Each year maritime accidents occur at sea causing human casualties. Training facilities serve to reduce the risk of human error by allowing maritime teams to train safety procedures in cooperative real-size immersive simulators. However, they are expensive and only few maritime professionals have access to such simulators. Virtual Reality (VR) can provide a digital all-immersive learning environment at a reduced cost allowing for increased access. However, a key ingredient of what makes all-immersive physical simulators effective is that they allow for multiple participants to engage in cooperative social interaction. Social interaction which allows trainees to develop skills and competencies in navigating situational awareness essential for safety training. Social interaction requires social fidelity. Moving from physical simulators into digital simulators based upon VR technology thus challenges us as HCI researchers to figure out how to design social fidelity into immersive training simulators. We explore social fidelity theoretically and technically by combining core conceptual work from CSCW research to the design experimentation of social fidelity for maritime safety training. We argue that designing for social fidelity in VR simulators requires designers to contextualize the VR experience in location, artifacts, and actors structured through dependencies in work allowing trainees to perform situational awareness, coordination, and communication which are all features of social fidelity. Further, we identify the risk of breaking the social fidelity immersion related to the intent and social state of the participants entering the simulation. Finally, we suggest that future designs of social fidelity should consider not only trainees in the design, but also the social relations created by the instructors’ guidance as part of the social fidelity immersion.

Abstract We demonstrate how Research through Art (RtA) extends the CSCW agenda to include considerations of “work as a mental-emotional experience” complementing “work as a practice.” We do this by documenting how one art piece, Multiviews , was created in connection to a workplace and later displayed in different circumstances and contexts, producing the art piece as a sociomaterial entity. As a sociomaterial entity, Multiviews allowed organizational members to engage with the elusive phenomenon “the future of work” in novel ways, informing us as CSCW researchers about the importance of including the mental-emotional experience of work when designing cooperative technologies. Multiviews pushed the notion of “comfort” from a physical consideration on ergonomics and practicalities to bring the emotional experience of comfort into the center of attention, prompting people to imagine the workplace as a mental experience as well as a physical or digital place. Reflecting upon our unorthodox methods of collaborating with an artist in the CSCW study, and the role which the art piece played in the collaboration, we suggest extending CSCW research vocabulary on boundary objects in cooperative work with the concept of the boundary rogue to describe how the fundamental strangeness of the artwork as a sociomaterial entity made it function as a collaborative artifact uniquely productive across the multiple contexts: work, art, and research, providing new types of insights.

Navigating the complexities of shared hybrid workspaces presents significant challenges, with a risk of producing problematic spatial dynamics. Drawing on an ethnographic study, we scrutinize how office workers produce and negotiate hybrid spatial arrangements and identify location multiplicity as a core challenge for reintroducing physical elements into hybrid office workspaces after the COVID-19 pandemic. From a temporal perspective, hybrid work represents multiple locations, separated across several 'homes' and office spaces. Location multiplicity emphasizes the mobility of individuals, introducing instability and unpredictability into cooperative work. To navigate the temporal nature of constellation change, our findings reveal workers rely on the stability of the digital space, while consequently disconnecting from the malleable physical space. Thus, the physical space risks becoming a lost opportunity for the collocated subgroup - a 'lost space' in hybrid work. We suggest that a CSCW design challenge for hybrid work is designing hybrid infrastructures that facilitate an experience of stability and predictability across temporal and spatial dimensions, with embedded affordances for integrating both physical and digital elements across multiple locations.

Situational awareness is a critical competence to master for maritime personnel to avoid critical failures risking safety in everyday practices. Cooperative simulator training utilizing virtual reality (VR) technologies provides new opportunities to train situational awareness, e.g., the capability to automatically collect data about cooperative behaviour. We explore different approaches to capturing behavioural data displaying participants’ situational awareness practices supporting trainers in teaching and assessing maritime trainees. We argue that to capture situational awareness behaviour we need to design data collection methods documenting 1) artefactual proximity; 2) body movement in the environment; and 3) mutual monitoring while interacting with artefacts. Through experimentation, we demonstrate ways to collect these types of situational awareness data and discuss limitations. Finally, we propose four design recommendations for extracting situational awareness data from behavioural data in cooperative virtual reality simulators.

The access needs of neurodivergent individuals in organizational settings are many and varied - and so are their everyday contributions to the creation of collective access. In this study, we contribute to the growing body of CSCW research on accessibility and investigate the invisible access labor of neurodivergent students in three computer science institutions. We use an exploratory, multi-stakeholder approach, combining semi-structured interviews (n=26) and document analysis. We adopted a broad definition of neurodiversity: our study included individuals with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, cyclothymia and individuals with neurological conditions that developed as a result of illness, trauma or injury. Our findings show that neurodivergent students face a number of structural and attitudinal barriers to access in the educational environment and within the disability support system. We identified barriers in three main areas: (i) assistive technology access barriers, (ii) cognitive and physical access barriers, and (iii) social access barriers. We examined how stigma, individualized understandings of disability and intersectional disadvantage shape organizational practices and explored how students are creatively improving collective access through micro-interventions, although these efforts are largely invisible. We then draw on our findings to identify opportunities for change. We propose access grafting as a bottom-up approach to rethinking and reorienting organizational strategies to improve equitable access.

Designing new technologies to support synchronous interaction across distances has for many years focused on creating symmetry for participation between geographically distributed actors. Symmetry in synchronous interaction has, to some extent, been achieved technologically (while multiple social, historical, political, and hierarchical concerns continue to exist) and proven empirically in the increased use of remote-work technologies that were used during the pandemic. However, synchronous interaction in hybrid work is achieved differently, since the asymmetry produced by some participants being collocated while others geographically distributed introduces increased complexities for such interactions. Focusing on this challenge, we ask: To what extent can symmetry in cooperative work engagements be achieved in hybrid work contexts? We explore this question by interrogating multiple different empirical examples of synchronous hybrid interaction collected across different organizations, activities, and events. We found that the effort required to accomplish hybrid work includes additional articulation work necessary for bounding multiple intertwined artefacts across sites, devices, and applications. Further, the multiple artefacts setup across sites, combined with asymmetric collocation across participants, produce incongruence in technological frames of reference for each participant. All participants in hybrid work have only partial access to the hybrid setup, and no single person has access to the complete setup. The incongruence in technological frames produces insurmountable gaps in collaboration, causing all hybrid work situations to be characterized fundamentally by asymmetric relationships. We argue that symmetry in hybrid synchronous interaction is impossible to attain in attempts to solve this problem through design. Instead, we propose that designers of cooperative technologies for hybrid work shift towards developing artefact-ecologies supporting hybrid work, focusing on asymmetry as a necessary feature. Fundamentally, the design strategy should explore novel ways of taking advantage of the multiple different artefact-ecologies which serve as the foundation for the hybrid collaboration. Instead of striving for symmetry, we propose to feature asymmetric conditions in future technology designs for hybrid interaction.

After the pandemic, it is urgently important to explore the special challenges which arise with hybrid work. Through cross-case analyses of published papers, we propose collocated distance as a design challenge uniquely relevant for hybrid cooperative technologies. We identify and conceptualize collocated distance as a design challenge that arises in hybrid work situations, where at least three actors are mutually dependent in their work while being located within fewer contexts than the number of actors. Collocated distance reminds us that when designing hybrid technologies, we must not only focus on creating technologies that support the work across geographical locations but equally pay attention to the relations and possible disconnections which exist locally between collocated actors. When designing cooperative technologies supporting distributed work, often focus is on the boundaries between geographical contexts – however, in hybrid work, we must not forget to pay attention to the collocated boundaries within the same context.

Abstract Prior research documents how the use of national cultural differences when used as an argument for failed collaboration is problematic and makes information technology (IT) companies blind to the challenges in global software development (GSD). Nevertheless, we still witness how issues in GSD work are kept explained, applied, and predicted through generic descriptions of national cultural behavior. Based on two ethnographic studies conducted within two large Danish IT companies, we extend prior work on implicit bias. The paper presents empirical examples on the widespread practice of using racist and stereotypical rhetoric in GSD, which initially motivated us to look for alternative strategies for analyzing the actual and locally situated collaboration‐related problems within organizations involved in GSD. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We show how the widespread practice of using negative stereotypical rhetoric is weaved into the fabric of GSD engagements; (2) we present the empirical results of attending to implicit bias as an approach to explore and combat pervasive practices that deploy static cultural narratives and stereotypes in GSD; and (3) we propose three areas in GSD that software organizations should investigate to identify and address the implicit biases that potentially challenge or shatter their distributed collaborative work.

Abstract Civic technologies have the potential to support participation and influence decision-making in governmental processes. Digital participatory budgeting platforms are examples of civic technologies designed to support citizens in making proposals and allocating budgets. Investigating the empirical case of urban biking activists in Madrid, we explore how the design of the digital platform Decide Madrid impacted the collaborative practices involved in digital participatory budgeting. We found that the design of the platform made the interaction competitive, where individuals sought to gain votes for their single proposals, rather than consider the relations across proposals and the larger context of the city decisions, even if the institutional process rewarded collective support. In this way, the platforms’ design led to forms of individualistic, competitive, and static participation, therefore limiting the possibilities for empowering citizens in scoping and self-regulating participatory budgeting collaboratively. We argue that for digital participatory budgeting platforms to support cooperative engagements they must be revisable and reviewable while supporting accountability among participants and visibility of proposals and activities.

“Are they all mostly Dave? I’ll just call everybody Dave” (Dona Bailey voice in cut scene no. 1, Remixed Pac-man, AtariWomen.org)Public narratives of computing often render its gender problems inev...

People are increasingly subject to the tracking of data about them at their workplaces. Sensor tracking is used by organizations to generate data on the movement and interaction of their employees to monitor and manage workers, and yet this data also poses significant risks to individual employees who may face harms from such data, and from data errors, to their job security or pay as a result of such analyses. Working with a large hospital, we developed a set of intervention strategies to enable what we call "collective sensemaking" describing worker contestation of sensor tracking data. We did this by participating in the sensor data science team, analyzing data on badges that employees wore over a two-week period, and then bringing the results back to the employees through a series of participatory workshops. We found three key aspects of collective sensemaking important for understanding data from the perspectives of stakeholders: 1) data shadows for tempering possibilities for design with the realities of data tracking; 2) data transducers for converting our assumptions about sensor tracking, and 3) data power for eliciting worker inclusivity and participation. We argue that researchers face what Dourish (2019) called the "legitimacy trap" when designing with large datasets and that research about work should commit to complementing data-driven studies with in-depth insights to make them useful for all stakeholders as a corrective to the underlying power imbalance that tracked workers face.

Despite the prevalence of global software Engineering (GSE), many companies continuously struggle to collaborate across geographical distance, nationalities, and languages. Prior research documents how the use of national cultural differences as an argument for failed collaboration is common amongst people working in GSE, which has made IT companies blind to the fundamental challenges of GSE work emerging upon the conditions for the actual conduct of work and practices undertaken by human actors. Based on an interventionist ethnographic study conducted within a Danish IT company, we present the results of attending to implicit bias as an approach to combat pervasive practices that deploy static cultural narratives and negative stereotypes in GSE. We find that implicit bias is a useful grip for moving discussions beyond negative cultural rhetoric and to reconsider the actual and locally situated collaboration-related problems that exist within organizations involved in GSE.

In this paper we unpack empirical data from two domains within the Blockchain information infrastructure: The cryptocurrency trading domain, and the energy domain. Through these accounts we introduce the relational concepts of Blockchain Assemblages and Whiteboxing. Blockchain assemblages comprise configurations of digital and analogue artefacts that are entangled with imaginaries about the current and future state of the Blockchain information infrastructure. Rather than being a black box, Blockchain assemblages alternate between being dynamic and stable entities. We propose Whiteboxing as the sociomaterial process which drives blockchain assemblages in their dynamic state to be (re)configured, while related artefacts and imaginaries are simultaneously transformed, creating dynamic representations. Whiteboxing is triggered during disconfirming events when representations are discovered as problematic. Complementing existing historical accounts demonstrating technologies in the making, the contribution of this paper, proposes whiteboxing as an analytical concept which allows us to unpack how contemporary technologies are created through entrepreneurial activities.

In the digital age, the fields and professions related to computing are having an unprecedent impact on our lives, and on societies. As computing becomes integrated in fundamental ways in healthcare [10,11], labor markets [2,4], and political processes [3,6], questions about who participates and takes decisions in developing digital technologies are becoming increasingly crucial and unavoidable [7].

What happens when agile methods are introduced in global outsourcing set-ups? Agile methods are designed to empower IT developers in decision-making through self-managing collocated teams. We studied how agile methods were introduced into global outsourcing from the Indian IT vendor’s perspective. We explored how agile processes in global outsourcing impacts work conditions of the Indian IT developers, and were surprised to find that agile methodologies, even after 3 years of implementation, created a stressful and inflexible work environment negatively impacting their personal lives. Many of the negative aspects of work, which agile methodologies were developed to reduce, were evident in the global agile outsourcing set-up. We propose translocality to repudiate the dichotomy of global/local reminding us that methodologies and technologies must be understood as immediately localized and situated. Translocality helps us to explain why we cannot determine the impact of global agile as a methodology independent of how it unfolds at particular sites. Instead, we must attend to concrete practices of use when evaluating the impact of new methods.

Open Design is an emerging area of research that seeks to connect and extend the culture of making, social innovation, open-source software, and open-source hardware. A cornerstone for Open Design is to broaden participation in technology innovation by allowing people to use and contribute to publicly shared resources. Makerspaces are important access points to share and contribute to these resources. However, prior to entering the physical door of a makerspace, makerspaces’ social media presence serve as the ‘front door’ for Open Design activities. In this paper, we examine different ‘front doors’ of Open Design, asking: What are the characteristics that produce makerspaces’ social media presences, and how do these representations shape potential access to Open Design activities? We manually collected and qualitatively analyzed 500 public posts on the Facebook sites of five makerspaces in Copenhagen, Denmark. By choosing the same geographical area, we were able to explore the characteristics of makerspaces’ social media presences for the same potential population of Open Design participants. Our analysis identifies three main characteristics of makerspaces’ social media presence, which together shape access to Open Design activities, namely reach, transparency, and discourse. The display of these characteristics produce openness and availability in unique ways, and is constitutive for how Open Design activities are produced online. In this paper, we do not argue for or against specific social media representations. Instead, we argue that the specificities and differences between makerspaces’ social media presences in the same geographical region have the strength of producing different identities across spaces, allowing for a broader definition and potential participation in Open Design.

What is ‘open design’ and who gets to say what it is? In the emerging body of literature on open design, there is a clear alignment to the values and practices of free culture and open source software and hardware. Yet this same literature includes multiple, sometimes even contradictory strands of technology practice and research. These different perspectives can be traced back to free culture advocates from the 1970s to the 1990s who formulated the ideal of the internet as inherently empowering, democratizing, and countercultural. However, more recent approaches include feminist and critical interventions into hacking and making as well as corporate strategies of “open innovation” that bring end-users and consumers into the design process. What remains today seems to fall into two schools of thought. On one hand, we have the celebratory endorsements of ‘openness’ as applied to technology and design. On the other hand, we have a continuous and expanding critique of these very ideals and questions, where that critique identifies persisting forms of racial, gender, age, and class-based exclusions, and questions about the relationship between open design, labor and power remain largely unanswered.

Denmark is a generous welfare state which provides resources and legal means for fathers to take their parental role seriously and engage with their children. In this paper, we explore the relation between Danish fathers' interaction online and the societal, legal, and economic infrastructures in which they are situated. By focusing on how fathers living in Denmark make use of the Internet and social media sites to facilitate their role as parents, we are able to explore how online engagement is shaped by the different societal 'norms' of parenting. Our research outlines the ways in which societal infrastructures influence how fathers perceive, and subsequently make use of social media in relation to child-caring. We find that fathers discuss their experiences of legal inequities and stereotypical discrimination on social network sites like Facebook. We also study fathers' online reviews of a Danish parenting App, FAR, designed specifically to support fathers. By analyzing social media discussions around fatherhood in Denmark, we found connections to the ways in which the current political climate shapes and influences fatherhood in Denmark, as they reflect the societal infrastructures which situate fathers in contemporary Denmark. Further, we found a strong political interest for collective action to transform the societal infrastructures to support legal equality for child caretaking across genders. This strong political motivation is distinct from existing studies exploring how fatherhood is displayed on social media in other countries such as the USA. On this basis, we argue that research exploring social media use in institutions which are strongly shaped by societal norms, must explicitly consider the role which society takes in shaping such institutions, and include these aspects into the analysis. Our data show that fathers use social media sites as platforms to produce a fatherhood more in line with their lived experience of parenting, and that they advocate for collective political action to strengthen fathers' legal rights.

As technology and data access continue to evolve, research ethics in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction and social computing are becoming increasingly complex. Despite increasing interest among researchers, there is still a lack of consistent community norms around ethical gray areas. One charge of the SIGCHI ethics committee is to help develop these norms by facilitating open conversations with different stakeholders. This panel will be an opportunity to develop a collective understanding of diverse perspectives on ethics, and to gather input from the GROUP research community around the ethical challenges we face as researchers who study social and collaborative computing systems and those who use these systems.

Inclusion in computer science education and profession is a debated topic in recent feminist HCI literature. To enable inclusion in computer science, we must find new ways to create opportunities for broadening the narrative of computing embracing diversity. In this paper, we present GRACE, an interactive installation, which combines history, crafts, and digital technology. The installation creates an opportunity for multiple people to engage into discussions around inclusion in computer science, thus facilitates open discussion of perspectives beyond predominant narratives of computing.

In this paper, we present ethnographic data unpacking three different accounts of how Blockchain technology gets introduced into the shipping domain. The results demonstrate that the shipping industry is based upon an information infrastructure with a socio-technical kernel comprising transaction practices between shippers, freight forwarders, ports, shipping lines, and other actors in the shipping industry. These practices are based upon standards, which have evolved over time and are embedded within the installed base of the infrastructure. We find that because of the inertia of the shipping infrastructure, Blockchain technology cannot be seamlessly introduced directly into the shipping domain. Instead, we introduce Infrastructural Grind as the activity by which domains (e.g. shipping) intersect with new technological infrastructures (e.g. Blockchain). Infrastructural grind occurs as a result of various infrastructuring activities taking place at different intersections between the two infrastructures, and is constituted of the sum of these manifestations. We propose that infrastructural grind is enacted through activities expressing elements of consolidation, permeability, and velocity.

In this article, we examine the fundamental and taken-for-granted infrastructures that make tech entrepreneurship possible. We report from a longitudinal ethnographic study of tech entrepreneurs situated in occupied Palestine. By investigating this polar case of tech entrepreneurship, we identify critical infrastructures that are otherwise invisible and go unnoticed. We propose infrastructural accessibility as a method to identify available and absent infrastructures in concrete trans-local situations. Infrastructural accessibility leads us to identify multiple dimensions of critical infrastructures necessary for the success of tech startups. This includes infrastructures related to location, community, funding, digital platforms, politics, and history. Our study shows how these multiple dimensions of infrastructural accessibility shape the everyday practices of tech entrepreneurs. Furthermore, our study reveals how Palestinian tech entrepreneurship is characterized by infrastructural inaccessibility due to missing infrastructures related to mobility, legal frameworks, payment gateways, and mobile Internet. Infrastructural inaccessibility seriously limits tech entrepreneurs’ potential to succeed in creating a long-term sustainable tech industry.

In this paper, we present ethnographic data that unpacks the everyday work of some of the many infrastructuring agents who contribute to creating, sustaining and growing the Blockchain information infrastructure. We argue that this infrastructuring work takes the form of entrepreneurial actions, which are self-initiated and primarily directed at sustaining or increasing the initiator's stake in the emerging information infrastructure. These entrepreneurial actions wrestle against the affordances of the installed base of the Blockchain infrastructure, and take the shape of engaging or circumventing activities. These activities purposefully aim at either influencing or working around the enablers and constraints afforded by the Blockchain information infrastructure, as its installed base is gaining inertia. This study contributes to our understanding of the purpose of infrastructuring, seen from the perspective of heterogeneous entrepreneurial agents. It supplements existing accounts of the "when" and "how" of infrastructure, with a lens for examining the "why" of infrastructure.

Critical design is gaining momentum in interaction design, yet little CSCW research has focused on articulating the cooperative potentials of critical design artefacts. We address this gap by reflecting upon a design project aimed at overturning the prevailing narrative regarding dyslexia in Italy. The adversarial propositions embedded in our critical design artefacts challenged the description of dyslexia as a learning disorder putting forward the view of a learning difference. These artefacts demonstrated their capacity to bridge heterogeneous social worlds (those of teachers, children, and parents) into one cooperative entity and mobilise cooperative activism. The contribution to CSCW is two-fold. Firstly, we introduce the cooperative potentials of critical design artefacts; secondly, we propose critical design as a strategy for researchers engaging with cooperative activism.

Introducing data tracking of patients, doctors, medicine, or medical equipment holds promise to optimize workflows within hospitals. However, placing tracking devices and collecting data does not automatically translate into new workflows; instead, it requires careful considerations, knowledge about the activities tracked, and technical knowledge. In this paper, we study the interdisciplinary work involved when data tracking techniques are used to construe workflows within a real life work setting: architectural design of hospitals. We provide an ethnographic account from a unique study where two types of data tracking techniques were utilized in an existing hospital with the aim of informing the architectural design of a future hospital. The paper makes three contributions. First, we characterize the work involved in construing workflows based upon data tracking. Second, we discuss surveillance as an empirical category, which emerged in our study. Finally, we argue that to be able to construe workflows based upon data tracking, balancing the seamless boundary of privacy in work and surveillance in cooperation with the practitioners is of critical importance. Without support from the practitioners, data quality is at risk, and the resulting workflows might turn out 'flawed'.

Children with autism often have difficulties in learning the social skills and norms of peer social interaction, which severely affect and limit their social lives. Aiming at addressing this issue, through design, we developed a digital-analogue model playground to help them understand and cope with the socially difficult situations experienced when they go to a physical playground to interact with peers. Based on therapists and parents' insights, we created the model playground with built in collaborative protocols providing immediate feedback to the children in terms of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. Our design artefact was evaluated in a rehabilitation clinic for autistic children and demonstrates promising potential for digital-analogue devices as useful resources training peer social interaction. Our findings document that digital-analogue design devices can facilitate the development of social skills and norms through peer learning activities amongst children with autism.

Using ethnographic data, we provide a critical reflection on the discrepancies between the application of agile development principles and the conditions which render these principles effective for global software development work. This reflection is based on the analysis of a failed collaboration within a global software project, which relied heavily on feedback from mundane project tools utilized for everyday coordination and monitoring. Our study reveals that these tools hid serious issues relating to both the distribution of socio-technical skills and a discharge of accountability in task execution. As a result, markers of complex collaborative problems were concealed. Furthermore, the imbalance evident in outsourcing setups, which is enacted through high and low status task distribution among partners, further compounds collaboration problems by emphasizing assumptions about remote workers in the absence of direct forms of knowledge interchange.

This paper identifies the design challenges for creating collaborative technologies supporting the practices of organizing elections. We ethnographically investigate the distributed nature of knowledge as enacted between heterogeneous groups over the course of three elections in Denmark. We 1) identify fundamental characteristics of elections, 2) provide a comprehensive account of the distributed nature of knowledge in organizing and executing elections, and 3) point to new challenging areas for human-computer interaction (HCI) design supporting distributed collaborative knowledge practices. We found that organizational pattern of elections complicates the embodiment of nomadic knowledge, which is crucial for managing the effective organization of an election. Thus, one of the relevant design challenges is finding out how to support the timely distribution of large amounts of information, while still ensuring it is appropriately divided and delivered to various groups participating in planning and executing elections.

We report on an ethnographic study of an outsourcing global software development (GSD) setup between a Danish IT company and an Indian IT vendor developing a system to replace a legacy system for social services administration in Denmark. Physical distance and GSD collaboration issues tend to be obvious explanations for why GSD tasks fail to reach completion; however, we account for the difficulties within the technical nature of the software system task. We use the framework of information infrastructure to show how replacing a legacy system in governmental information infrastructures includes the work of tracing back to knowledge concerning law, technical specifications, as well as how information infrastructures have dynamically evolved over time. Not easily carried out in a GSD setup is the work around technical tasks that requires careful examination of mundane technical aspects, standards, and bureaucratic forms, as well as the excavation work that keeps the information infrastructure afloat.

On the basis of an ethnographic field study, this article introduces the concept of documentscape to the analysis of document-centric work practices. The concept of documentscape refers to the entire ensemble of documents in their mutual intertextual interlocking. Providing empirical data from a global software development case, we show how hierarchical structures and sequentiality across the interlocked documents are critical to how actors make sense of the work of others and what to do next in a geographically distributed setting. Furthermore, we found that while each document is created as part of a quasi-sequential order, this characteristic does not make the document, as a single entity, into a stable object. Instead, we found that the documents were malleable and dynamic while suspended in intertextual structures. Our concept of documentscape points to how the hierarchical structure, sequentiality, and authorless nature of documents serve as a constitutive platform for the development of iterative and emergent work practices, making it possible for highly distributed actors to collaborate with limited communication, as the documentscape serves as a vehicle of coordination.

We report on an ethnographic study of an outsourcing global software development (GSD) setup between an Indian IT vendor and an IT development division of a Danish bank. We investigate how the local IT development work is shaped by the global setup in GSD and argue that the bank had cultural blind spots toward the changes in Denmark. Three critical issues were neglected due to the cultural blind spots: 1) increased number of interruptions, 2) lack of translucence of remote colleagues' work, and 3) the re-definition of boundaries between work and articulation work. The implications of these findings include considerations for how to organize GSD practices and prepare the organizational changes that occur when moving from a co-located software development organization to an inter-organizational geographically distributed organization. Also, our findings open up discussions about the professional identity of IT developers within GSD, including extending the qualifications for IT developers.

We present an ethnographic field study of a distributed software development team following the Scrum methodology. During a two-week period, we observed from both sites the collaboration between a Danish software company off-shoring part of their development to an Indian solution provider. Collaboration by its very definition is based on the notion of dependency in work between multiple people. Articulation work is the extra work required to handle these dependencies. In a globally distributed team, managing these dependencies is exacerbated due to the distances of time, space, and culture. To broaden our understanding of dependencies in a global context and how they influence work practices, we made them the focus of our analysis. The main contributions of this paper are (i) an empirical account of the dependencies that are part of the collaborative work in a global software development team, (ii) a discussion of the interlinked properties of dependencies, and (iii) an explanation of how the practices of standardization and routine are developed and used to manage these dependencies.

Does distance still matter? Reporting on a comparative analysis of four ethnographic studies of global software development, this article analyzes the fundamental aspects of distance as depicted in the famous paper “Distance Matters.” The results suggest that, although while common ground, collaboration readiness, and organizational management are still important aspects for distributed collaboration, the arguments concerning coupling of work and collaboration technology readiness need to be refined. We argue that in working remotely, closely coupled work tasks encourage remote workers to spend the extra effort required in articulation of work to make the collaboration function. Also we find that people in distributed software development have already made collaborative technologies part of their work, and individuals are comfortable with them; thus, collaboration technology readiness takes a different shape in this setting.

This showcase paper describes the Global Interaction Research Initiative - GIRI - recently inaugurated at the IT University of Copenhagen. It presents the motivation for this initiative, namely that the use of information technology is the core enabling factor for global collaboration and business. We argue that there is a fundamental need for understanding and providing next generation technologies for this ultra large-scale interaction paradigm. GIRI is organized around a set of research themes and projects, focusing on different application areas. Themes and projects are loosely coupled in the sense that each research project is defined in its own right with a specific set of challenges, vision, approach, partners, and funding scheme. At the time of writing, GIRI has 3 research themes and are hosting 6 projects, but these numbers are expected to increase as GIRI grows. GIRI is an open research initiative, and we invite other researchers to join.

In this paper, we propose an approach to balance the legitimate and yet conflicting perspectives between standardization and reconfiguration embedded within hospital information systems (HIS) design activities. We report on an action research study of the customization process of an electronic triage and tracking system that was reconfigured to be used in eight Canadian emergency departments. We argue that during HIS design activities, it is essential for both practitioners and system designers to articulate and identify which aspects can be standardized without constraining important local flexibility and which aspects require local reconfiguration to function in a particular work context. To identify these differences, we suggest an analytical distinction between boundary factors and contextual contingencies, which can be used in a design and reconfiguration process. We argue that the process of designing shared electronic templates should be perceived as a common design process, where multiple stakeholders articulate, identify, and negotiate boundary factors and contextual contingencies. Boundary factors are then represented within the shared electronic system, whereas contextual contingencies form the basis for constructing localized versions of the shared application. All local versions include both boundary factors and the reconfigured contextual contingencies.

In this paper we outline a typology, which will be useful for those engaged in the design and customization of information systems in healthcare. Drawing on ethnographic case studies conducted in six healthcare settings in two countries, the typology outlined here is intended to identify possible sources of local variability of health care work practices, which need to be accommodated in local configurations of generic information systems.

This paper argues that proactive behaviour, caused by high engagement and motivation of the learners, may lead to failure of collaborative learning. By examining empirical data from real-world text-only virtual negotiations between dispersed participants engaged in project-based collaborative learning, we discover that volunteering self-initiated activities promotes the participants' individualistic behaviour. Also, the technology made it easy for participants to include their own statements in new contributions and deconstruct the statements of others, permitting few opportunities for others to influence proposals.