Trust is an integral element of any collaboration. We sought to investigate the interplay among trust, risk, and reliance within the context of Global Systems Engineering (GSE) teams. To this end, we conducted an empirical study of individuals' processes and considerations when presented with hypothetical scenarios that required long-term and short-term commitments, in addition to relinquishing control to others in their team. In this paper, we present the results of our 1-1 interviews of 57 individuals collaborating in GSE teams within five organizations. Our results suggest that study participants often readily trust their peers and those higher in the organizational hierarchy when no long-term commitment is required, and the participant retains control of the scenario. Our study findings also suggest that this finding does not necessarily extend to scenarios in which their decision entailed loss of control and thus higher risk and reliance. Our investigation of an individual's decision-making processes and the influence of trust on these processes provide us with insights that can be used to refine GSE managers' strategies and guide future research.

Trust remains a challenge in globally distributed development teams. In order to investigate how trust plays out in this context, we conducted a qualitative study of 5 multi-national IT organizations. We interviewed 58 individuals across 10 countries and made two principal findings. First, study participants described trust in terms of their expectations of their colleagues. These expectations fell into one of three dimensions: that socially correct behavior will persist, that team members possess technical competency, and that individuals will demonstrate concern for others. Second, our study participants described trust as a dynamic process, with phases including formation, dissolution, adjustment and restoration. We provide new insights into these dimensions and phases of trust within distributed teams which extend existing literature. Our study also provides guidelines on effective practices within distributed teams in addition to providing implications for the extension of software engineering and collaboration tools.

Trust is generally considered a key element of effective and productive distributed team collaborations. In this paper, we report the results of our investigation into the factors that engender trust in Global Systems Engineering (GSE) teams in five multinational organizations. We extend our previous work by conducting a new field study focused solely on factors that engender trust and identify the implications of these factors. Our work provides significant contributions to practitioners, researchers and tool developers. Managers working in study field sites have confirmed that our findings will be used to inform future team management strategies. Our results can also be used to structure and guide future research in this field, as it identifies gaps in existing literature. Finally, our findings can be used to inform the development of future tools that aim to support collaborative work in general and GSE teams specifically.

We present the results of a qualitative study of the use of social computing technologies by volunteer coordinators at nonprofit organizations. The work of volunteer coordinators is bridge-building work - bringing together numerous public constituencies as well as constituencies within their organizations. One might expect this class of work to be well supported by social software, some of which has been found to enable bridging social capital. However, we find that, in many ways, this class of technology fails to adequately support volunteer coordinators' bridge-building work. We discuss a number of strategies for bridge-building via social computing technologies, numerous challenges faced by volunteer coordinators in their use of these technologies, and opportunities for designing social software to better support bridge-building between organizations and the public.

In this paper we investigate the role blogs played within the context of the Egyptian revolution of early 2011 using blog data authored between 2004-2011. We conducted topic modeling analysis to gain a longitudinal view of the interaction of societal, personal and revolutionary blog topics over this period. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis of blog posts during the period that bracketed the political uprising revealed Egyptian bloggers' concerns. Reporting events and supplying commentary provided bloggers with a means to voice dissent against institutionalized power represented by the government-controlled media. In short, blogs reveal a counter-narrative to the government-supplied version of events in Egypt during the 18-day uprising. These narratives offer rich documentation of how blogs, and perhaps social media more generally, can be utilized by individuals operating under repressive conditions.

Disaster-related research in human-centered computing has typically focused on the shorter-term, emergency period of a disaster event, whereas effects of some crises are long-term, lasting years. Social media archived on the Internet provides researchers the opportunity to examine societal reactions to a disaster over time. In this paper we examine how blogs written during a protracted conflict might reflect a collective view of the event. The sheer amount of data originating from the Internet about a significant event poses a challenge to researchers; we employ topic modeling and pronoun analysis as methods to analyze such large-scale data. First, we discovered that blog war topics temporally tracked the actual, measurable violence in the society suggesting that blog content can be an indicator of the health or state of the affected population. We also found that people exhibited a collective identity when they blogged about war, as evidenced by a higher use of first-person plural pronouns compared to blogging on other topics. Blogging about daily life decreased as violence in the society increased; when violence waned, there was a resurgence of daily life topics, potentially illustrating how a society returns to normalcy.

We sought to understand the role that Web 2.0 technologies play in supporting the development of trust in globally distributed development teams. We found the use of Web 2.0 technologies to be minimal, with less than 25% of our participants reporting using them and many reporting the disadvantages of adopting them. In response, we sought to understand the factors that led to the use and non-use of these technologies in distributed development teams. We adopted a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze data collected from 61 interviewees representing all common roles in systems development. We discovered six factors that influenced the use and non-use of Web 2.0 technology. We present a proclivity model to frame our findings as well as our conclusions about the interrelationships between the results of our qualitative and quantitative analyses. We also present implications for the design of collaboration tools, which could lead to greater support and usage by distributed developers.

Many people manage a complex assortment of digital information in their lives. Volunteer coordinators at nonprofit organizations are no exception; they collectively manage information about millions of volunteers every year. Yet current information management systems are insufficient for their needs. In this paper, we present results of a qualitative study of the information management practices of volunteer coordinators. We identify the resource constraints and the diverse and fluid information needs, stakeholders, and work contexts that motivate their information management strategies. We characterize the assemblages of information systems that volunteer coordinators have created to satisfice their needs as 'homebrew databases.' Finally, we identify additional information management challenges that result from the use of these 'homebrew databases,' highlighting deficiencies in the appropriateness and usability of databases and information management systems, more generally.

Person-to-person knowledge sharing is considered a key aspect of any effective collaboration. Many studies have investigated what motivates team members to share knowledge, but few have explored the role trust plays in knowledge seeking and acceptance. We conducted an empirical field study to investigate trust in distributed teams and its influence on knowledge seeking and acceptance practices in a Fortune 500 organization. Our main objective in this study was to investigate what factors determine who will be sought when knowledge is needed, and what the criteria are for knowledge acceptance in person-to-person knowledge sharing. Study findings provide a substantial understanding of knowledge-seeking practices, knowledge-acceptance needs, and the role trust plays in these practices and needs. In this paper, we discuss these findings and their implications on future tool support.

The blogosphere is changing how people experience war and conflict. We conducted an analysis of 125 blogs written by Iraqi citizens experiencing extreme disruption in their country. We used Hoffman's [8] stages of recovery model to understand how blogs support people in a region where conflict is occurring. We found that blogs create a safe virtual environment where people could interact, free of the violence in the physical environment and of the strict social norms of their changing society in wartime. Second, blogs enable a large network of global support through their interactive and personal nature. Third, blogs enable people experiencing a conflict to engage in dialogue with people outside their borders to discuss their situation. We discuss how blogs enable people to collaboratively interpret conflict through communities of interest and discussion with those who comment. We discuss how technology can better support blog use in a global environment.

Knowledge is considered a key asset in most organizations. Ineffective knowledge engineering and management practices can lead to disastrous outcomes. This paper aims to raise questions regarding knowledge within distributed software engineering teams through two perspectives. First, some examples of ineffective practices will be discussed and used to reflect on the possible causes which contributed to the disastrous outcomes. These examples are used to determine gaps in knowledge engineering practices. Second, tools our research team has developed are used as case studies of alternative approaches to knowledge management. Regarding knowledge through both these perspectives highlights the need to articulate social and cultural knowledge. These perspectives also raise questions regarding knowledge management and engineering.

Citizen response to disaster has begun to receive attention in the CHI community but little attention has so far been given to how citizens use technology to adapt when their country is at war. We report on an ethnographic interview study of how technology was adopted and used by citizens to be resilient during wartime. We interviewed 45 Iraqi citizens experiencing the current Iraq war. Based on our data we identified properties of resilience: reconfiguring social networks, self-organization, redundancy, proactive practices, and repairing trust in information. Technology supported people in being resilient by enabling them to control identity, to collaborate in travel, to create an organizational memory, and to provide alternative sources of news and information. As people adopted and used technology to be resilient we found a merging of old and new cultural practices. We discuss these systemic changes and describe implications for how technology can support people in being resilient in disrupted environments.

In this paper, we report the findings of an empirical investigation into decision making processes (DMPes) in distributed teams. We conducted the study in a Fortune 500 organization with a total of sixteen respondents who participated in an hour-long interview. Our analysis of the DMP reported by our respondents suggests that there is a strong organizational culture that supersedes local and individual culture. We also found that while decisions are predominately made in consultation with team members, the leader is usually the decision maker regardless of team distribution or size. The role the leader plays in the DMP implies that greater consideration should be given to assigning a team leader and also the DMP in place. It is also significant that we did not find any evidence of support mechanisms to the DMP leading us to conclude that this possibility needs to be explored by the organization. Our data also suggests that the DMP is chosen ad-hoc and is not explicitly articulated in this organization, which may benefit from documentation.

Trust has long been a contentious issue in human endeavours. It is not readily given nor gained, more so when strangers are involved. It often becomes an issue during distributed development where individuals are expected to interact with strangers they may not ldquomeetrdquo during the project lifetime. Trust was spontaneously raised by respondents in an empirical study of practices within distributed development and is reported in this paper. A qualitative analysis of study data suggests that trust typically becomes an issue in large teams when developers are to deliver an innovative product. We also found that it is more likely to be an issue the greater the diversity (of culture, language, time zone...etc.) within the team. Finally the data also suggests that developers more readily trust an authoritative team member (e.g. team leader), even if remote. Data suggests these factors can act as positive and negative forces to influence trust within distributed teams. These forces are reported in this paper together with proposed approaches that can promote equilibrium of the net forces.

Communication models adopted in large-scale software engineering projects have significant impact on the efficacy of communication. We strove to understand these models by empirically examining synchronous communication within distributed and collocated teams at a large Fortune 500 organization. Our data imply that the overhead for tool support of synchronous communication for distributed teams are generally unacceptably high and that collocated teams are as likely to employ alternatives to face-to-face communication with collocated team members as distributed. Data also imply that communication patterns and models for both distributed and collocated teams evolve naturally over time to meet needs as opposed to a well-defined process delineated at project inception. Finally, data imply that communication models tend to be hybrids of existing communication models, suggesting a continual evolution of team communications over time. These implications collectively suggest that developers are adapting to collaborating with remote team members within this organization, perhaps realizing a new stage of evolution within the software engineering community.

Requirements engineers with many years of experience have a distinct perspective on the field. To sample this knowledge, we interviewed 34 requirements researchers and practitioners, each with up to 42 years of experience. We used open-ended, structured interviews in which we asked them to reflect on their experiences and professional development as requirements engineers over their careers. Several themes emerged: requirements engineers act as bridges between different worlds, good communication is key, good process can help but isn't everything, shorter requirements documents can be better, and good requirements are driven by customer value not technical elegance. All of these pertain to amethodical requirements engineering. Amethodical concepts are not rejections of method, but rather those concepts that are marginalized and left out of prescriptive methods for carrying out a procedure. We discuss these results and their implications.

In the context of increasing pressure to adopt global approaches to software development, the importance of teaching skills for geographically distributed software development (GSD) becomes essential. This paper reports the experience of teaching a course to prepare graduates for software engineering (SE) in global customer-developer teams, and which was taught in three-University collaboration (Canada, Australia and Italy). The course emphasized the learning of requirements management activities in frequent synchronous computer-mediated client-developer relationships and created a GSD environment with significant time zone and language differences. We describe our instructional approach and assessment strategies within a GSD instructional design framework which integrates (a) required GSD skills and strategies for aligning classroom projects with contemporary and authentic GSD conditions, (b) strategies for assessment of learning of GSD skills and (c) examples from our GSD course.

The success of a task relies on the expertise of its owner to a great degree. But what is the anticipated expertise? In what areas? Our research intends to investigate the skill sets anticipated of requirements engineers. This paper presents a model of the varying levels of RE expertise within the context of the main RE domains. Identifying the layers of RE expertise can provide more realistic expectations of the anticipated expertise. This understanding can in turn be utilised to increase tool usability (by embedding appropriate support for users' expertise), course development (by identifying the anticipated competencies a student demonstrated at the end of a course), task allocation and employment in industry (mapping capability required to a person 's expertise)