CSCW by Depe at Universität Siegen

• Directly related to local knowledge
  • Who’s around
  • What they’re up to
  • Whether they’re available 

• Provides serendipitous opportunities for cooperation
• Fostered by physical proximity

• CSCW; Generic term which combines the understanding of the way people work in groups, with the enabling technologies of computer networking, and associated hardware, software, services and techniques.
• Communication is one key factor in enabling cooperative work
• Necessary for the social construction of meaning (especially the shared

  meaning in an socio-cultural context)

• Basic premise of coordination, and hence cooperation

1. Cooperation
2. Coordination 
3. Communication

• Knowledge of a group‘s activities in a common/shared work space
• Single place software: awareness about your own actions and responsibilities
• Shared workspaces
  • Knowledge about other people‘s tasks
  • Certain dynamics within the group
  • State of work progress
  • Supporting artefacts: documents and tools

• Social Presence Theory
  • Social presence: a communicator’s sense of awareness of the presence of an interaction partner. Increased presence leads to a better person perception
  • Social presence is both influenced by the quality of the media and the users’ perception of the media
• Media Richness Theory
  • Media richness: the ability of communication media to convey a large amount of information in different forms
• Implications for Groupware Systems
  • The “right” levels of richness and social presence depend on the task and context
  • How the choice of a digital media can affect the users view on work processes
  • Digital media changes our communication (or our perception) and has to be

    considered when building / implementing a groupware system.

  • Digital media can and will be used to create a “common ground” between the
    users which will eventually change the way employees cooperate and perceive
    each other

  • The choice of the digital medium must fit the environment (both the technical and the social) in which it will be deployed, i.e. the context.

• It draws knowledge from other fields for design, elaboration & conduction.
• CS, Hardware Engineering: to understand role of tech in work environment
• Sociology: Sociological aspects concerning group work. How people work together and accomplish shared goals. Patterns of social relationship, interaction, cultural aspects
• Anthropology: CSCW is about people’s practices, the use of technology for cooperative work. Anthropology provides method & approach that facilitates study of such practices and makes sense of the observed behavior
• Organizational Studies: provides focus on how people construct organizational structure with the help of technology, in how technology affords and effects processes and practices. Shapes social relations and institutions that affect people’s lives.
• Information Management: The mediation & acquisition in sharing of information, consequences.
• Communication Engineering: Cooperation & coordination

• Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals.
• Groupware can be divided into three categories depending on the level of collaboration:
  • Communication: unstructured interchange of information. E.g. phone call, IM chat
  • Collaboration: interactive work toward a shared goal. E.g. electronic meeting room, brainstorming, voting
  • Coordination: complex interdependent work toward a shared goal, e.g. workflow management system

• Coordination:  the act of managing interdependencies between activities
• The act of working together harmoniously.
• One type of coordination: division of labor. When we split a task into several smaller tasks, you’ll be naturally creating interdependencies. After all, these subtasks sure comes together once again, somehow sometime to account for the task from where they originated
• Coordination is nearly invisible when properly executed. One would only note coordination if it is lacking, since it would create noise in the process.

• Coordination Mechanism: a protocol involving a set of explicit conventions and prescribed procedures to which people can refer to
• Made tangible by artifact, which usually follow a standard format and make clear the rules for successful cooperation in the context under consideration.
• In so doing this mechanism mediates the articulation of distributed activities that have been allocated to different actors.
• Maps, scripts and checklists are few examples that can be used to support specific tasks. They can provide an overview of the task at hand.
• Ultimately coordination mechanisms should reduce the complexity of articulation work involved in coordination.

Advantages

• Provide resources for coordination, by facilitating structuring & planning of activities. Being mindful of actions of every cooperative actors can facilitate teamwork & contribute to harmonious cooperation. 
• Reduced tasks, especially referring to double work. Being aware of what others are doing would prevent actors would work on something someone else is working on. Working on different things can potentially lead to performance improvement
• Decrease articulation work during cooperative initiative. Knowing what other people are doing & current state of each activity help people to plan their own actions without really having to ask other people about when they should expect the inputs they need for their own work.
• Support for switching between individual and collaborative modes
• Support for spontaneous, informal communication
• Context for interpretation of actions and communication

• Informal Awareness
  • Directly related to local knowledge
    • Who’s around
    • What they’re up to
    • Whether they’re available
  • Provides serendipitous opportunities for cooperation
  • Fostered by physical proximity
• Conversational Awareness
  • Cues during conversation
    • Visual (Facial expressions, Eye contact)
    • Gestures (Verbal, Intonation)
    • Usage of particular words
  • Support adjustments and adaptations for smooth progress of cooperation
• Structural Awareness
  • Knowledge of a group’s organisation and of the working relationships within it
  • Focus on
    • Roles
    • Rules of interaction
    • Power and status relationships
  • Support to smooth operation of groups and reduction of the amount of coordination needed
• Workspace Awareness
  • Knowledge of a group‘s activities in a common/shared work space
  • Single place software: awareness about your own actions and responsibilities
  • Shared workspaces
    • Knowledge about other people‘s tasks
    • Certain dynamics within the group
    • State of work progress
    • Supporting artefacts: documents and tools

• generic term which combines the understanding of the way people work in groups, with the enabling technologies of computer networking, and associated hardware, software, services and techniques.
• It draws knowledge from other fields for design, elaboration & conduction.
• Represent[s] a growing recognition of the challenges of synchronizing the social and technical, and the need to revisit both over time.
• Cooperation, Coordination, Communication