Software development teams depend on the constant and varied use of technological tools that contribute to the fluidity of development activities. The communication channels provided by these tools contribute to the participatory culture of software development, where requirements include getting involved, learning and co-producing the code. However, the choice of channels to support development is still an open question in the scientific community. Through an investigation of closed remote software teams from a large public educational institution in Brazil during the COVID-19 Pandemic, we identified their preferred communication channels and analyzed them to learn how to improve collaboration. We also drew some comparison with social developers and took a look at the challenges that these channels impose and solutions adopted to mitigate these problems.

For over a quarter century, GROUP has offered a premier yet intimate and welcoming venue for agenda-setting, diverse research. Although the traditional focus of the conference is on supporting group work, it has expanded to include research from computer-supported cooperative work, sociotechnical studies, practice-centered computing, human-computer interaction, computersupported collaborative learning, participatory technology design, and other related areas. The work presented in this issue embodies that interdisciplinary ethos. Papers in this issue cover a wide range topics, from human-AI collaboration, to collaboration in virtual reality, to perceptions of privacy and security, to the myriad impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The application domains are similarly wide ranging, from health data, to civic engagement, to educational settings, to government provision of social services. Similar to the 2021 issue, this issue also continues the tradition of design fiction at GROUP. This issue of PACM:HCI brings you papers from the planned 2022 ACMConference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP 2022). Typically, the GROUP conference occurs every two years. However, research developments do not necessarily follow conference deadline cycles. Thus, the GROUP conference offers authors the opportunity to submit to multiple waves. The first wave of papers for this conference were published in July 2021 in Volume 5 of PACM:HCI, and papers from this current issue were first submitted in May 2021. Both of these sets of papers published as part of the planned GROUP 2022 conference were authored and reviewed during the COVID-19 pandemic. These papers represent commendable volumes of hard work and resilience, not just from the authors, but also from the reviewers, the program committee, and the conference organizers. Additionally, the pandemic forced a major change to the conference at which these papers will be presented.

Competency Management Systems are used to facilitate individual competencies management, both in companies and academia. Most systems use the term “competency management” based only on the technical skills of individuals. This way, the manager ends up not being sure of the accuracy of the technical skills of individuals, forming low-performance and poorly collaborative groups. This paper presents an open source web tool aimed at forming highly collaborative groups. The main contribution of this research is the innovative use of the Forgotten Curve concept and modeling for collaborative based grouping to support the design of work teams.

Social isolation and loneliness are problems faced by the elderly that might be aggravated due to quarantine during the coronavirus pandemic. This motivates a search demand for automatic technological solutions, such as chatbots, to address the problem, and establish a collaborative interaction between elderly and conversational agents. We analyze the use of conversational agents and the main types of personalization used during interacting with the elderly. We mapped 53 papers in 5 sources to answer 5 research questions that guided our study. Our findings show these solutions may have a positive impact on elderly's life.

No abstract available.

Collaboration is an important process for combining the potential and knowledge of experts in organizations. To support the transfer of knowledge, we highlight the role of teams in disseminating knowledge and in preparing new specialists. After all, the absence of a strategy to avoid the loss of a specialist's knowledge, by retirement or unexpected departure, may correspond to a reduction of competitive advantage for the organization. Therefore, this work proposes providing managers with mechanisms that facilitate the formation of new specialists through a behavioral approach. For this, collaborative observations, based on the use of the eMOC tool - Mapping Expert Behavior Through Observation, can intensify collaboration productivity, coordinate activities and improve interaction among group members. The result of the work consists in presenting a set of cognitive barriers and thus promoting the acceleration of the transfer of knowledge, generating profit and value for the organizations.

Knowledge transfer in organizations is a decisive advantage in the competitive market. When it is done effectively, it prevents companies from losing relevant information when experts leave or are disconnected for any reason. Considering that beliefs and collaboration are important to support the knowledge transfer process, this paper investigates the main cognitive barriers and beliefs that may prevent knowledge transfer in organizational environments. This work maps the knowledge transfer processes found in organizations in order to elicit the barriers faced by experts as well as their beliefs, and how they affect the group during complex decision activities. These barriers are part of the Conceptual Framework for Identifying Barriers of Knowledge Transfer between Experts (KTAe).

Experts apply their intuition in different activities within organizations (e.g. decision making, impact projection). Thus, when an expert leaves the organization, it loses the expert's intuition as well as his/her expertise. In this context, the organization spends resources (e.g. time, money) to replace and train a new expert. We propose to use a team instead of an individual as a way to accelerate the process of training and replacing the expert. For the team to be able to perform actions using a rationale similar to the individual expert's, a process to develop intuition in a group is proposed. The application of the process in a real scenario provides initial evidences about its viability.

Dynamic domains involve complex decisions that must be made by experts. In these domains, the impacts of decisions lead to unpredictable results. An unexpected need for impact mitigation involves a great deal of material resources and expert cognitive capacity; after a decision is made, impact mitigation requires costly expert effort. To address this problem, this paper proposes the characterization of projections for the impacts of decisions in the early stages of decision management. A complex decision impact (CDI) metamodel is put forward that forms the basis of a support system to orient decision makers in the achievement of decision impacts. This proposal was evaluated by experts in the field of dynamic domains, and this evaluation generated evidence confirming the feasibility of CDI and the adherence of the proposed metamodel regarding the actions taken in practice by decision makers in complex domains.

Organizations are becoming increasingly complex, interconnected, dynamic and horizontal. In this scenario, expertise transfer is a complex process, but can lead the organization to gain competitive advantage, save money, and reduce the impact of losing expertise. Organizations are investigating not only expertise transfer techniques, but also how to accelerate transfer. We explore an approach that splits expertise of an individual and transfers it to a collaborative team. We are particularly interested in exploring the feasibility of the approach and if it actually accelerates the transfer. Besides, we believe the approach of using teams reduces the impact of losing expertise in the organization. We present some results of a systematic review on knowledge transfer and a survey of organizational practices on knowledge transfer.

Collaboration is an important concept for workgroups involved in agile development processes. However, enhancing collaboration within those groups is not an easy task. This research aims to create a Collaboration Observation Framework (COF) suitable for workgroups that practice agile software development fundamentals. To this end, observations were conducted in agile development workgroups to validate and identify criteria for the collaboration evaluation. In this paper, COF is presented, and its applicability is discussed in the representatives' workgroup view.

Business process modeling has become essential for managing organizational knowledge artifacts. However, this is not an easy task, especially when it comes to the so-called Knowledge-Intensive Processes (KIPs). A KIP comprises activities based on acquisition, sharing, storage, and (re)use of knowledge, as well as collaboration among participants, so that the amount of value added to the organization depends on process agents' knowledge. The previously developed Knowledge Intensive Process Ontology (KIPO) structures all the concepts (and relationships among them) to make a KIP explicit. Nevertheless, KIPO does not include a graphical notation, which is crucial for KIP stakeholders to reach a common understanding about it. This paper proposes the Knowledge Intensive Process Notation (KIPN), a notation for building knowledge-intensive processes graphical models.

Knowledge Intensive Processes (KIP) focus on the dynamic conversion of knowledge among the participants involved in the execution of a business process, and typically comprises tacit and constantly changing pieces of knowledge supported by CSCW tools. Despite their key role for organizational Knowledge Management, existing methods for Business Processes Modeling do not adequately address the representation of key elements denoting these pieces of knowledge, thus making it hard to come up with a process model through which other participants may understand the knowledge intensive process. This paper proposes a set of properties needed to understand and consequently organize KTPs. The proposed properties are structured into a KIP Ontology, as a first and necessary step of any approach, method or tool for adequately addressing this important class of processes.