BBB servers share ratings with each other to afford scalability to many sites.

There are some lovely diagrams of the netnews architecture and its augmentation by Grouplens.

There are a lot of alternative designs for collaborative filtering, they chose their design because they realized that a group larger than 7 people would probably be required to provision good ratings, but at larger groups sizes people's knowledge of others in the group would be low and anonymity would be more desirable.

They modified three existing news readers with a rating box where users would rate articles from good to bad on a 1-5 scale.

Grouplens reuses the Usenet protocol by publishing ratings to a special purpose newsgroup. This way the ratings get propagated and are available to clients.

How does Grouplens turn ratings into recommendations? BBB models ratings using matrix completion. Their algorithm for matrix completion is based on reinforcement learning, regression, and pairwise correlation coefficients. The method is actually pretty simple. They just take the average of all the ratings weighted by the users correlation with the rater. The assumption is that people who agreed in the past are likely to agree again, which is a pretty bad assumption but leads to reasonable predictions.

They put a lot of effort into modifying each of the usenet clients to conform to the look and feel and normal interaction motifs of the editor. The users appreciated this a lot. It is pretty cool to be able to integrate with multiple ecosystems like this. They also have a cute explanation of threads and triangle collapse interfaces.

=== Scale ===

The also discuss scale issues. How well does GroupLens predict, how fast is it? How much network traffic does it use? How do the BBB machines scale? It turns out that computing the ratings scales super linearly so running the BBB machines could get more expensive. They provide a lot of technical details about how they optimize this or limit the number of ratings to be considered. If they had 1,000,000 users they would need 10GB of network traffic per day! This is a pretty fair amount today. At the time it was enormous!

=== Ongoing Experimentation ===

In the section called "Ongoing Experimentation" they describe experimental installations they are using to iterate on and refine their system. They are going to evaluate the systems scaling performance and how well it can predict missing entries from the ratings matrix. They use participants in these installations to collect data in order to evaluate rating prediction. They suggest that future BBBs might improve upon their current design by performing a 'combination of content filtering and collaborative filtering.'

They imagine how GroupLens could change how people consume news on the net. They suggest that GroupLens could be a sort of distributed moderation that improves the quality of articles on newsgroups and reduce the need for moderators. They may also reduce the need for "splits" that break news down into smaller categories. GroupLens might also reduce the need for blacklists. This is interesting because while collaborative filtering systems have been adopted, they often eschew the personalization component (reddit collaborative filtering produces an overall popularity rank that is not personalized.) Their influential vision remains only partly realized.

Next they consider why individuals would participate in contributing to group lens. They suggest that users may feel altruism or guilt in order to "do their share" of rating, but the suppose that ratings will be under-provisioned. This is what happened in one of their pilot tests where the volume of posts was too high. They consider providing external incentives.

This is a bit puzzling since it seems like if users understand the system then they will want to rate articles in order to keep the algorithm trained.

In conclusion they summarize their architecture and approach, with emphasis on the open architecture that allows others to create new clients and BBBs.
}}

GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews

2017-10-04T01:16:27Z

Groceryheist:

GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews

2017-10-04T01:15:57Z

Groceryheist:

{{Summary
|title=GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews
|authors=Paul Resnick, Neophytos Iacovou , Mitesh Suchak, Peter Bergstrom, John Riedl
|url=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=192905
|tags=Human Computer Interaction, Collaborative Filtering, Computer Science, Social Computing, Computer supported cooperative work
|relevance=This seminal work on collaborative filtering presents Grouplens, a system for crowdsourcing ratings of news articles. The hugely influential system laid the foundation for recommendation engines based on correlating user behaviors. The work anticipates the rise of the systems that aggregate small contributions like rating an article into information about quality, decisions about what content to recommend, and how such systems may structure the ways that humans interact in computer mediated sites.
|journal=Proceeding CSCW '94 Proceedings of the 1994 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work Pages 175-186
|pub_date=1994
|subject=Computer Science
}}

They introduce their collaborative filtering system by discussing the setting in which they make an intervention. Usenet news groups were a big deal, over 100MB in traffic per day, with up to 140,000 participants! They were very popular and were becoming important for computing professionals and for academics.

Yet there was a lot of junk on the newsgroups and many found it difficult to receive feedback on what they were sharing. Existing mechanisms for managing the volume of news included the bifurcating tree structure of usenet groups and moderation that filtered out articles that the moderator thought were not appropriate. Newsreaders collapsed articles allowing readers to select titles, and collapse threads so only the top comments are shown. They also allowed readers to blacklist subjects and authors. Some even provided rudimentary search.

Group lens provides a social mechanism for predicting what articles people will like using collaborative filtering.

=== Related Work ===

They situate their system in broader work on information filtering. There are 3 categories of filtering techniques: cognitive, social, and economic (Malone et al.). Content blacklists and search are simple cognitive filters; they look at the content of the documents. Cognitive filters could be made more complex by taking user feedback into account and applying machine learning. Social filtering is like the author blacklist. Collaborative filtering is an advanced kind of social filtering. Social filtering as an advantage because humans are good at reading, understanding, and judging text. Moderation is a primitive form of collaborative filtering.

Tapestry was a prior collaborative filtering system. It accepts evaluations from many people to socially filter news, but it was monolithic and did not aggregate ratings into personalized recommendations.

Economic filtering recommend articles based on the costs and benefits.

=== Design of Grouplens ===

They built Grouplens: a system consisting of Unix and Macintosh clients and servers they call "Better Bit Bureaus."

Their design goals are openness - to allow any Usenet client to participate in Grouplens and the creation of alternative BBBs; Ease of User; Compatibility with Usenet; Scalability, and Privacy.

Usenet is a distributed system, but articles have global identifiers which they can use to track articles.

The BBB servers share ratings with each other to afford scalability to many sites.

There are some lovely diagrams of the netnews architecture and its augmentation by Grouplens.

There are a lot of alternative designs for collaborative filtering, they chose their design because they realized that a group larger than 7 people would probably be required to provision good ratings, but at larger groups sizes people's knowledge of others in the group would be low and anonymity would be more desirable.

They modified three existing news readers with a rating box where users would rate articles from good to bad on a 1-5 scale.

Grouplens reuses the Usenet protocol by publishing ratings to a special purpose newsgroup. This way the ratings get propagated and are available to clients.

How does Grouplens turn ratings into recommendations? BBB models ratings using matrix completion. Their algorithm for matrix completion is based on reinforcement learning, regression, and pairwise correlation coefficients. The method is actually pretty simple. They just take the average of all the ratings weighted by the users correlation with the rater. The assumption is that people who agreed in the past are likely to agree again, which is a pretty bad assumption but leads to reasonable predictions.

They put a lot of effort into modifying each of the usenet clients to conform to the look and feel and normal interaction motifs of the editor. The users appreciated this a lot. It is pretty cool to be able to integrate with multiple ecosystems like this. They also have a cute explanation of threads and triangle collapse interfaces.

=== Scale ===

The also discuss scale issues. How well does GroupLens predict, how fast is it? How much network traffic does it use? How do the BBB machines scale? It turns out that computing the ratings scales super linearly so running the BBB machines could get more expensive. They provide a lot of technical details about how they optimize this or limit the number of ratings to be considered. If they had 1,000,000 users they would need 10GB of network traffic per day! This is a pretty fair amount today. At the time it was enormous!

=== Ongoing Experimentation ===

In the section called "Ongoing Experimentation" they describe experimental installations they are using to iterate on and refine their system. They are going to evaluate the systems scaling performance and how well it can predict missing entries from the ratings matrix. They use participants in these installations to collect data in order to evaluate rating prediction. They suggest that future BBBs might improve upon their current design by performing a 'combination of content filtering and collaborative filtering.'

They imagine how GroupLens could change how people consume news on the net. They suggest that GroupLens could be a sort of distributed moderation that improves the quality of articles on newsgroups and reduce the need for moderators. They may also reduce the need for "splits" that break news down into smaller categories. GroupLens might also reduce the need for blacklists. This is interesting because while collaborative filtering systems have been adopted, they often eschew the personalization component (reddit collaborative filtering produces an overall popularity rank that is not personalized.) Their influential vision remains only partly realized.

Next they consider why individuals would participate in contributing to group lens. They suggest that users may feel altruism or guilt in order to "do their share" of rating, but the suppose that ratings will be under-provisioned. This is what happened in one of their pilot tests where the volume of posts was too high. They consider providing external incentives.

This is a bit puzzling since it seems like if users understand the system then they will want to rate articles in order to keep the algorithm trained.

In conclusion they summarize their architecture and approach, with emphasis on the open architecture that allows others to create new clients and BBBs.

GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews

2017-10-04T01:13:31Z

Groceryheist:

{{Summary
|title=GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews
|authors=Paul Resnick, Neophytos Iacovou , Mitesh Suchak, Peter Bergstrom, John Riedl
|url=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=192905
|tags=Human Computer Interaction, Collaborative Filtering, Computer Science, Social Computing, Computer supported cooperative work
|summary

=== GroupLens: Resnick et. al. 1994 ==

They introduce their collaborative filtering system by discussing the setting in which they make an intervention. Usenet news groups were a big deal, over 100MB in traffic per day, with up to 140,000 participants! They were very popular and were becoming important for computing professionals and for academics.

Yet there was a lot of junk on the newsgroups and many found it difficult to receive feedback on what they were sharing. Existing mechanisms for managing the volume of news included the bifurcating tree structure of usenet groups and moderation that filtered out articles that the moderator thought were not appropriate. Newsreaders collapsed articles allowing readers to select titles, and collapse threads so only the top comments are shown. They also allowed readers to blacklist subjects and authors. Some even provided rudimentary search.

Group lens provides a social mechanism for predicting what articles people will like using collaborative filtering.

=== Related Work ===

They situate their system in broader work on information filtering. There are 3 categories of filtering techniques: cognitive, social, and economic (Malone et al.). Content blacklists and search are simple cognitive filters; they look at the content of the documents. Cognitive filters could be made more complex by taking user feedback into account and applying machine learning. Social filtering is like the author blacklist. Collaborative filtering is an advanced kind of social filtering. Social filtering as an advantage because humans are good at reading, understanding, and judging text. Moderation is a primitive form of collaborative filtering.

Tapestry was a prior collaborative filtering system. It accepts evaluations from many people to socially filter news, but it was monolithic and did not aggregate ratings into personalized recommendations.

Economic filtering recommend articles based on the costs and benefits.

=== Design of Grouplens ===

They built Grouplens: a system consisting of Unix and Macintosh clients and servers they call "Better Bit Bureaus."

Their design goals are openness - to allow any Usenet client to participate in Grouplens and the creation of alternative BBBs; Ease of User; Compatibility with Usenet; Scalability, and Privacy.

Usenet is a distributed system, but articles have global identifiers which they can use to track articles.

The BBB servers share ratings with each other to afford scalability to many sites.

There are some lovely diagrams of the netnews architecture and its augmentation by Grouplens.

There are a lot of alternative designs for collaborative filtering, they chose their design because they realized that a group larger than 7 people would probably be required to provision good ratings, but at larger groups sizes people's knowledge of others in the group would be low and anonymity would be more desirable.

They modified three existing news readers with a rating box where users would rate articles from good to bad on a 1-5 scale.

Grouplens reuses the Usenet protocol by publishing ratings to a special purpose newsgroup. This way the ratings get propagated and are available to clients.

How does Grouplens turn ratings into recommendations? BBB models ratings using matrix completion. Their algorithm for matrix completion is based on reinforcement learning, regression, and pairwise correlation coefficients. The method is actually pretty simple. They just take the average of all the ratings weighted by the users correlation with the rater. The assumption is that people who agreed in the past are likely to agree again, which is a pretty bad assumption but leads to reasonable predictions.

They put a lot of effort into modifying each of the usenet clients to conform to the look and feel and normal interaction motifs of the editor. The users appreciated this a lot. It is pretty cool to be able to integrate with multiple ecosystems like this. They also have a cute explanation of threads and triangle collapse interfaces.

=== Scale ===

The also discuss scale issues. How well does GroupLens predict, how fast is it? How much network traffic does it use? How do the BBB machines scale? It turns out that computing the ratings scales super linearly so running the BBB machines could get more expensive. They provide a lot of technical details about how they optimize this or limit the number of ratings to be considered. If they had 1,000,000 users they would need 10GB of network traffic per day! This is a pretty fair amount today. At the time it was enormous!

=== Ongoing Experimentation ===

In the section called "Ongoing Experimentation" they describe experimental installations they are using to iterate on and refine their system. They are going to evaluate the systems scaling performance and how well it can predict missing entries from the ratings matrix. They use participants in these installations to collect data in order to evaluate rating prediction. They suggest that future BBBs might improve upon their current design by performing a 'combination of content filtering and collaborative filtering.'

They imagine how GroupLens could change how people consume news on the net. They suggest that GroupLens could be a sort of distributed moderation that improves the quality of articles on newsgroups and reduce the need for moderators. They may also reduce the need for "splits" that break news down into smaller categories. GroupLens might also reduce the need for blacklists. This is interesting because while collaborative filtering systems have been adopted, they often eschew the personalization component (reddit collaborative filtering produces an overall popularity rank that is not personalized.) Their influential vision remains only partly realized.

Next they consider why individuals would participate in contributing to group lens. They suggest that users may feel altruism or guilt in order to "do their share" of rating, but the suppose that ratings will be under-provisioned. This is what happened in one of their pilot tests where the volume of posts was too high. They consider providing external incentives.

This is a bit puzzling since it seems like if users understand the system then they will want to rate articles in order to keep the algorithm trained.

In conclusion they summarize their architecture and approach, with emphasis on the open architecture that allows others to create new clients and BBBs.
|relevance=This seminal work on collaborative filtering presents Grouplens, a system for crowdsourcing ratings of news articles. The hugely influential system laid the foundation for recommendation engines based on correlating user behaviors. The work anticipates the rise of the systems that aggregate small contributions like rating an article into information about quality, decisions about what content to recommend, and how such systems may structure the ways that humans interact in computer mediated sites.
|journal=Proceeding CSCW '94 Proceedings of the 1994 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work Pages 175-186
|pub_date=1994
|subject=Computer Science
}}

GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews

2017-10-04T01:13:07Z

Groceryheist: Created page with "{{Summary |title=GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews |authors=Paul Resnick, Neophytos Iacovou , Mitesh Suchak, Peter Bergstrom, John Riedl |..."

{{Summary
|title=GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews
|authors=Paul Resnick, Neophytos Iacovou , Mitesh Suchak, Peter Bergstrom, John Riedl
|url=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=192905
|tags=Human Computer Interaction, Collaborative Filtering, Computer Science, Social Computing, Computer supported cooperative work
|summary=== GroupLens: Resnick et. al. 1994 ==

They introduce their collaborative filtering system by discussing the setting in which they make an intervention. Usenet news groups were a big deal, over 100MB in traffic per day, with up to 140,000 participants! They were very popular and were becoming important for computing professionals and for academics.

Yet there was a lot of junk on the newsgroups and many found it difficult to receive feedback on what they were sharing. Existing mechanisms for managing the volume of news included the bifurcating tree structure of usenet groups and moderation that filtered out articles that the moderator thought were not appropriate. Newsreaders collapsed articles allowing readers to select titles, and collapse threads so only the top comments are shown. They also allowed readers to blacklist subjects and authors. Some even provided rudimentary search.

Group lens provides a social mechanism for predicting what articles people will like using collaborative filtering.

=== Related Work ===

They situate their system in broader work on information filtering. There are 3 categories of filtering techniques: cognitive, social, and economic (Malone et al.). Content blacklists and search are simple cognitive filters; they look at the content of the documents. Cognitive filters could be made more complex by taking user feedback into account and applying machine learning. Social filtering is like the author blacklist. Collaborative filtering is an advanced kind of social filtering. Social filtering as an advantage because humans are good at reading, understanding, and judging text. Moderation is a primitive form of collaborative filtering.

Tapestry was a prior collaborative filtering system. It accepts evaluations from many people to socially filter news, but it was monolithic and did not aggregate ratings into personalized recommendations.

Economic filtering recommend articles based on the costs and benefits.

=== Design of Grouplens ===

They built Grouplens: a system consisting of Unix and Macintosh clients and servers they call "Better Bit Bureaus."

Their design goals are openness - to allow any Usenet client to participate in Grouplens and the creation of alternative BBBs; Ease of User; Compatibility with Usenet; Scalability, and Privacy.

Usenet is a distributed system, but articles have global identifiers which they can use to track articles.

The BBB servers share ratings with each other to afford scalability to many sites.

There are some lovely diagrams of the netnews architecture and its augmentation by Grouplens.

There are a lot of alternative designs for collaborative filtering, they chose their design because they realized that a group larger than 7 people would probably be required to provision good ratings, but at larger groups sizes people's knowledge of others in the group would be low and anonymity would be more desirable.

They modified three existing news readers with a rating box where users would rate articles from good to bad on a 1-5 scale.

Grouplens reuses the Usenet protocol by publishing ratings to a special purpose newsgroup. This way the ratings get propagated and are available to clients.

How does Grouplens turn ratings into recommendations? BBB models ratings using matrix completion. Their algorithm for matrix completion is based on reinforcement learning, regression, and pairwise correlation coefficients. The method is actually pretty simple. They just take the average of all the ratings weighted by the users correlation with the rater. The assumption is that people who agreed in the past are likely to agree again, which is a pretty bad assumption but leads to reasonable predictions.

They put a lot of effort into modifying each of the usenet clients to conform to the look and feel and normal interaction motifs of the editor. The users appreciated this a lot. It is pretty cool to be able to integrate with multiple ecosystems like this. They also have a cute explanation of threads and triangle collapse interfaces.

=== Scale ===

The also discuss scale issues. How well does GroupLens predict, how fast is it? How much network traffic does it use? How do the BBB machines scale? It turns out that computing the ratings scales super linearly so running the BBB machines could get more expensive. They provide a lot of technical details about how they optimize this or limit the number of ratings to be considered. If they had 1,000,000 users they would need 10GB of network traffic per day! This is a pretty fair amount today. At the time it was enormous!

=== Ongoing Experimentation ===

In the section called "Ongoing Experimentation" they describe experimental installations they are using to iterate on and refine their system. They are going to evaluate the systems scaling performance and how well it can predict missing entries from the ratings matrix. They use participants in these installations to collect data in order to evaluate rating prediction. They suggest that future BBBs might improve upon their current design by performing a 'combination of content filtering and collaborative filtering.'

They imagine how GroupLens could change how people consume news on the net. They suggest that GroupLens could be a sort of distributed moderation that improves the quality of articles on newsgroups and reduce the need for moderators. They may also reduce the need for "splits" that break news down into smaller categories. GroupLens might also reduce the need for blacklists. This is interesting because while collaborative filtering systems have been adopted, they often eschew the personalization component (reddit collaborative filtering produces an overall popularity rank that is not personalized.) Their influential vision remains only partly realized.

Next they consider why individuals would participate in contributing to group lens. They suggest that users may feel altruism or guilt in order to "do their share" of rating, but the suppose that ratings will be under-provisioned. This is what happened in one of their pilot tests where the volume of posts was too high. They consider providing external incentives.

This is a bit puzzling since it seems like if users understand the system then they will want to rate articles in order to keep the algorithm trained.

In conclusion they summarize their architecture and approach, with emphasis on the open architecture that allows others to create new clients and BBBs.
|relevance=This seminal work on collaborative filtering presents Grouplens, a system for crowdsourcing ratings of news articles. The hugely influential system laid the foundation for recommendation engines based on correlating user behaviors. The work anticipates the rise of the systems that aggregate small contributions like rating an article into information about quality, decisions about what content to recommend, and how such systems may structure the ways that humans interact in computer mediated sites.
|journal=Proceeding CSCW '94 Proceedings of the 1994 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work Pages 175-186
|pub_date=1994
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Beyond Being There

2017-10-02T20:36:15Z

Groceryheist:

{{Summary
|title=Beyond Being There
|authors=Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta
|summary=This is a classic CHI paper that marks a pivot in the field of telecommunications and early social computing from pursuit of technologies that reproduce the phenomenological experience of face-to-face communication---referred to as 'being there' to taking advantage of the strengths of new media in order to provide new mechanisms for meeting underlying communication needs.

They introduce a conception of the 'the telecommunication problem', with which to do battle.

"To create systems that allow the same richness and variety of interaction, but with distance no longer an issue .... those at a distance should be at no disadvantage to those who are physically present."

The history of telecommunications pursues establishing audio and video connections in attempt to create a sense of 'being there'.

Two social psychological measures in decreasing order:
1. social presence
2. information richness

f2f >>> audio/visual > audio >>> written.
Audio visual is closer to audio than to f2f.

Are telecom a/v systems ever going to achieve parity with f2f?

Their argument is no, people will always prefer f2f.

The goal should be instead to use same media when close as when far.

'We must develop tools that go beyond being there'

Shoes provide advantages over running barefoot -- they correct problems of our natural condition and enhance performance. Why not telcom to do the same thing?

== Framing human communication: needs, media, mechanisms ==

'''Needs''' are human requirements for communication, e.g. cue variety, feedback, message personalization, being reminded of a need to talk, having a communication channel, turn taking, repair, stylized openings... ....

'''Media''' are literally the medium that carry communication messages. In the case of F2F communication this means physically proximate reality.

'''Mechanisms''' are the ways a medium meets the needs.

Mechanisms are tightly coupled to the media.
Needs are media independent -- universal.

Therefore we should not be committed to reproducing the mechanisms of f2f communication in new media. Imitation will never be as good as the real thing because new and old media have relative strengths.

"Focus not on the tele- part, but the commmunication part"

Email is a good example because it "exploits the asynchronous nature of the electronic medium rather than attempting to imitate synchronous physical interactions."

They are working on a system the call an "ephemeral interest group." This are sites for discussion about a topic or event that are meant to be short lived unlike a normal bulletin board. They aim to lower the cost of creating and disposing of groups in order to create a more informal space. Their goal is for people who use the system to feel more like a part of a community, even if they are not co-located, than people who are elsewhere."

They are also working on a sort of personal profile for an individual's network presence. Their aim is to decrease the cost of initiating contact and to support the maintenance of interactions over time.

They also raise anonymity, how it may promote truthfulness and affordances not available in F2F.

They also propose semi-synchronous mechanisms that might batch synchronous responses to publish them asynchronously. Thinking about semisynchronization might open up new mechanisms.

On page 5 they speculate a bit about the cellular future.

On page 6 they suggest some ways that CMC might improve upon "unassisted face-to-face interaction." These are clarity by helping to resolve reference ambiguation, feedback (they are thinking about tablet gestures, but these days you might think about emoji), archive (obvious).

Finally they suggest that "auditory paper" "will some day,even without the face-to-face component be viewed as having greater social presence than unassisted face-to-face conversations."

== Potential Criticisms ==
Next they turn to addressing potential criticisms, they say they are taking an extreme position in order to make their point clear.

# Imitation has advantages of familiarity, but imperfect imitations will still be unfamiliar.
# Cultural change is required to use new media, but culture can change to incorporate new media mechanisms if they "provide better ways of meeting underlying requirements".
# F2F affords rich intersubjectivity, but there isn't any reason that intersubjectivity cannot be provided in other ways. Disabling
intersubjectivity can be useful since participating in intersubjetivity is demanding.

== Conclusions ==

In conclusion they summarize their argument, emphasizing the importance of understanding fundamental communication needs that are "not ideally met in the medium of physical proximity" and working on mechanisms that leverage new media to meet these needs.

We don't need to abolish distance, but rather abolish "our current concept of 'being there'"
|relevance=This paper was a very big deal in the field of human computer interaction. It was highly prescient, anticipating profiles, ephemeral message boards, the importance of anonymity, and mobile computing.
|journal=CHI '92
|pub_date=1992
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Beyond Being There

2017-10-02T20:35:50Z

Groceryheist:

{{Summary
|title=Beyond Being There
|authors=Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta
|summary=This is a classic CHI paper that marks a pivot in the field of telecommunications and early social computing from pursuit of technologies that reproduce the phenomenological experience of face-to-face communication---referred to as 'being there' to taking advantage of the strengths of new media in order to provide new mechanisms for meeting underlying communication needs.

They introduce a conception of the 'the telecommunication problem', with which to do battle.

"To create systems that allow the same richness and variety of interaction, but with distance no longer an issue .... those at a distance should be at no disadvantage to those who are physically present."

The history of telecommunications pursues establishing audio and video connections in attempt to create a sense of 'being there'.

Two social psychological measures in decreasing order:
1. social presence
2. information richness

f2f >>> audio/visual > audio >>> written.
Audio visual is closer to audio than to f2f.

Are telecom a/v systems ever going to achieve parity with f2f?

Their argument is no, people will always prefer f2f.

The goal should be instead to use same media when close as when far.

'We must develop tools that go beyond being there'

Shoes provide advantages over running barefoot -- they correct problems of our natural condition and enhance performance. Why not telcom to do the same thing?

== Framing human communication: needs, media, mechanisms ==

'''Needs''' are human requirements for communication, e.g. cue variety, feedback, message personalization, being reminded of a need to talk, having a communication channel, turn taking, repair, stylized openings... ....

'''Media''' are literally the medium that carry communication messages. In the case of F2F communication this means physically proximate reality.

'''Mechanisms''' are the ways a medium meets the needs.

Mechanisms are tightly coupled to the media.
Needs are media independent -- universal.

Therefore we should not be committed to reproducing the mechanisms of f2f communication in new media. Imitation will never be as good as the real thing because new and old media have relative strengths.

"Focus not on the tele- part, but the commmunication part"

Email is a good example because it "exploits the asynchronous nature of the electronic medium rather than attempting to imitate synchronous physical interactions."

They are working on a system the call an "ephemeral interest group." This are sites for discussion about a topic or event that are meant to be short lived unlike a normal bulletin board. They aim to lower the cost of creating and disposing of groups in order to create a more informal space. Their goal is for people who use the system to feel more like a part of a community, even if they are not co-located, than people who are elsewhere."

They are also working on a sort of personal profile for an individual's network presence. Their aim is to decrease the cost of initiating contact and to support the maintenance of interactions over time.

They also raise anonymity, how it may promote truthfulness and affordances not available in F2F.

They also propose semi-synchronous mechanisms that might batch synchronous responses to publish them asynchronously. Thinking about semisynchronization might open up new mechanisms.

On page 5 they speculate a bit about the cellular future.

On page 6 they suggest some ways that CMC might improve upon "unassisted face-to-face interaction." These are clarity by helping to resolve reference ambiguation, feedback (they are thinking about tablet gestures, but these days you might think about emoji), archive (obvious).

Finally they suggest that "auditory paper" "will some day,even without the face-to-face component be viewed as having greater social presence than unassisted face-to-face conversations."

== Potential Criticisms ==
Next they turn to addressing potential criticisms, they say they are taking an extreme position in order to make their point clear.

#. Imitation has advantages of familiarity, but imperfect imitations will still be unfamiliar.
#. Cultural change is required to use new media, but culture can change to incorporate new media mechanisms if they "provide better ways of meeting underlying requirements".
#. F2F affords rich intersubjectivity, but there isn't any reason that intersubjectivity cannot be provided in other ways. Disabling
intersubjectivity can be useful since participating in intersubjetivity is demanding.

== Conclusions ==

In conclusion they summarize their argument, emphasizing the importance of understanding fundamental communication needs that are "not ideally met in the medium of physical proximity" and working on mechanisms that leverage new media to meet these needs.

We don't need to abolish distance, but rather abolish "our current concept of 'being there'"
|relevance=This paper was a very big deal in the field of human computer interaction. It was highly prescient, anticipating profiles, ephemeral message boards, the importance of anonymity, and mobile computing.
|journal=CHI '92
|pub_date=1992
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Beyond Being There

2017-10-02T20:35:10Z

Groceryheist:

{{Summary
|title=Beyond Being There
|authors=Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta
|summary=This is a classic CHI paper that marks a pivot in the field of telecommunications and early social computing from pursuit of technologies that reproduce the phenomenological experience of face-to-face communication---referred to as 'being there' to taking advantage of the strengths of new media in order to provide new mechanisms for meeting underlying communication needs.

They introduce a conception of the 'the telecommunication problem', with which to do battle.

"To create systems that allow the same richness and variety of interaction, but with distance no longer an issue .... those at a distance should be at no disadvantage to those who are physically present."

The history of telecommunications pursues establishing audio and video connections in attempt to create a sense of 'being there'.

Two social psychological measures in decreasing order:
1. social presence
2. information richness

f2f >>> audio/visual > audio >>> written.
Audio visual is closer to audio than to f2f.

Are telecom a/v systems ever going to achieve parity with f2f?

Their argument is no, people will always prefer f2f.

The goal should be instead to use same media when close as when far.

'We must develop tools that go beyond being there'

Shoes provide advantages over running barefoot -- they correct problems of our natural condition and enhance performance. Why not telcom to do the same thing?

== Framing human communication: needs, media, mechanisms ==

'''Needs''' are human requirements for communication, e.g. cue variety, feedback, message personalization, being reminded of a need to talk, having a communication channel, turn taking, repair, stylized openings... ....

'''Media''' are literally the medium that carry communication messages. In the case of F2F communication this means physically proximate reality.

'''Mechanisms''' are the ways a medium meets the needs.

Mechanisms are tightly coupled to the media.
Needs are media independent -- universal.

Therefore we should not be committed to reproducing the mechanisms of f2f communication in new media. Imitation will never be as good as the real thing because new and old media have relative strengths.

"Focus not on the tele- part, but the commmunication part"

Email is a good example because it "exploits the asynchronous nature of the electronic medium rather than attempting to imitate synchronous physical interactions."

They are working on a system the call an "ephemeral interest group." This are sites for discussion about a topic or event that are meant to be short lived unlike a normal bulletin board. They aim to lower the cost of creating and disposing of groups in order to create a more informal space. Their goal is for people who use the system to feel more like a part of a community, even if they are not co-located, than people who are elsewhere."

They are also working on a sort of personal profile for an individual's network presence. Their aim is to decrease the cost of initiating contact and to support the maintenance of interactions over time.

They also raise anonymity, how it may promote truthfulness and affordances not available in F2F.

They also propose semi-synchronous mechanisms that might batch synchronous responses to publish them asynchronously. Thinking about semisynchronization might open up new mechanisms.

On page 5 they speculate a bit about the cellular future.

On page 6 they suggest some ways that CMC might improve upon "unassisted face-to-face interaction." These are clarity by helping to resolve reference ambiguation, feedback (they are thinking about tablet gestures, but these days you might think about emoji), archive (obvious).

Finally they suggest that "auditory paper" "will some day,even without the face-to-face component be viewed as having greater social presence than unassisted face-to-face conversations."

== Potential Criticisms ==
Next they turn to addressing potential criticisms, they say they are taking an extreme position in order to make their point clear.

1. Imitation has advantages of familiarity, but imperfect imitations will still be unfamiliar.
2. Cultural change is required to use new media, but culture can change to incorporate new media mechanisms if they "provide better ways of meeting underlying requirements".
3. F2F affords rich intersubjectivity, but there isn't any reason that intersubjectivity cannot be provided in other ways. Disabling
intersubjectivity can be useful since participating in intersubjetivity is demanding.

== Conclusions ==

In conclusion they summarize their argument, emphasizing the importance of understanding fundamental communication needs that are "not ideally met in the medium of physical proximity" and working on mechanisms that leverage new media to meet these needs.

We don't need to abolish distance, but rather abolish "our current concept of 'being there'"
|relevance=This paper was a very big deal in the field of human computer interaction. It was highly prescient, anticipating profiles, ephemeral message boards, the importance of anonymity, and mobile computing.
|journal=CHI '92
|pub_date=1992
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Beyond Being There

2017-10-02T20:33:13Z

Groceryheist:

{{Summary
|title=Beyond Being There
|authors=Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta
|summary=This is a classic CHI paper that marks a pivot in the field of telecommunications and early social computing from pursuit of technologies that reproduce the phenomenological experience of face-to-face communication---referred to as 'being there' to taking advantage of the strengths of new media in order to provide new mechanisms for meeting underlying communication needs.

They introduce a conception of the 'the telecommunication problem', with which to do battle.

"To create systems that allow the same richness and variety of interaction, but with distance no longer an issue .... those at a distance should be at no disadvantage to those who are physically present."

The history of telecommunications pursues establishing audio and video connections in attempt to create a sense of 'being there'.

Two social psychological measures in decreasing order:
1. social presence
2. information richness

f2f >>> audio/visual > audio >>> written.
Audio visual is closer to audio than to f2f.

Are telecom a/v systems ever going to achieve parity with f2f?

Their argument is no, people will always prefer f2f.

The goal should be instead to use same media when close as when far.

'We must develop tools that go beyond being there'

Shoes provide advantages over running barefoot -- they correct problems of our natural condition and enhance performance. Why not telcom to do the same thing?

== Framing human communication: needs, media, mechanisms ==

- needs :: human requirements for communication, e.g. cue variety, feedback, message personalization, being reminded of a need to talk, having a communication channel, turn taking, repair, stylized openings... ....

- media :: e.g. physically proximate reality (f2f)

- mechanisms :: the ways a medium meets the needs.

Mechanisms are tightly coupled to the media.
Needs are media independent -- universal.

Therefore we should not be committed to reproducing the mechanisms of f2f communication in new media. Imitation will never be as good as the real thing because new and old media have relative strengths.

"Focus not on the tele- part, but the commmunication part"

Email is a good example because it "exploits the asynchronous nature of the electronic medium rather than attempting to imitate synchronous physical interactions."

They are working on a system the call an "ephemeral interest group." This are sites for discussion about a topic or event that are meant to be short lived unlike a normal bulletin board. They aim to lower the cost of creating and disposing of groups in order to create a more informal space. Their goal is for people who use the system to feel more like a part of a community, even if they are not co-located, than people who are elsewhere."

They are also working on a sort of personal profile for an individual's network presence. Their aim is to decrease the cost of initiating contact and to support the maintenance of interactions over time.

They also raise anonymity, how it may promote truthfulness and affordances not available in F2F.

They also propose semi-synchronous mechanisms that might batch synchronous responses to publish them asynchronously. Thinking about semisynchronization might open up new mechanisms.

On page 5 they speculate a bit about the cellular future.

On page 6 they suggest some ways that CMC might improve upon "unassisted face-to-face interaction." These are clarity by helping to resolve reference ambiguation, feedback (they are thinking about tablet gestures, but these days you might think about emoji), archive (obvious).

Finally they suggest that "auditory paper" "will some day,even without the face-to-face component be viewed as having greater social presence than unassisted face-to-face conversations."

== Potential Criticisms ==
Next they turn to addressing potential criticisms, they say they are taking an extreme position in order to make their point clear.

1. Imitation has advantages of familiarity, but imperfect imitations will still be unfamiliar.
2. Cultural change is required to use new media, but culture can change to incorporate new media mechanisms if they "provide better ways of meeting underlying requirements".
3. F2F affords rich intersubjectivity, but there isn't any reason that intersubjectivity cannot be provided in other ways. Disabling
intersubjectivity can be useful since participating in intersubjetivity is demanding.

== Conclusions ==

In conclusion they summarize their argument, emphasizing the importance of understanding fundamental communication needs that are "not ideally met in the medium of physical proximity" and working on mechanisms that leverage new media to meet these needs.

We don't need to abolish distance, but rather abolish "our current concept of 'being there'"
|relevance=This paper was a very big deal in the field of human computer interaction. It was highly prescient, anticipating profiles, ephemeral message boards, the importance of anonymity, and mobile computing.
|journal=CHI '92
|pub_date=1992
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Beyond Being There

2017-10-02T20:31:22Z

Groceryheist:

{{Summary
|title=Beyond Being There
|authors=Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta
|summary=This is a classic CHI paper that marks a pivot in the field of telecommunications and early social computing from pursuit of technologies that reproduce the phenomenological experience of face-to-face communication---referred to as 'being there' to taking advantage of the strengths of new media in order to provide new mechanisms for meeting underlying communication needs.

They introduce a conception of the 'the telecommunication problem', with which to do battle.

"To create systems that allow the same richness and variety of interaction, but with distance no longer an issue .... those at a distance should be at no disadvantage to those who are physically present."

The history of telecommunications pursues establishing audio and video connections in attempt to create a sense of 'being there'.

Two social psychological measures in decreasing order:
- social presence :: f2f ---- audio/visual -- audio ---- written and audio visual is closer to audio than to f2f.

Are telecom a/v systems ever going to achieve parity with f2f?

Their argument is no, people will always prefer f2f.

The goal should be instead to use same media when close as when far.

'We must develop tools that go beyond being there'

Shoes provide advantages over running barefoot -- they correct problems of our natural condition and enhance performance. Why not telcom to do the same thing?

== Framing human communication: needs, media, mechanisms ==

- needs :: human requirements for communication, e.g. cue variety, feedback, message personalization, being reminded of a need to talk, having a communication channel, turn taking, repair, stylized openings... ....

- media :: e.g. physically proximate reality (f2f)

- mechanisms :: the ways a medium meets the needs.

Mechanisms are tightly coupled to the media.
Needs are media independent -- universal.

Therefore we should not be committed to reproducing the mechanisms of f2f communication in new media. Imitation will never be as good as the real thing because new and old media have relative strengths.

"Focus not on the tele- part, but the commmunication part"

Email is a good example because it "exploits the asynchronous nature of the electronic medium rather than attempting to imitate synchronous physical interactions."

They are working on a system the call an "ephemeral interest group." This are sites for discussion about a topic or event that are meant to be short lived unlike a normal bulletin board. They aim to lower the cost of creating and disposing of groups in order to create a more informal space. Their goal is for people who use the system to feel more like a part of a community, even if they are not co-located, than people who are elsewhere."

They are also working on a sort of personal profile for an individual's network presence. Their aim is to decrease the cost of initiating contact and to support the maintenance of interactions over time.

They also raise anonymity, how it may promote truthfulness and affordances not available in F2F.

They also propose semi-synchronous mechanisms that might batch synchronous responses to publish them asynchronously. Thinking about semisynchronization might open up new mechanisms.

On page 5 they speculate a bit about the cellular future.

On page 6 they suggest some ways that CMC might improve upon "unassisted face-to-face interaction." These are clarity by helping to resolve reference ambiguation, feedback (they are thinking about tablet gestures, but these days you might think about emoji), archive (obvious).

Finally they suggest that "auditory paper" "will some day,even without the face-to-face component be viewed as having greater social presence than unassisted face-to-face conversations."

== Potential Criticisms ==
Next they turn to addressing potential criticisms, they say they are taking an extreme position in order to make their point clear.

1. Imitation has advantages of familiarity, but imperfect imitations will still be unfamiliar.
2. Cultural change is required to use new media, but culture can change to incorporate new media mechanisms if they "provide better ways of meeting underlying requirements".
3. F2F affords rich intersubjectivity, but there isn't any reason that intersubjectivity cannot be provided in other ways. Disabling
intersubjectivity can be useful since participating in intersubjetivity is demanding.

== Conclusions ==

In conclusion they summarize their argument, emphasizing the importance of understanding fundamental communication needs that are "not ideally met in the medium of physical proximity" and working on mechanisms that leverage new media to meet these needs.

We don't need to abolish distance, but rather abolish "our current concept of 'being there'"
|relevance=This paper was a very big deal in the field of human computer interaction. It was highly prescient, anticipating profiles, ephemeral message boards, the importance of anonymity, and mobile computing.
|journal=CHI '92
|pub_date=1992
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Beyond Being There

2017-10-02T20:30:18Z

Groceryheist: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Beyond Being There |authors=Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta |summary=This is a classic CHI paper that marks a pivot in the field of telecommunications and earl..."

{{Summary
|title=Beyond Being There
|authors=Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta
|summary=This is a classic CHI paper that marks a pivot in the field of telecommunications and early social computing from pursuit of technologies that reproduce the phenomenological experience of face-to-face communication---referred to as 'being there' to taking advantage of the strengths of new media in order to provide new mechanisms for meeting underlying communication needs.

They introduce a conception of the 'the telecommunication problem', with which to do battle.

"To create systems that allow the same richness and variety of interaction, but with distance no longer an issue .... those at a distance should be at no disadvantage to those who are physically present."

The history of telecommunications pursues establishing audio and video connections in attempt to create a sense of 'being there'.

Two social psychological measures in decreasing order:
- social presence :: f2f ---- audio/visual -- audio ---- written and audio visual is closer to audio than to f2f.

Are telecom a/v systems ever going to achieve parity with f2f?

Their argument is no, people will always prefer f2f.

The goal should be instead to use same media when close as when far.

'We must develop tools that go beyond being there'

Shoes provide advantages over running barefoot -- they correct problems of our natural condition and enhance performance. Why not telcom to do the same thing?

*** Framing human communication: needs, media, mechanisms

- needs :: human requirements for communication, e.g. cue variety, feedback, message personalization, being reminded of a need to talk, having a communication channel, turn taking, repair, stylized openings... ....

- media :: e.g. physically proximate reality (f2f)

- mechanisms :: the ways a medium meets the needs.

Mechanisms are tightly coupled to the media.
Needs are media independent -- universal.

Therefore we should not be committed to reproducing the mechanisms of f2f communication in new media. Imitation will never be as good as the real thing because new and old media have relative strengths.

"Focus not on the tele- part, but the commmunication part"

Email is a good example because it "exploits the asynchronous nature of the electronic medium rather than attempting to imitate synchronous physical interactions."

They are working on a system the call an "ephemeral interest group." This are sites for discussion about a topic or event that are meant to be short lived unlike a normal bulletin board. They aim to lower the cost of creating and disposing of groups in order to create a more informal space. Their goal is for people who use the system to feel more like a part of a community, even if they are not co-located, than people who are elsewhere."

They are also working on a sort of personal profile for an individual's network presence. Their aim is to decrease the cost of initiating contact and to support the maintenance of interactions over time.

They also raise anonymity, how it may promote truthfulness and affordances not available in F2F.

They also propose semi-synchronous mechanisms that might batch synchronous responses to publish them asynchronously. Thinking about semisynchronization might open up new mechanisms.

On page 5 they speculate a bit about the cellular future.

On page 6 they suggest some ways that CMC might improve upon "unassisted face-to-face interaction." These are clarity by helping to resolve reference ambiguation, feedback (they are thinking about tablet gestures, but these days you might think about emoji), archive (obvious).

Finally they suggest that "auditory paper" "will some day,even without the face-to-face component be viewed as having greater social presence than unassisted face-to-face conversations."

Next they turn to addressing potential criticisms, they say they are taking an extreme position in order to make their point clear.

1. Imitation has advantages of familiarity, but imperfect imitations will still be unfamiliar.
2. Cultural change is required to use new media, but culture can change to incorporate new media mechanisms if they "provide better ways of meeting underlying requirements".
3. F2F affords rich intersubjectivity, but there isn't any reason that intersubjectivity cannot be provided in other ways. Disabling intersubjectivity can be useful since participating in intersubjetivity is demanding.

In conclusion they summarize their argument, emphasizing the importance of understanding fundamental communication needs that are "not ideally met in the medium of physical proximity" and working on mechanisms that leverage new media to meet these needs.

We don't need to abolish distance, but rather abolish "our current concept of 'being there'"
|relevance=This paper was a very big deal in the field of human computer interaction. It was highly prescient, anticipating profiles, ephemeral message boards, the importance of anonymity, and mobile computing.
|journal=CHI '92
|pub_date=1992
|subject=Computer Science
}}