When large, complex interorganizational collaborations create new systems, they must discover how the system should work and how it should integrate into the overall organizational milieu. These collaborations must also draw upon and accommodate a host of processes and resources. In this paper, we present results from a qualitative case study of a key policy and process document for a large design project for a civic traffic management system that must serve multiple organizations and government agencies. The document is one common to systems engineering, but less familiar to CSCW: the Concept of Operations (ConOps). We describe the sociotechnical design functions of the ConOps. We also analyze the document and its developmental process using Ewenstein and Whyte's concept of epistemic objects," which has been useful for CSCW and design research scholars to understand the roles artifacts play in the messy processes of design and cooperative work. We find that the ConOps exhibits many qualities of an epistemic object and supports the deeply integrated work of "designing" both the system and the interorganizational collaboration itself. We then explore avenues for future research in similarly complex infrastructural design settings.

The question of how to develop and maintain appropriate, socially informed and sophisticated infrastructural systems is an ongoing concern for CSCW. Information infrastructure development efforts are usually large endeavors that involve many stakeholders, including several organizations that need to interoperate with legacy systems. Projects typically take several years to develop. The duration, variety, and sites of engagement in the development of information infrastructures can be challenging to approach with typical CSCW approaches. In this paper, we compare and analyze our varied experiences in order to generate lessons learned based on being embedded for three or more years as action researchers and ethnographers in infrastructure development projects in the domains of traffic engineering, vocational education, and ocean science. Drawing upon these experiences, as well as literature in infrastructure studies, design methodologies, and organizational studies, we extract guidance for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand and engage in long-term organizationally complex system development projects. Among these lessons, we encourage revisiting previously gathered data as scope and scale change, observing changes in the discursive "reference public" who will benefit from the system, and planning for different intellectual points of entry and exit. This paper lays groundwork for future developments in theory and method of collaborative design and development in and with complex systems.

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 note explores how data work takes place in a public sector arena. We report on findings from a 3-year research project with a Danish organisation, which, amongst other things, aimed to improve current data practices in the organisation. We make use of the notion of ‘social arenas’ as a lens to understand the complex setting the organisation is situated in. We find that data work in this context takes place among multiple stakeholders and requires cooperation across organisational boundaries. Moreover, changes in data practices in one site changes cooperation among multiple stakeholders in the arena. Additionally, we develop a diagram of this complex setting, which constitutes an analytical tool that supports our understanding of the site (or sites) of intervention where data work is examined. Our study contributes to the field of CSCW by proposing and showing how the notion of sub-arena helps to comprehend the cooperation and interaction within the surprisingly complex public sector and locate the (sub-)arenas and stakeholders affected by a change in how data is provided and used.

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.

Over the last several years, a growing body of work has examined the nature of large-scale virtual organizations for data-intensive cooperative science. These projects, known as Cyberinfrastructures (CI) in the United States, are established realms of inquiry for the eScience and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) communities. Scholarship in these communities extends technology focused inquiries to investigate the sociotechnical concerns to such infrastructure creation and maintenance. In this paper we present findings from our qualitative study of a federated cyberinfrastructure organization known as GENI. We contribute to this body of scholarship by investigating how stakeholders in the GENI project position existing, and newly created, resources for use in educational settings. We examine how stakeholders acquaint new potential stakeholders with this CI in order to draw them into the community, and the ways in which stakeholder's roles evolve over time. Our findings illustrate several ways stakeholders leverage and align existing relationships and resources to expand the CI project's user base. Finally, this paper suggests avenues of further inquiry and implications for organizing future CI projects.

Software is an integral element of the work of science yet it is not commonly an object of inquiry in studies of scientific infrastructures. This paper presents findings from an ethnographic study of a cosmology group's collaborative scientific software production. We demonstrate how these cosmologists use plots to simultaneously test their software and analyze data while interrogating multiple layers of infrastructural components. We broaden perspectives on scientific software development using a sociotechnical, software studies lens to examine this work of scientific discovery as a creative and embodied, yet exacting and methodical, activity that requires a 'human in the loop'. We offer a new reading of scientific software practices to convey how creating scientific software is often really the act of doing science itself--an intervention we believe is necessary to more successfully support scientific software sharing and infrastructure production.

Child development research suggests that using phones while caring for children can be problematic, but limited prior work in this space makes defining appropriate use challenging. We conducted the first exploration of whether adults feel pressure to limit phone use in this context and whether they choose to do so. Through mixed methods, we collected data from 466 adult caregivers at playgrounds. We found that phone use was a small part of playground time, yet a notable source of guilt. Adults engaged in systematic and specific phone-use and phone-non-use behaviors in order to prioritize their children above themselves. Our results indicate that caregiver values and self-control together predict behavior and can be used to model phone use in this context. Users' mixed success with engaging in intentional periods of non-use suggests that a design agenda which prioritizes cycles of engagement, disengagement, and re-engagement may be of value to this group.

In this paper we report the results of a qualitative research study of the GENI cyberinfrastructure: a program of four federated cyberinfrastructures. Drawing on theories of stakeholder positioning, we examine how different GENI stakeholders attempt to enlist new participants in the cyberinfrastructures of GENI, and leverage existing relationships to create sustainable infrastructure. This study contributes to our understanding of how cyberinfrastructures emerge over time through processes of stakeholder alignment, enrollment, and through synergies among stakeholder groups. We explore these issues to better understand how cyberinfrastructures can be designed to sustain over time.

The CSCW community is reliant upon technology-centric models of groupware and collaboration that frame how we examine and design for cooperative work. This paper both reviews the CSCW literature to examine existing models of collaborative work and proposes a new, expanded conceptual model: the Model of Coordinated Action (MoCA). MoCA is a broader framework for describing complex collaborative situations and environments including, but not limited to, collaborations that have diverse, high-turnover memberships or emerging practices. We introduce MoCA's seven dimensions of coordinative action and illustrate their connection to past and current CSCW research. Finally, we discuss some ramifications of MoCA for our understanding of CSCW as a sociotechnical design space.

The production and use of software pipelines is a key component of much modern scientific research. We present emerging findings from our qualitative, social science study of a radio astronomy group developing software pipelines as they produce a data processing infrastructure. This paper examines how these researchers co-produce data products and software pipelines to enact their research infrastructure. We investigate the work of co-producing data and software to illustrate that to better support data-intensive science, we need to understand the practices that enable and produce data products, software, and ultimately infrastructures.

Coordinating Centers (CCs) are central bodies tasked with the work of coordination and operations management of a virtual organization whose purpose is to conduct multi-site research projects. We call these organizations Coordinating Center Enabled Networks (CCENs). This qualitative, interview-based study followed two CCs in the field of cancer epidemiology over seven months to answer the question: How does a CC facilitate the work of networked science in a CCEN? In order to answer the question of how CCs facilitate work, we first describe the complex ecology of CCEN work practices. We further discuss how various stakeholders engage in different work practices to facilitate scientific progress. Finally, we use the conceptual lenses of local articulation work and metawork together with the diversity of work practices to better understand what practices CCs actually coordinate.

We present the results of a two-month ethnographic study of three introductory Russian classrooms. Through observation and interviews, we identify several distinct roles played by physical artifacts in the classrooms, such as providing a reference to necessary foreign-language material and serving as props in creative role-play. The range of roles taken on by artifacts and the attitudes students have toward them provide a basis for our discussion about how technology might be more effectively introduced into the socially negotiated environment of the introductory foreign-language classroom. We identify the need to balance between collaborative and personal technology in a stressful, but social, context. Our findings inform a range of roles that technology can undertake in replacing or augmenting existing classroom artifacts.

Middleware software, which provides an abstraction layer between low-level computational services and domain-specific applications, is a key component of cyberinfrastructure. This paper presents a qualitative study of how cyberinfrastructure middleware development is accomplished in two supercomputing centers. Our investigation highlights key development phases in the lives of middleware projects. Middleware development is typically undertaken as part of collaborations between technologists and domain scientists, and middleware developers must balance the pressure to meet specific scientific needs and the desire to explore their own R&D agendas. We explore how developers work to sustain an ongoing development trajectory by aligning their own work with particular domain science projects and funding streams. However, we find that the key transition from being a component in a domain-specific project to a stand-alone system that is useful across domains is particularly challenging for middleware development. We provide organizational and national policy implications for how to better support this transition.

In theory, software, like other digital artifacts, can be freely copied and distributed. In practice, however, its effective flow is conditioned on various technical and social factors. In this paper, drawing on ethnographic work primarily with a bio-informatics research team in China, we report on meanings of scientific software sharing as embedded in social practices of learning, apprenticeship, membership, publication, and reputation. We illustrate that while free flow is important, boundary management is equally important for the effective travel of software to its appropriate destinations. Our study highlights a number of issues that are important to consider for effectively supporting sharing and collaboration in science.

While previous CSCW research on data sharing and reuse has focused on how researchers assess the trust and reliability of the data of others, we know little about scientists' data use practices after that decision has been taken. This qualitative study of post-doctoral researchers' use of preexisting datasets investigates the practices of cancer-epidemiology post-docs working to understand their "Small Data" datasets. We report the ongoing and iterative nature of information seeking inherent in using unfamiliar data and the time-consuming and highly-collaborative process post-docs used to understand aspects of the dataset important to their scientific questions. Understanding data use practices can help inform the design of both Small Data projects and large cyberinfrastructure projects where multi-source data are collected and combined.

This study enriches the understanding of relationship work in the context of calendar sharing by examining how people negotiate and enact accountability in their intimate relationships with and around their shared calendars. We conducted 13 semi-structured interviews as part of a qualitative study of Google Calendar users. Our research discovered how participants develop understandings of how close friends and significant others structure their time using shared calendars, as well as how people negotiate and enact accounts within and beyond their intimate relationships. Our findings indicate ways in which Online Calendar Systems (OCS) can be better designed to more effectively support users' needs.

Cyberinfrastructures are virtual organizations comprised of people and large-scale scientific computational infrastructures. Cyberinfrastructures endeavor to support "cutting-edge" science and must continually evolve and be under development in order to maintain their relevance and usefulness. This qualitative study of a cyberinfrastructure development project to support the new science of metagenomics investigates how sustaining cyberinfrastructure entails continually realigning the relationships among people, technologies, and organizations.

While previous CSCW research has noted that computer scientists have their own research interests pertaining to cyberinfrastructure development projects, most have focused on the research imperatives of scientists. This qualitative, interview-based study investigates the perspective of computer scientists developing middleware software for cyberinfrastructures at two supercomputing centers. This paper examines how technologists develop and sustain middleware applications over time by leveraging expertise and partnering with different research domains in order to achieve long-term infrastructural goals.

While there has been substantial research into the use of online calendar systems (OCS) within organizations and families with children, no research focuses on adults without children. In our study, we focus on these OCS users' practices of calendar sharing as relationship work, the continually negotiated practice of managing friendships and intimacy. We conducted semi-structured interviews as part of a qualitative user study of Google Calendar users. We report the calendar sharing behaviors and strategies of our participants, who maintain multiple calendars for different purposes and with different users, communicating factual and emotional information through their calendar events. We contribute new knowledge by discussing four strategies derived from our participants' calendar sharing and relationship work activities.

While rapid growth in e-reader use is receiving much attention in industry and academia, the use of e-readers for academic reading remains understudied. This qualitative study investigates how graduate students accomplish their academic reading and integrate an e-reader into their reading practices. Our work represents the first long-term study of e-reading on a production device (the Amazon Kindle DX). In this paper we contribute new knowledge to the discussion of the academic potential of e-readers by analyzing the meta-level relationship between reading tasks and associated reading techniques, students' compensation for the limitations of e-readers, and the hindrance of the human ability to construct cognitive maps of texts when using e-readers.

No abstract available.

This paper uses qualitative research methods to analyze how members of the Seattle chapter of a social activist group, Asha for Education, use social media, such as Yahoo! Groups, Microsoft distribution lists, and Facebook to coordinate their organizational activities, fundraise, and build and strengthen community.

This paper investigates the work of creating infrastructure, using as a case study the development of cyberinfrastructure for metagenomics research. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the role of embeddedness in infrastructure development. We expand on the notion of human infrastructure to develop the concepts of synergizing , leveraging, and aligning, which denote the active processes of creating and managing relationships among people, organizations, and technologies in the creation of cyberinfrastructure. This conceptual lens highlights how embeddedness is not only an important result of infrastructure development, but is also a precursor that can act as both a constraint and a resource for development activities.

Abstract This article marries the study of serious leisure pursuits with library and information science's (LIS) interest in people's everyday use, need, seeking, and sharing of information. Using a qualitative approach, the role of information as a phenomenon was examined in relation to the leisure activity of hobbyist collecting. In the process, a model and a typology for these collectors were developed. We find that the information needs and information seeking of hobbyist collectors is best represented as an interrelationship between information and object needs, information sources, and interactions between collectors and their publics. Our model of the role of information in a particular domain of hobbyist collecting moves away from the idea of one individual seeking information from formal systems and shifts towards a model that takes seriously the social milieu of a community. This collecting community represents a layer of a social system with complex interactions and specialized information needs that vary across collector types. Only the serious collectors habitually engage in information seeking and, occasionally, in information dissemination, in the traditional sense, yet information flows through the community and serves as a critical resource for sustaining individual and communal collecting activities.

How do mobility and presence feature as aspects of social life? Using a case study of paroled offenders tracked via Global Positioning System (GPS), we explore the ways that location-based technologies frame people's everyday experiences of space. In particular, we focus on how access and presence are negotiated outside of traditional conceptions of "privacy." We introduce the notion of accountabilities of presence and suggest that it is a more useful concept than "privacy" for understanding the relationship between presence and sociality.

Despite their rapid proliferation, there has been little examination of the coordination and social practices of cyberinfrastructure projects. We use the notion of "human infrastructure" to explore how human and organizational arrangements share properties with technological infrastructures. We conducted an 18-month ethnographic study of a large-scale distributed biomedical cyberinfrastructure project and discovered that human infrastructure is shaped by a combination of both new and traditional team and organizational structures. Our data calls into question a focus on distributed teams as the means for accomplishing distributed work and we argue for using human infrastructure as an alternative perspective for understanding how distributed collaboration is accomplished in big science.