PURPOSE: Cybersecurity advocates safeguard their organizations by promoting security best practices. However, little is known about what constitutes successful advocacy. METHODOLOGY: We conducted 28 in-depth interviews of cybersecurity advocates. FINDINGS: Effective advocates not only possess technical acumen, but also interpersonal skills, communication acumen, context awareness, and a customer service orientation. ORIGINALITY: We are the first to define and enumerate competencies for the role of cybersecurity advocate. IMPLICATIONS: Non-technical skills are deemphasized in cybersecurity training, limiting career progression into the cybersecurity advocate role for existing security professionals and those from other disciplines. We suggest improvements for professional development that encourage greater security workforce diversity.

As digital fabrication technology has become mainstream, the increased demand for 3D printed objects has created a new market for professional outsourcing. Given that most of this work does not require advanced training, and is an appropriate entry-level manufacturing job, there is an exciting opportunity to employ youth already skilled in "making" and interested in technology to do this work as an after-school job. The combination of this new technology and workforce calls for new workflows that streamline client-driven digital manufacturing. However, the limitations of current digital fabrication technology and youth schedules require that this work be spread between multiple shifts, necessitating employees to coordinate and handoff their work. We investigated the collaborative practices between youth employees while working on client jobs in a 3D print shop during one year of field work. In this paper, we describe instances where youth employees successfully, and unsuccessfully, handed off work between shifts and identify techniques utilized by youth to support successful handoffs, including: counting physical artifacts, using asynchronous chat programs, and documenting work. We then discuss the impact of the print shop manager's presence, physical characteristics of 3D prints, and youth perspectives of work on the selection of and effectiveness of these techniques. Finally, we offer lessons learned from successful handoffs in the print shop and recommendations for supporting youth in collaborative work environments.

This paper investigates the co-evolution of scientific practice and supporting technologies for the interdisciplinary research community of Land Change Science. Through three and a half years of iterative fieldwork and system design, we have developed a deep understanding of their synthetic research practices, specifically regarding meta-studies. Here we detail the challenges researchers face conducting meta-studies and how this collective effort advances the entire scholarly community. We illustrate how our understanding of this synthetic research practice informs the design and refinement of cyberinfrastructure to better support their work.

Increasingly, adults and children socialise and communicate online. Children's safe and secure online communication with people from all over the world can increase their understanding of other cultures, which is an important goal in today's multicultural world. Our research studied such interactions between children from three countries, Hungary, Mexico, and the USA. The goals of our research were to study how children represent their identity online and what the implications are for the design of children's online communities. We used qualitative methods to derive a deep understanding of children's behaviours and motivations. Our results show that children exposed their true and complete identities online. They focused on sharing and learning about personal, ethnic, and gender identities via online media and largely ignored cultural identity. They learned about children from other countries and developed positive attitudes towards them. Based on our results we describe design guidelines for children's online identity tools.

Ad-hoc virtual teams often lack tools to formalize leadership and structure collaboration, yet they are often successful. How does this happen? We argue that the emergence of leadership and the development of expertise occurs in the process of taking action and in direct response to a lack of structure. Using a twinned set of eight modality sliders, we examine the interactions of fourteen players in an alternate reality game. We find that players adopted military language and culture to structure and arrange their play. We determine that it is critical to account for the context of play across these modalities in order to design appropriately for effective in-game virtual organizing.

Moderation within online communities is critical. Though many guidelines are available that describe the goals of successful moderation, these often minimize the complex interplay that exists between tools and practices of moderators. This study investigates the role of moderation through the lens of the moderators in a nascent online community for adolescents. Based on an analysis of their activities, three classes of emergent behavior were uncovered when exploring how the available tools impacted the way moderator work was performed. The findings reveal a need for design considerations that take into account the appropriateness of match between the tools and work processes from a moderator perspective.

Interaction history tools record interactions between users and systems, allowing users to annotate, edit, and replay their activities. Search history tools, a class of interaction history recorders, preserve search, browse, and other information-seeking steps. These tools include web browser histories and history lists in online full-text databases. Although search history tools were developed to support individuals in their information seeking, individuals often share their histories with one another collaboratively. This paper examines such sharing behaviors in two field studies of knowledge workers who routinely shared their individual search histories with their colleagues. While this practice is widespread, it is not supported by the design of contemporary interaction history tools. The results of the field research highlight core dimensions of this activity and inform considerations for the next generation of collaboration-sensitive interaction history tools.

Ontology development is fundamental to most knowledge management efforts. When approached in a formal knowledge engineering manner the resulting ontology usually becomes brittle when spanning even a modest number of groups within a single organization. It breaks entirely when scaled to multiple, heterogeneous organizations. A promising alternative is the bottom-up approach such as can be found in social tagging systems (e.g., del.ico.us), but little research has examined the utility of these systems for knowledge reuse activities. In this paper we extend our field work with IT helpdesk staff to examine the drivers for natural ontology development. We found that a balance between some degree of external order while maintaining local flexibility was required. This information space is navigated via social relations, especially expert referral. We examine the user-centered design criteria for both mid-level ontology development and related expert profile management.

Healthcare providers and their IT staff, working in an effort to balance appropriate accessibility with stricter security mandates, are considering the use of a single network sign-on approach for authentication and password management. There is an inherent tension between an authentication mechanism's security strength and the privacy implications of using that authentication technology. This is particularly true with single sign-on authentication. While single sign-on does facilitate authentication, our on-going field work in a regional hospital reveals several unanticipated privacy implications.

Large-scale, organization-wide groupware systems are high risk development efforts. Requirements gathering and early evaluation are constrained by the need to attain a critical mass of users and content. One approach to mitigate this risk is to employ Wizard of Oz style system simulations during the requirements gathering phase. While this method has historically been used to test quasi-functional system prototypes, we have found it to be a useful method for assessing organizational feasibility.

When performing packet-level analysis in intrusion detection, analysts often lose sight of the big picture while examining these low-level details. In order to prevent this loss of context and augment the available tools for intrusion detection analysis tasks, we developed an information visualization tool, the time-based network traffic visualizer (TNV). TNV is grounded in an understanding of the work practices of intrusion detection analysts, particularly foregrounding the overarching importance of context and time in the process of intrusion detection analysis. The main visual component of TNV is a matrix showing network activity of hosts over time, with connections between hosts superimposed on the matrix, complemented by multiple, linked views showing port activity and the details of the raw packets. Providing low-level textual data in the context of a high-level, aggregated graphical display enables analysts to examine packet-level details within the larger context of activity. This combination has the potential to facilitate the intrusion detection analysis tasks and help novice analysts learn what constitutes normal on a particular network.

People frequently write messages to themselves. These informal, hurried personal jottings serve as temporary storage for notable information as well as reminders for future action. Many mobile technologies have been designed specifically to support this ubiquitous behavior; however, adoption has been universally problematic. Despite its clear utility, the process of taking micronotes stubbornly resists computing support. This field study examines the lifecycles of the canonical micronote forms (immediate use, temporary storage, and prospective memory aid), pinpointing the behaviors that are mismatched with current mobile support. Implications for improving the design of these systems are presented, culminating in a vision for integrated paper-digital micronote systems. This shifts the development focus away from trying to support the entire micronote lifecycle, emphasizing instead the different behaviors best supported by the different technologies.

The work of intrusion detection (ID) in accomplishing network security is complex, requiring highly sought-after expertise. While limited automation exists, the role of human ID analysts remains crucial. This paper presents the results of an exploratory field study examining the role of expertise and collaboration in ID work. Through an analysis of the common and situated expertise required in ID work, our results counter basic assumptions about its individualistic character, revealing significant distributed collaboration. Current ID support tools provide no support for this collaborative problem solving. The results of this research highlight ID as an engaging CSCW work domain, one rich with organizational insights, design challenges, and practical import.

Boundary objects are a critical, but understudied, theoretical construct in CSCW. Through a field study of aircraft technical support, we examined the role of boundary objects in the achievement of safety by service engineers. The resolution process of repair requests was captured in two compound boundary objects. These crystallizations did not manifest a static interpretation, but instead were continually re-interpreted in light of meta-negotiations. This suggests design implications for organizational memory systems which can more fluidly represent the meta-negotiations surrounding boundary objects.