Drawing from a longitudinal case study, we inspect the activities of an expanding team of scientists and their collaborators as they sought to develop a novel software pipeline that worked both for themselves and for their wider community. We argue that these two tasks - making the software work for themselves and also for their wider scientific community - could not be differentiated from each other at the beginning of the software development process. Rather, this division of labor and software capacities emerged, articulated by the actors themselves as they went about their tasks. The activities of making the novel software "work" at all, and the "extra work" of making that software repurposable or reusable could not be distinguished until near the end of the development process - rather than defined or structured in advance. We discuss implications for the trajectory of software development, and the practical work of making software repurposable.

The construct of "situational awareness" (SA) has a rich and productive history within both academic literature and practice. Situational awareness as a technical term has its earliest roots in formative human factors research in service of military and flight applications. However, its value as a construct in other domains, particularly those having to do with rapid sensemaking in safety-sensitive conditions, has led to a broader applied and theoretical interest over the past few decades. As a discipline, CSCW has been relatively less engaged with this concept, but has empirical and theoretical tools that will be valuable to its study. To bring CSCW more fully into the conversation, we present a description of how operators in a city department of transportation's transportation management center (TMC) develop and maintain situational awareness for themselves and the key recipients of their critical information outputs. We identify some of the schemas operators must develop in order to effectively construct situational awareness and dynamically articulate common fields of work, and the social collaborative practices they engage in to support that awareness. Implications for design and further research are proposed.

This paper contributes to the development of an under-utilized area of focus for CSCW research and design: history. The design and evaluation of technology, as practiced in the field, has positioned CSCW as a largely forward-looking community. The enduring "presentism' and lack of historical view threatens to leave out a wealth of resources that can inspire design, support comparative analysis, and develop a deeper understanding of technology development and its social consequences. This paper argues that a historicist sensibility should inform the due diligence of all CSCW research, and we present connection points for the various ways in which historical research might more deeply inform CSCW, while offering a selection of historiographic challenges to sensitize CSCW scholars as we seek to better situate our collective work within both the present moment as well as ongoing temporal change.

Author(s): Sahneh, Faryad; Balk, Meghan A; Kisley, Marina; Chan, Chi-kwan; Fox, Mercury; Nord, Brian; Lyons, Eric; Swetnam, Tyson; Huppenkothen, Daniela; Sutherland, Will; Walls, Ramona L; Quinn, Daven P; Tarin, Tonantzin; LeBauer, David; Ribes, David; Birnie, Dunbar P; Lushbough, Carol; Carr, Eric; Nearing, Grey; Fischer, Jeremy; Tyle, Kevin; Carrasco, Luis; Lang, Meagan; Rose, Peter W; Rushforth, Richard R; Roy, Samapriya; Matheson, Thomas; Lee, Tina; Brown, C Titus; Teal, Tracy K; Papeș, Monica; Kobourov, Stephen; Merchant, Nirav | Editor(s): Schwartz, Russell

Although reproducibility--the idea that a valid scientific experiment can be repeated with similar results--is integral to our understanding of good scientific practice, it has remained a difficult concept to define precisely. Across scientific disciplines, the increasing prevalence of large datasets, and the computational techniques necessary to manage and analyze those datasets, has prompted new ways of thinking about reproducibility. We present findings from a qualitative study of a NSF--funded two-week workshop developed to introduce an interdisciplinary group of domain scientists to data-management techniques for data-intensive computing, with a focus on reproducible science. Our findings suggest that the introduction of data-related activities promotes a new understanding of reproducibility as a mechanism for local knowledge transfer and collaboration, particularly as regards efficient software reuse.

Recent CSCW research on the collaborative design and development of research infrastructures for the natural sciences has increasingly focused on the challenges of open data sharing. This qualitative study describes and analyzes how multidisciplinary, geographically distributed ocean scientists are integrating highly diverse data as part of an effort to develop a new research infrastructure to advance science. This paper identifies different kinds of coordination that are necessary to align processes of data collection, production, and analysis. Some of the hard work to integrate data is undertaken before data integration can even become a technical problem. After data integration becomes a technical problem, social and organizational means continue to be critical for resolving differences in assumptions, methods, practices, and priorities. This work calls attention to the diversity of coordinative, social, and organizational practices and concerns that are needed to integrate data and also how, in highly innovative work, the process of integrating data also helps to define scientific problem spaces themselves.

We examine the concept of personal knowledge management using data drawn from our study of digital nomads. We make two contributions: an empirical and conceptual development of knowledge management as it relates to independent workers and an advancement of social informatics that builds on Gibson's ecological perspective. Digital nomads provide an empirical basis to better understand how knowledge management is shifting from organization‐centric, with its concomitant emphasis on organizational information systems, to worker‐centric, which relies on personal knowledge ecologies. We advance this concept as a combination of personal knowledge management activities and the digital technologies that support them. Our data make clear that individuals are the locus of personal knowledge ecologies, but these ecologies are embedded in a larger community of collaborators, clients, and peers who are often extensively mediated by digital technologies. This embedding and mediation are at the core of the sociotechnical arrangements that define the personal knowledge ecologies that we document.

The algorithm-based management exercised by digital gig platforms contributes to information and power asymmetries that are pervasive in the gig economy. Although the design of these platforms may foster unbalanced relationships, in this paper, we outline how freelancers and clients on the gig platform Upwork can leverage a network of alliances with external digital platforms to repossess their displaced agency within the gig economy. Building on 39 interviews with Upwork freelancers and clients, we found a dynamic ecosystem of digital platforms that facilitate gig work through and around the Upwork platform. We use actor-network theory to: 1) delineate Upwork's strategy to establish a comprehensive and isolated platform within the gig economy, 2) track human and nonhuman alliances that run counter to Upwork's system design and control mechanisms, and 3) capture the existence of a larger ecosystem of external digital platforms that undergird online freelancing. This work explicates the tensions that Upwork users face, and also illustrates the multiplicity of actors that create alliances to work with, through, around, and against the platform's algorithmic management.

Ongoing discussions of the gig economy have focused on the critical aspect of digital mediation, and in particular the role of applications and platforms such as Uber or TaskRabbit. We extend this discussion by considering more decentralized contexts of gig economy, in which individuals do not rely on a single dominant, central intermediary, but rather exercise a higher degree of agency in arranging and aligning multiple digital platforms to support relevant work practices.We employ the concept of information infrastructure to describe the emergent configuration of heterogeneous digital platforms leveraged by digital nomads as a community of location-independent, remote workers. Using both forum analysis and in-depth interviews, we examine how the digital nomad community dynamically brings together and negotiates digital mediation in the form of an information infrastructure.