U.S. public housing is historically a site of racialized and carceral surveillance. Digital surveillance technologies reinforce this containment by mediating carceral visuality, the institutionalized visual and analytic lenses that shape perceptions and governance of public housing spaces and residents. This paper presents a videovoice project with a public housing community, for which residents used smartphones to capture their routines, spatial practices, and imaginaries in relation to surveillance. We analyze how these video artifacts enact alternative ways of seeing and knowing, surfacing overlooked routines, relations, and critiques of surveillance. These videos document what is often invisibilized: the lived consequences of carceral visuality and the situated knowledge of those surveilled. We propose “counter-visual artifacts” to describe the political and disruptive role these videos play in challenging dominant visual regimes and reclaiming the right to see and be seen otherwise. By advocating for counter-visual sensibilities, we invite HCI scholars to rethink how artifacts make room for alternative ways of seeing.

Peer Reviewed

Social media systems are as varied as they are pervasive. They have been almost universally adopted for a broad range of purposes including work, entertainment, activism, and decision making. As a result, they have also diversified, with many distinct designs differing in content type, organization, delivery mechanism, access control, and many other dimensions. In this work, we aim to characterize and then distill a concise design space of social media systems that can help us understand similarities and differences, recognize potential consequences of design choice, and identify spaces for innovation. Our model, which we call Form-From, characterizes social media based on (1) the form of the content, either threaded or flat, and (2) from where or from whom one might receive content, ranging from spaces to networks to the commons. We derive Form-From inductively from a larger set of 62 dimensions organized into 10 categories. To demonstrate the utility of our model, we trace the history of social media systems as they traverse the Form-From space over time, and we identify common design patterns within cells of the model.

The bereaved interact with photos of the deceased in various ways to maintain continuing bonds. Extant research in HCI and interaction design suggests leveraging data on photos’ contexts (e.g., time and place) to support photo use by the bereaved. Extending this research, we interviewed 17 bereaved parents to examine how the bereaved might also interact with photos’ content (e.g., color schemes, facial expressions). We characterize their interactions as processes of meaning-making that enabled them to keep their finite photos relevant and maintain continuing bonds with their children. By identifying meaning-making processes in terms of interactions with both photos’ content and contexts, we open up possibilities for supporting photo use for the bereaved that leverage content-related data. Our findings more broadly highlight the importance of accounting for subjective meaning-making processes in data-driven approaches to photo use in HCI and computer vision.

Noticing differently commits to stepping out of familiar reference frameworks while attending to oft-neglected actors, relations, and ways of knowing for design. Photovoice is an arts- and community-based participatory approach allowing individuals to communicate their lives and stories about pressing community concerns through photography. This paper bridges photovoice and the commitment to noticing in HCI and design through a photovoice project with Detroit residents on safety and surveillance. The photovoice process—alongside the production, reflection, and dissemination of photographs—makes residents’ everyday situations legible and sensible, allowing both community members and researchers to orient to and engage with multiple viewpoints, sensibilities, and temporal trajectories. This process confronts the invisibility of both the sociotechnical infrastructures (in our case, surveillance infrastructures) and minoritized communities’ relational ontologies. By advocating participatory noticing in design research, we show the opportunities for adopting arts- and community-based participatory approaches in decentering dominant ways of knowing and seeing, while at the same time fostering community capacity and relations for future potentialities.

Algorithmic systems have infiltrated many aspects of our society, mundane to high-stakes, and can lead to algorithmic harms known as representational and allocative. In this paper, we consider what stigma theory illuminates about mechanisms leading to algorithmic harms in algorithmic assemblages. We apply the four stigma elements (i.e., labeling, stereotyping, separation, status loss/discrimination) outlined in sociological stigma theories to algorithmic assemblages in two contexts : 1) "risk prediction" algorithms in higher education, and 2) suicidal expression and ideation detection on social media. We contribute the novel theoretical conceptualization of algorithmic stigmatization as a sociotechnical mechanism that leads to a unique kind of algorithmic harm: algorithmic stigma. Theorizing algorithmic stigmatization aids in identifying theoretically-driven points of intervention to mitigate and/or repair algorithmic stigma. While prior theorizations reveal how stigma governs socially and spatially, this work illustrates how stigma governs sociotechnically.

Safety has been used to justify the expansion of today’s large-scale surveillance infrastructures in American cities. Our work offers empirical and theoretical groundings on why and how the safety-surveillance conflation that reproduces harm toward communities of color must be denaturalized. In a photovoice study conducted in collaboration with a Detroit community organization and a university team, we invited 11 Black mid-aged and senior Detroiters to use photography to capture their lived experiences of navigating personal and community safety. Their photographic narratives unveil acts of “everyday noticing” in negotiating and maintaining their intricate and interdependent relations with human, non-human animals, plants, spaces, and material things, through which a multiplicity of meaning and senses of safety are produced and achieved. Everyday noticing, as simultaneously a survival skill and a more-than-human care act, is situated in residents’ lived materialities, while also serving as a site for critiquing the reductive and exclusionary vision embedded in large-scale surveillance infrastructures. By proposing an epistemological shift from surveillance-as-safety to safety-through-noticing, we invite future HCI work to attend to the fluid and relational forms of safety that emerge from local entanglement and sensibilities.

The acquisition of information and its use in decision making and coping by people with health concerns have garnered much attention in CSCW. This study investigated patients' information behavior during a critical treatment, in vitro fertilization (IVF). Based on in-depth interviews with 29 IVF patients, this study uncovered several underlying drivers and mechanisms accounting for patients' information behavior. Their behavior is shown to be driven by coping concerns - specifically, dealing with the unpredictability of the treatment outcome, overcoming feelings of powerlessness and the sense of being out of control, and managing difficult emotionality. These factors shape patients' information needs and drive their behaviors in seemingly irrational but ultimately logical and adaptive ways. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that patients typically seek information that can help them fill knowledge gaps to resolve treatment uncertainty and foster their positive emotions, we discovered that in response to the desire to control their perceptions of irresolvable uncertainty and the difficult emotional needs of the moment, IVF patients frequently used ?calibrated uncertainty" - a psychological mechanism or state driven by the simultaneous seeking of varying levels and contradictory valences of certainty - to actively conduct targeted searches and actively use the information sought. This behavior has not always been understood by the IVF clinicians, who have assumed that information was primarily for knowledge transfer. This study shows that coping, emotion regulation, and information-seeking are inextricably bound together in the patient experience, and that this intertwining must be considered in the clinical setting for physician-patient communication and for patient-facing information. The findings have several valuable design implications for improved health informatics technology and service delivery systems.

People with visual impairments (PVI) access photos through image descriptions. Thus far, research has studied what PVI expect in these descriptions mostly regarding functional purposes (e.g., identifying an object) and when engaging with online, publicly available images. Extending this research, we interviewed 30 PVI to understand their expectations for image descriptions when viewing, taking, searching, and reminiscing with personal photos on their own devices. We show how their expectations varied across photo activities and often went well beyond identifying objects in photos. Based on our findings, we propose design opportunities for generating and providing image descriptions for personal photo use by PVI. The design opportunities for PVI also point to novel support for the sighted for using image descriptions to enrich their experience of photos.

Domain experts play an essential role in data science by helping data scientists situate their technical work beyond the statistical analysis of large datasets. How domain experts themselves may engage with data science tools as a type of end-user remains largely invisible. Understanding data science as domain expert-driven depends on understanding how domain experts use data. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a craft brewery in Korea, we show how craft brewers worked with data by situating otherwise abstract data within their brewing practices and settings. We contribute theoretical insight into how domain experts use data distinctly from technical data scientists in terms of their view of data (situated vs. abstract), purposes for engaging with data (guiding processes over predicting outcomes), and overall goals of using data (flexible control vs. precision). We propose four ways in which working with data can be supported through the design of data science tools, and discuss how craftwork can be a useful lens for integrating domain expert-driven understandings of data science into CSCW and HCI research.

Digital educational technologies have been employed in classrooms to collect students’ behavioral data in the hope of supporting teachers in identifying and correcting undesirable behaviors, which raises the concern of heightened surveillance in classrooms. We present a qualitative study of 20 K-8 teachers to understand their experiences and practices of using ClassDojo, a data-driven classroom behavior management intervention. Our analysis reveals a series of unintended socio-technical effects resulting from the use of ClassDojo in practice. In particular, the use of ClassDojo runs the risk of measuring, codifying, and simplifying the nuanced psycho-social factors that may drive children’s behavior and performance, thereby serving as a “Band-Aid” for deeper issues. We discuss how this process could perpetuate existing inequality and bias in education. With the goals of spurring future design and mitigating these unintended effects, we take on the reflexive-interventionist approach and propose three considerations for designing and using future educational technologies: 1) provide context, 2) expose bias, and 3) challenge and reimagine what is normal.

Affirmative consent is the idea that someone must ask for, and earn, enthusiastic approval before interacting with someone else. For decades, feminist activists and scholars have used affirmative consent to theorize and prevent sexual assault. In this paper, we ask: Can affirmative consent help to theorize online interaction? Drawing from feminist, legal, and HCI literature, we introduce the feminist theory of affirmative consent and use it to analyze social computing systems. We present affirmative consent’s five core concepts: it is voluntary, informed, revertible, specific, and unburdensome. Using these principles, this paper argues that affirmative consent is both an explanatory and generative theoretical framework. First, affirmative consent is a theoretical abstraction for explaining various problematic phenomena in social platforms—including mass online harassment, revenge porn, and problems with content feeds. Finally, we argue that affirmative consent is a generative theoretical foundation from which to imagine new design ideas for consentful socio-technical systems.

This paper examines "repairedness" - the contingently stable, working version of an artifact under repair that is negotiated out of multiple possible versions to bring about the temporary conclusion of repair work. Our paper draws on an ethnographic study of an analog electronics repair community in Seoul, South Korea to develop two contributions. First, studying processes of negotiating the repairedness of an artifact accounts for contingency in the properties of the artifact itself, which differs from contingencies in collaborative work practices that have been a focus of CSCW research on repair. Second, a concept of repairedness highlights how ongoing processes of interacting with an artifact nonetheless need to be brought to contingent conclusions, suggesting that an artifact's properties are a valuable site for sustainable engagement. These contributions help CSCW research on repair account for the multiplicity of artifacts highlighted by STS scholars as integral to how humans sustainably engage with artifacts in their practices.

Today, teachers have been increasingly relying on data-driven technologies to track and monitor student behavior data for classroom management. Drawing insights from interviews with 20 K--8 teachers, in this paper we unpack how teachers enacted both care and control through their data work in collecting, interpreting, and using student behavior data. In this process, teachers found themselves subject to surveilling gazes from parents, school administrators, and students. As a result, teachers had to manipulate the student behavior data to navigate the balance between presenting a professional image to surveillants and enacting care/control that they deemed appropriate. In this paper we locate two nuanced forms of teachers' data work that have been under-studied in CSCW: (1) data work as recontextualizing meanings and (2) data work as resisting surveillance. We discuss teachers' struggle over (in)visibility and their negotiation of autonomy and subjectivity in these two forms of data work. We highlight the importance of foregrounding and making space for informal data workers' (in our case, teachers') resistance and negotiation of autonomy in light of datafication.

Detecting rhetoric that manipulates readers' emotions requires distinguishing intrinsically emotional content (IEC; e.g., a parent losing a child) from emotionally manipulative language (EML; e.g., using fear-inducing language to spread anti-vaccine propaganda). However, this remains an open classification challenge for both automatic and crowdsourcing approaches. Machine Learning approaches only work in narrow domains where labeled training data is available, and non-expert annotators tend to conflate IEC with EML. We introduce an approach, anchor comparison, that leverages workers' ability to identify and remove instances of EML in text to create a paraphrased "anchor text", which is then used as a comparison point to classify EML in the original content. We evaluate our approach with a dataset of news-style text snippets and show that precision and recall can be tuned for system builders' needs. Our contribution is a crowdsourcing approach that enables non-expert disentanglement of social references from content.

Given the importance and social significance of passing down family stories to each generation, why do important family stories not get told? How should designers of digital family storytelling platforms address missing or incomplete parts of narratives? Drawing from the results of an interview-based, practice-oriented inquiry, we argue that non-telling should be considered an important and integral part of family storytelling. Our findings show that non-telling is not simply silence. Non-telling allows family members to observe protective and discretionary values essential to the identity-making and relational goals of family storytelling. We also show ways that a person's reticence is situated and may change over time. In our discussion, we provide design strategies for family storytelling technologies to make room for silence and incorporate the values, purposes, and practices of non-telling.

In this paper, we present ethnographic account of people's everyday behavioral health experiences in the city of Jackson, Michigan to explore community forms of care work through an infrastructural lens. Detailing people's interactions with clinical processes and health policies, local resources, and diverse social worlds, we highlight problematic healthcare delivery gaps, as well as the informal (and often invisible) practices people depend upon to manage their health needs given socioeconomic hardships and cultural concerns. We also discuss the city's efforts to support local behavioral health needs through the development of a community health record. Placing fieldwork findings in conversation with the goals of this ongoing civic design project, we propose the analytic sensibility of precarious intervention to unpack the significance of the infrastructural tensions and power relations at play when people seek solutions to complex sociotechnical problems. Precarious intervention calls for CSCW research that attends to 1) the collective labor necessary to create and maintain ecologies of care in the face of infrastructural brokenness; and 2) the high-stakes and varied costs of 'engagement' for different community stakeholders.

Emotion- and stressed-related eating (ESRE) is associated with weight management difficulties and is more likely to affect women than men. Additionally, health information technology (HIT) for weight management tends to be less effective for women than it is for men, and less effective for people who engage in ESRE. Therefore, this study explores how HIT can support overweight/obese women curb ESRE behavior. Study participants, all adult overweight/obese women (BMI ' 25), logged dietary intake for 10 days with the Lose It! smartphone app as an elicitation exercise. Cross sectional, semi-structured interviews (N = 22) were then conducted to explore technology support needs concerning ESRE behavior. Findings revealed participants had the following needs: holistic health goal development, building motivation to achieve goals, and assistance with handling stress. Resulting HIT guidelines include supporting holistic health goals, developing and sustaining motivation, exchange of emotional support, understanding of behavior, and change in ESRE mindset.

Sharing family stories is an integral aspect of how families remember together and build a sense of connection. Yet, when generations in families are separated by large geographic and temporal distances, the everyday taken-for-granted processes of sharing family stories shift from conversational to mediated forms. To inform HCI research and practice in mediating family stories, we contribute an account of the co-constructive intergenerational social practices enacted to co-construct and interpret family stories. These practices demonstrate the agency of both storytellers and listeners as they work to discover, decipher, and reconstruct family stories. We close by drawing insights from this setting to frame key design challenges for multi-lifespan information systems mediating asynchronous, asymmetric, co-constructive and socially weighted information sharing interactions.

Human–computer interaction research on personal informatics in health care has focused on systems that aim to support patient empowerment and enable better health outcomes with data monitoring and tracking. Through examining the lived experience of personal data used to manage chronic illness, we show how such technology design is also the site of radical dependencies, collaborative care arrangements, and wider sociopolitical concerns tied to new forms of technical labor and shifts in medical expertise. Drawing from ethnographic research with open source, do-it-yourself collectives engaged in opening up corporate-controlled type 1 diabetes devices and data, we propose the analytical lens of lived data. Lived data emphasize data as an integral way of living, enacted through a multiplicity of things, relations, and practices, from bodies and needles, social media support groups, and legal processes to writing code, making visualizations, and hacking devices. Building on critical and feminist scholarship of human–machine relations, we articulate the work that goes into producing and living personal data, the physical and emotional costs of data tracking, and the consequences of do-it-yourself as a form of individual empowerment in health and wellness.

Independence is a central concern for people in the care of many chronic conditions. It is often viewed as a goal that can be facilitated with the use of patient data. It is also viewed, especially from the medical side, as something an individual achieves. However, in the lived experience, independence is often a set of collaborative practices. In this paper, we unpack findings from an interview-based study of Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) self-care. We found that independence - both functional and in the form of effecting agency - must be co-constructed by the choices and activities of the care network, including the person with disability, caregivers, and clinicians. This collaboratively shaped independence also affects potential collection and use of data in support of self-care. We describe how collaboratively shaped independence informs requirements and constraints for the design of sensor-based networks for self-care in long-term chronic disability.

In location-based social Q8A services, people ask a question with a high expectation that local residents who have local knowledge will answer the question. However, little is known about the locality of user activities in location-based social Q8A services. This study aims to deepen our understanding of location-based knowledge sharing by investigating the following: general behavioral characteristics of users, the topical and typological patterns related to geographic characteristics, geographic locality of user activities, and motivations of local knowledge sharing. To this end, we analyzed a 12-month period Q8A dataset from Naver KiN “Here,” a location-based social Q8A mobile app, in addition to a supplementary survey dataset obtained from 285 mobile users. Our results reveal several unique characteristics of location-based social Q8A. When compared with conventional social Q8A sites, users ask and answer different topical/typological questions. In addition, those who answer have a strong spatial locality wherein they primarily have local knowledge in a few regions, in areas such as their home and work. We also find unique motivators such as ownership of local knowledge and a sense of local community. The findings reported in the article have significant implications for the design of Q8A systems, especially location-based social Q8A systems.

Studies on technology adoption typically assume that a user's perception of usability and usefulness of technology are central to its adoption. Specifically, in the case of accessibility and assistive technology, research has traditionally focused on the artifact rather than the individual, arguing that individual technologies fail or succeed based on their usability and fit for their users. Using a mixed-methods field study of smartphone adoption by 81 people with visual impairments in Bangalore, India, we argue that these positions are dated in the case of accessibility where a non-homogeneous population must adapt to technologies built for sighted people. We found that many users switch to smartphones despite their awareness of significant usability challenges with smartphones. We propose a nuanced understanding of perceived usefulness and actual usage based on need-related social and economic functions, which is an important step toward rethinking technology adoption for people with disabilities.

Patients are often overwhelmed in their efforts to understand their illnesses and determine what actions to take. In this paper, we want to show why care is sometimes not co-managed well between clinicians and patients, and the necessary information is often not well coordinated. Through a 2.5-year field study of an adult bone marrow transplant (BMT) clinic, we show there are different experiences of temporal ordering, or temporalities, between clinicians and patients (and their caregivers). We also show that misalignments between these temporalities can seriously affect the articulation (coordination) and information work that must go on for people to co-manage their conditions with clinicians. As one example, information flows can be misaligned, as a result of differing temporalities, causing sometimes an overwhelming amount of information to be presented and sometimes a lack of properly contextualized information. We also argue that these misalignments in temporalities, important in medicine, are a general coordination problem.

Children grow up fast. Many parents want to capture the candid, fleeting moments of their young children's lives to treasure later, but these moments are difficult to anticipate and to capture without disruption. Current technologies to address this are limited to indiscriminately capturing everything, or are dependent on parents' presence and prescience to initiate capture and manually record the moment. To address these limitations, we introduce KidKeeper, a toy-like system to capture, select, and deliver everyday family memories with minimal effort and disruption to family life. It uses an innovative approach to capture that we call "integrated capture," that combines previous attempts to continuously capture family memories with the practice-oriented approach of "unremarkable computing" to embed capture capabilities unobtrusively into everyday activities. In our study, we explore how technologies like KidKeeper mediate and align the different interests and values of various family members, namely parents who want precious moments and children who want to play, towards accomplishing a family goal to capture memories of everyday life.

Designing systems to support the social context of personal data is a topic of importance in CSCW, particularly in the area of health and wellness. The relational complexities and psychological consequences of living with health data, however, are still emerging. Drawing on a 12+ month ethnography and corroborating survey data, we detail the experiences of parents using Nightscout--an open source, DIY system for remotely monitoring blood glucose data-with their children who have type one diabetes. Managing diabetes with Nightscout is a deeply relational and (at times) contested activity for parent-caregivers, whose practices reveal the tensions and vulnerabilities of caregiving work enacted through data. As engagement with personal data becomes an increasingly powerful way people experience life, our findings call for alternative data narratives that reflect a multiplicity of emotional concerns and social arrangements. We propose the analytic lens of caring-through-data as a way forward.

People capture photos, audio recordings, video, and more on a daily basis, but organizing all these digital artifacts quickly becomes a daunting task. Automated solutions struggle to help us manage this data because they cannot understand its meaning. In this paper, we introduce Kurator, a hybrid intelligence system leveraging mixed-expertise crowds to help families curate their personal digital content. Kurator produces a refined set of content via a combination of automated systems able to scale to large data sets and human crowds able to understand the data. Our results with 5 families show that Kurator can reduce the amount of effort needed to find meaningful memories within a large collection. This work also suggests that crowdsourcing can be used effectively even in domains where personal preference is key to accurately solving the task.

Making effective use of patient-generated data (PGD) is challenging for both patients and providers. Designing systems to support collaborative and individual use of PGD is a topic of importance in CSCW, considering the limitations of informatics tools. To inform better system design, we conducted a study including focus groups, observations and interviews with patients and providers to understand how PGD is interpreted and used. We found that while PGD is useful for identifying and solving disease-related problems, the following differences in patient-provider perceptions challenge its effective use - different perceptions about what is a problem, selecting what kinds of problems to focus on, and using different data representations. Drawing on these insights, we reflect on two specific conceptualizations of disease management behavior (sensemaking and problem-solving) as they relate to data specific activities of patients and providers and provide design suggestions for tools to support collaborative and individual use of PGD.

Over the last 25-30 years, an enormous amount has been learned about how people seek, use, maintain, and reuse information and expertise in groups and other collectivities. We have also seen major changes in the kinds of information available and in how it is available.

Valuable memories are increasingly captured and stored as digital artifacts. However, as people amass these digital mementos, their collections are rarely curated, due to the volume of content, the effort involved, and a general lack of motivation, which can result in important artifacts being obscured and forgotten in an accumulation of content over time. Our study aims to better understand the challenges and goals of people dealing with large collections, and to provide insight into how people select and pay attention to large collections of digital mementos. We conducted an interpretivist analysis of forum data from UnclutterNow.com, where participants discussed issues they face in curating the sentimental artifacts in their homes. We uncovered a number of social, temporal, and spatial affordances and concerns that influence the ways that people curate their memories, and discuss how curation is closely tied to how people use storage and display in their home. In our study, we drew out and unpack "curation regimes" as patterns that people enact to focus the attention they are able to pay to the artifacts in their collections. We close with a discussion of the design opportunities for memory artifacts, which support and facilitate the curatorial processes of users managing digital mementos in everyday life.

BACKGROUND: Patient-centered care has been shown to improve patient outcomes, satisfaction, and engagement. However, there is a paucity of research on patient-centered care in the inpatient setting, including an understanding of unmet informational needs that may be limiting patient engagement. Pediatric hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) represents an ideal patient population for elucidating unmet informational needs, due to the procedure's complexity and its requirement for caregiver involvement. METHODS: We conducted field observations and semi-structured interviews of pediatric HSCT caregivers and patients to identify informational challenges in the inpatient hospital setting. Data were analyzed using a thematic grounded theory approach. RESULTS: Three stages of the caregiving experience that could potentially be supported by a health information technology system, with the goal of enhancing patient/caregiver engagement, were identified: (1) navigating the health system and learning to communicate effectively with the healthcare team, (2) managing daily challenges of caregiving, and (3) transitioning from inpatient care to long-term outpatient management. DISCUSSION: We provide four practical recommendations to meet the informational needs of pediatric HSCT patients and caregivers: (1) provide patients/caregivers with real-time access to electronic health record data, (2) provide information about the clinical trials in which the patient is enrolled, (3) provide information about the patient's care team, and (4) properly prepare patients and caregivers for hospital discharge. CONCLUSION: Pediatric HSCT caregivers and patients have multiple informational needs that could be met with a health information technology system that integrates data from several sources, including electronic health records. Meeting these needs could reduce patients' and caregivers' anxiety surrounding the care process; reduce information asymmetry between caregivers/patients and providers; empower patients/caregivers to participate in the care process; and, ultimately, increase patient/caregiver engagement in the care process.

Mailing lists have existed since the early days of email and are still widely used today, even as more sophisticated online forums and social media websites proliferate. The simplicity of mailing lists can be seen as a reason for their endurance, a source of dissatisfaction, and an opportunity for improvement. Using a mixed-method approach, we studied two community mailing lists in depth with interviews and surveys, and surveyed a broader spectrum of 28 lists. We report how members of the different communities use their lists and their goals and desires for them. We explore why members prefer mailing lists to other group communication tools. But we also identify several tensions around mailing list usage that appear to contribute to dissatisfaction with them. We conclude with design implications, discussing ways to alleviate these tensions while preserving mailing lists' appeal.

The impact of health information on caregivers is of increasing interest to HCI/CSCW in designing systems to support the social and emotional dimensions of managing health. Drawing on an interview study, as well as corroborating data including a multi-year ethnography, we detail the practices of caregivers (particularly parents) in a bone marrow transplant (BMT) center. We examine the interconnections between information and emotion work performed by caregivers through a liminal lens, highlighting the BMT experience as a time of transition and reflection in which caregivers must quickly adapt to the new social world of the hospital and learn to manage a wide range of patient needs. The transition from parent to 'caregiver' is challenging, placing additional emotional burdens on the intensive information work for managing BMT. As a time of reflection, the BMT experience also provides an occasion for generative thinking and alternative approaches to health management. Our study findings call for health systems that reflect a design paradigm focused on 'transforming lives' rather than 'transferring information.'

In this paper, we examine whether the use of expertise ratings can help crowd-sourcing systems. We show, using simulations, that a crowd-sourcing system based in social navigation works better when users’ expertise levels are taken into account.

In this work, we designed and field-tested a system called Home Trivia to explore how we can use activity traces captured in the home to allow household members to reflect on how they use technology, which has become an issue of increasing concern among families that have seen their home lives intertwined with Internet-enabled devices. Home Trivia captures traces of using technology at home and then shows those traces to family members as content of a puzzle game they can play together. The results of testing Home Trivia in the field show that the design of the game allows engagement and reflection to reinforce each other. Moreover, our work enriches and further develops the idea of using ambiguity as a resource for design with the insight that allowing users to reduce ambiguity through recollecting past events and communicating with others can help trigger reflection.

Personal tracking technologies allow users to monitor and reflect on their physical activities and fitness. However, users are uncertain about how accurately their devices track their data. In order to better understand this challenge, we analyzed 600 product reviews and conducted 24 interviews with tracking device users. In this paper, we describe what methods users used to assess accuracy of their tracking devices and identify seven problems they encountered. We found that differences in users' expectations, physical characteristics, types of activities and lifestyle led them to have different perceptions of the accuracy of their devices. With the absence of sound mental models and unclear understanding of the concepts of accuracy and experimental controls, users designed faulty tests and came to incorrect conclusions. We propose design recommendations to better support end-users' efforts to assess and improve the accuracy of their tracking devices as required to suit their individual characteristics and purposes.

Transitional points in patient care, such as handoffs and hospital discharges, are known to have unique information challenges. Transitions following long-term care involve even more complex processes. In this study, we examine the informational and contextual issues for patients transitioning from the care of specialists who have come to know them through long-term partnerships to clinicians potentially less familiar with patients’ chronic care concerns. The context is bone marrow transplant (BMT); specifically allogeneic transplants, which involve risk for particular chronic complications and a long-term process that requires close monitoring of patients by BMT specialists for at least a year beyond the actual transplant procedure. Based on a 16-month field study, we examine patient experience and clinician viewpoints regarding the transition of patient responsibility from BMT clinicians to primary care or oncologists, and detail the important issues for patients and clinicians.

This work explores the potential value of using the enormous amount of activity traces latest ubicomp environments have started to capture. We sought to understand potential practices of using these traces in the long term through a field-based study in the USA that examines how today's people use traces left by their predecessors in the houses where they live.

In location-based social Q&A, the questions related to a local community (e.g. local services and places) are typically answered by local residents (i.e. who have the local knowledge). In this work, we wanted to deepen our understanding of the localness of knowledge sharing through investigating the topical and typological patterns related to the geographic characteristics, geographic locality of user activities, and motivations of local knowledge sharing. To this end, we analyzed a 12-month period Q&A dataset from Naver KiN "Here" and a supplementary survey dataset from 285 mobile users. Our results revealed several unique characteristics of location-based social Q&A. When compared with conventional social Q&A sites, Naver KiN "Here" had very different topical/typological patterns. Naver KiN "Here" exhibited a strong spatial locality where the answerers mostly had 1-3 spatial clusters of contributions, the topical distributions varied widely across different districts, and a typical cluster spanned a few neighboring districts. In addition, we uncovered unique motivators, e.g. ownership of local knowledge and sense of local community. The findings reported in the paper have significant implications for the design of Q&A systems, especially location-based social Q&A systems.

We propose using discovery-based learning games to teach people how to use complex software. Specifically, we developed Jigsaw, a learning game that asks players to solve virtual jigsaw puzzles using tools in Adobe Photoshop. We conducted an eleven-person lab study of the prototype, and found the game to be an effective learning medium that can complement demonstration-based tutorials. Not only did the participants learn about new tools and techniques while actively solving the puzzles in Jigsaw, but they also recalled techniques that they had learned previously but had forgotten.

Sentiment is a rich and important dimension of social interaction. However, its presence in computer-mediated communication in corporate settings is not well understood. This paper provides a preliminary study of people's expression of sentiment in email conversations in an organizational context. The study reveals that sentiment levels evolve over time during the process of newcomers' socialization, that sentiment varies according to tie-strength with the recipient, and that sentiment patterns can be indicative of one's position in the corporate social network as well as job performance. These findings shed light on the complex and dynamic nature of sentiment patterns, and would inspire further explorations and applications of sentiment analysis in organizations.

NB is an in-place collaborative document annotation website targeting students reading lecture notes and draft textbooks. Serving as a discussion forum in the document margins, NB lets users ask and answer questions about their reading material as they are reading. NB users can read and annotate documents using their web browsers, without any special plug-ins. We describe the NB system and its evaluation in real class environment, where students used it to submit their reading assignments, ask questions and get or provide feedback. We show that this tool can be and has been successfully incorporated into a number of different classes at different institutions. To understand how and why, we focus on a particularly successful class deployment where the instructor adapted his teaching style to take students' comment into account. We analyze the annotation practices that were observed - including the way geographic locality was exploited in ways unavailable in traditional forums - and discuss general design implications for online annotation tools in academia.

Coping with chronic illness disease is a long and lonely journey, because the burden of managing the illness on a daily basis is placed upon the patients themselves. In this paper, we present our findings for how diabetes patient support groups help one another find individualized strategies for managing diabetes. Through field observations of face-to-face diabetes support groups, content analysis of an online diabetes community, and interviews, we found several help interactions that are critical in helping patients in finding individualized solutions. Those are: (1) patients operationalize their experiences to easily contextualize and share executable strategies; (2) operationalization has to be done within the larger context of sharing illness trajectories; and (3) the support groups develop common understanding towards diabetes management. We further discuss how our findings translate into design implications for supporting chronic illness patients in online community settings.

The patient Problem List (PL) is a mandated documentation component of electronic health records supporting the longitudinal summarization of patient information in addition to facilitating the coordination of care by multidisciplinary medical teams. In this paper, we report an ethnographic study that examined the institutionalization of the PL. Specifically, we explored: (1) how different groups (primary care providers, inpatient hospitalists, specialists, and emergency doctors) perceived the purposes of the PL differently; (2) how these deviated perceptions might affect their use of the PL; and (3) how the technical design of the PL facilitated or hindered the clinical practices of these groups. We found significant ambiguity regarding the definition, benefits, and use of the PL across different groups. We also found that certain groups (e.g. primary care providers) had developed effective cooperative strategies regarding the use of the PL; however, suboptimal usage was common among other user types, which could have a profound impact on quality of care and safety. Based on these findings, we provide suggestions to improve the design of the PL, particularly on strengthening its support on longitudinal and cooperative clinical practices.

In this paper, we seek to advance the research around utilizing collaborative help for supporting individualized use of technologies. We do this by shedding light on the ways that users of MythTV, a highly flexible open-source software system for home entertainment enthusiasts, collaboratively help one another in maintaining their individualized MythTV systems. By analyzing the MythTV user community's mailing list archive, documentation, and wiki, coupled with user interviews we discuss how the community utilizes configuration artifacts as proxies to easily mobilize and exchange knowledge. While exchanging concrete artifacts such as scripts and configuration files was seen to sometimes increase the efficiency of knowledge transfer, it also presented several challenges. Negotiating the transparency of configuration artifacts, navigating the customization and appropriation gulfs, and aligning usage trajectories all emerged as problematic areas. We discuss design implications that address these challenges. Our findings provide a crucial understanding for how to support users in their individualized use of systems.

We conducted an ethnographically based study at a large teaching hospital to examine clinician workarounds engendered by the adoption of a Computerized Prescribe Order Entry (CPOE) system. Specifically, we investigated how adoption of computerized systems may alter medical practice, order management in particular, as manifested through the working-around behavior developed by doctors and nurses to accommodate the changes in their day-to-day work environment. In this paper, we focus on clinicians' workarounds, including those workarounds that gradually disappeared and those that have become routinized. Further, we extend the CSCW concept of boundary object (to "assemblage") in order to understand the workarounds created with CPOE system use and the changing nature of clinical practices that are increasingly computerized.

Significant cultural differences persist between East and West. Software systems that have been proven to operate efficiently within one culture can fail in the context of the other, especially if they are intended to support rich social interactions. In this paper we demonstrate how a virtual currency system, not unlike ones employed by many US-based websites, evolved within a thriving Chinese online forum into an essential medium for extremely diverse and culturally specific social exchange activities. The social interactions reflect the traditional Chinese idea of guanxi, or interpersonal influence and connectedness, while at the same time incorporating the norms of a new generation of Internet users.

We conducted a field-based study at a large teaching hospital to examine doctors' use and documentation of patient care information, with a special focus on a patient's psychosocial information. We were particularly interested in the gaps between the medical work and any representations of the patient. The paper describes how doctors record this information for immediate and long-term use. We found that doctors documented a considerable amount of psychosocial information in their electronic health records (EHR) system. Yet, we also observed that such information was recorded selectively, and a medicalized view-point is a key contributing factor. Our study shows how missing or problematic representations of a patient affect work activities and patient care. We accordingly suggest that EHR systems could be made more usable and useful in the long run, by supporting both representations of medical processes and of patients.

More and more interaction is becoming code-based. Indeed, in online worlds, it is all there is. If software is providing a new basis for social interaction, then changing the infrastructure of interaction may necessarily change social interaction in important ways. As such, it is critical to understand the implications of code - we want to know what the use of code means for socio-technical design.In this paper, based on an ethnographic study of an online game, we examine social regulation in an online game world as a case study of socio-technical design using code. We wanted to know how changing interaction based in code conditioned use in our site. We found that code changed social regulation in three specific ways. First, code made some user actions that were socially unwanted to be immediately visible. Second, code could prevent some actions from occurring or punish users immediately. Finally, software was not able to see all action. Some user actions were too nuanced or subtle for code to catch; others were too ambiguous to place into code. Following Agre, we argue i that a grammar of action resulting from the use of code limits the kinds of behaviors that can be seen and dealt with.These findings suggest that there is more than just a gap between the social world and technical capabilities. There are new possibilities, tradeoffs, and limitations that must be considered in socio-technical design, and all come simultaneously.

For emerging group technologies that require evaluations on long-term use and social norms, assumptions, and implicit rules that develop around the technologies, standard usability testing may not be adequate. At the same time, field based research that allows for observing technology use over long-term is costly in terms of time. In this paper, we present a rapid method that we call progressive scenarios, which could help replicate the processes by which interpretations evolve over time in natural settings and how invisible assumptions and social norms dictate the technology use. Using a preliminary design concept of a publicly available ambient personal information and communication system, we demonstrate how the method helped to elicit design implications.

This paper introduces architectural and interaction patterns for integrating crowdsourced human contributions directly into user interfaces. We focus on writing and editing, complex endeavors that span many levels of conceptual and pragmatic activity. Authoring tools offer help with pragmatics, but for higher-level help, writers commonly turn to other people. We thus present Soylent, a word processing interface that enables writers to call on Mechanical Turk workers to shorten, proofread, and otherwise edit parts of their documents on demand. To improve worker quality, we introduce the Find-Fix-Verify crowd programming pattern, which splits tasks into a series of generation and review stages. Evaluation studies demonstrate the feasibility of crowdsourced editing and investigate questions of reliability, cost, wait time, and work time for edits.

When designing context-aware applications, it is difficult to for designers in the studio or lab to envision the contextual conditions that will be encountered at runtime. Designers need a tool that can create/re-create naturalistic contextual states and transitions, so that they can evaluate an application under expected contexts. We have designed and developed RePlay: a system for capturing and playing back sensor traces representing scenarios of use. RePlay contributes to research on ubicomp design tools by embodying a structured approach to the capture and playback of contextual data. In particular, RePlay supports: capturing naturalistic data through Capture Probes, encapsulating scenarios of use through Episodes, and supporting exploratory manipulation of scenarios through Transforms. Our experiences using RePlay in internal design projects illustrate its potential benefits for ubicomp design.

Large general-purposed community question-answering sites are becoming popular as a new venue for generating knowledge and helping users in their information needs. In this paper we analyze the characteristics of knowledge generation and user participation behavior in the largest question-answering online community in South Korea, Naver Knowledge-iN. We collected and analyzed over 2.6 million question/answer pairs from fifteen categories between 2002 and 2007, and have interviewed twenty six users to gain insights into their motivations,roles, usage and expertise. We find altruism, learning, and competency are frequent motivations for top answerers to participate, but that participation is often highly intermittent. Using a simple measure of user performance, we find that higher levels of participation correlate with better performance. We also observe that users are motivated in part through a point system to build a comprehensive knowledge database. These and other insights have significant implications for future knowledge generating online communities.

We conducted a field-based study examining informal nursing information. We examined the use of this information before and after the adoption of a CPOE (Computerized Provider Order Entry) system in an inpatient unit of a large teaching hospital. Before CPOE adoption, nurses used paper working documents to detail psycho-social information about patients; after the CPOE adoption, they did not use paper or digital notes as was planned. The paper describes this process and analyses how several interlocked reasons contributed to the loss of this information in written form. We found that a change in physical location, sufficient convenience, visibility of the information, and permanency of information account for some, but not all, of the outcome. As well, we found that computerization of the nursing data led to a shift in the politics of the information itself - the nurses no longer had a cohesive agreement about the kinds of data to enter into the system. The findings address the requirements of healthcare computerization to support both formal and informal work practices, respecting the nature of nursing work and the politics of information inherent in complex medical work.

This paper presents a qualitative study of attitudes towards participation and contribution in an online creative community. The setting of the work is an online community of practice focused on the use and development of a user-customizable music software package called Reaktor. Findings from the study highlight four emergent topics in the discourse related to user contributions to the community: contribution assessment, support for learning, perceptions of audience and tensions about commercialization. Our analysis of these topics frames discussion about the value and challenges of attending to amateur and professional users in online creative communities.

Witkeys are a thriving type of web-based knowledge sharing market in China, supporting a form of crowdsourcing. In a Witkey site, users offer a small award for a solution to a task, and other users compete to have their solution selected.

A proactive display is an application that selects content to display based on the set of users who have been detected nearby. For example, the Ticket2Talk [17] proactive display application presented content for users so that other people would know something about them.

Yahoo Answers (YA) is a large and diverse question-answer forum, acting not only as a medium for sharing technical knowledge, but as a place where one can seek advice, gather opinions, and satisfy one's curiosity about a countless number of things. In this paper, we seek to understand YA's knowledge sharing and activity. We analyze the forum categories and cluster them according to content characteristics and patterns of interaction among the users. While interactions in some categories resemble expertise sharing forums, others incorporate discussion, everyday advice, and support. With such a diversity of categories in which one can participate, we find that some users focus narrowly on specific topics, while others participate across categories. This not only allows us to map related categories, but to characterize the entropy of the users' interests. We find that lower entropy correlates with receiving higher answer ratings, but only for categories where factual expertise is primarily sought after. We combine both user attributes and answer characteristics to predict, within a given category, whether a particular answer will be chosen as the best answer by the asker.

Most empirical studies of peer production have focused on the final products of these efforts (such as software in Free/Open Source projects), but there are also many other knowledge artifacts that improve the effectiveness of the project. This paper presents a study of an intermediate work product, or informalism, used in a Free/Open Source Software project, GNUe. A digest-like artifact called the Kernel Cousin (KC) was used extensively in the project. These KCs allowed critical coordination and memory, but at the cost of considerable effort. The paper presents two examples of the KCs' use in the project as well as an analysis of their benefits and costs.

Online discussions such as a large-scale community brainstorming often end up with an unorganized bramble of ideas and topics that are difficult to reuse. A process of distillation is needed to boil down a large information space into information that is concise and organized. We take a system-augmented approach to the problem by creating a set of tools with which human editors can collaboratively distill a large amount of informal information.

Help-seeking communities have been playing an increasingly critical role in the way people seek and share information. However, traditional help-seeking mechanisms of these online communities have some limitations. In this paper, we describe an expertise-finding mechanism that attempts to alleviate the limitations caused by not knowing users' expertise levels. As a result of using social network data from the online community, this mechanism can automatically infer expertise level. This allows, for example, a question list to be personalized to the user's expertise level as well as to keyword similarity. We believe this expertise location mechanism will facilitate the development of next generation help-seeking communities.

Web-based communities have become important places for people to seek and share expertise. We find that networks in these communities typically differ in their topology from other online networks such as the World Wide Web. Systems targeted to augment web-based communities by automatically identifying users with expertise, for example, need to adapt to the underlying interaction dynamics. In this study, we analyze the Java Forum, a large online help-seeking community, using social network analysis methods. We test a set of network-based ranking algorithms, including PageRank and HITS, on this large size social network in order to identify users with high expertise. We then use simulations to identify a small number of simple simulation rules governing the question-answer dynamic in the network. These simple rules not only replicate the structural characteristics and algorithm performance on the empirically observed Java Forum, but also allow us to evaluate how other algorithms may perform in communities with different characteristics. We believe this approach will be fruitful for practical algorithm design and implementation for online expertise-sharing communities.

People search for people with suitable expertise all of the time in their social networks - to answer questions or provide help. Recently, efforts have been made to augment this searching. However, relatively little is known about the social characteristics of various algorithms that might be useful. In this paper, we examine three families of searching strategies that we believe may be useful in expertise location. We do so through a simulation, based on the Enron email data set. (We would be unable to suitably experiment in a real organization, thus our need for a simulation.) Our emphasis is not on graph theoretical concerns, but on the social characteristics involved. The goal is to understand the tradeoffs involved in the design of social network based searching engines.

This paper presents a modified diary study that investigated how people performed personally motivated searches in their email, in their files, and on the Web. Although earlier studies of directed search focused on keyword search, most of the search behavior we observed did not involve keyword search. Instead of jumping directly to their information target using keywords, our participants navigated to their target with small, local steps using their contextual knowledge as a guide, even when they knew exactly what they were looking for in advance. This stepping behavior was especially common for participants with unstructured information organization. The observed advantages of searching by taking small steps include that it allowed users to specify less of their information need and provided a context in which to understand their results. We discuss the implications of such advantages for the design of personal information management tools.

Communities are social entities whose actors share common needs, interests, or practices: they constitute the basic units of social experience. With regard to communities, social capital captures the structural, relational and cognitive aspects of the relationships among their members. Social capital is defined as a set of properties of a social entity (e.g. norms, level of trust, and intensive social networking) which enables joint activities and cooperation for mutual benefit. It can be understood as the glue which holds communities together. On this panel we will discuss whether and how information technology can strengthen communities by fostering social capital.

This paper examines the way in which a knowledge management system (KMS)-by which we mean the people, processes and software-came into being and evolved in response to a variety of shifting social, technical and organizational pressures. We draw upon data from a two year ethnographic study of a sophisticated help desk to trace the KMS from its initial conception as a "Common Problems" database for help desk personnel, to its current instantiation as a set of Frequently Asked Questions published on an intranet for help desk clients. We note how shifts in management, organizational structure, incentives, software technologies, and other factors affected the development of the system. This study sheds light on some of the difficulties that accompany the implementation of CSCW systems, and provides an analysis of how such systems are often designed by bricolage.

This paper discusses the software architecture of Impromptu, a mobile IP-based audio computing platform, with an associated set of network-based applications and services. Impromptu merges the communication properties and universal mobility of the telephone with the multi-tasking and open protocol world of the handheld PC. Its supporting architecture handles multiple streaming audio applications, provides speech services for consistent audio user interfaces across applications, and enables user management of these varied applications running simultaneously.

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.

Impromptu is a mobile audio device which uses wireless Internet Protocol (IP) to access novel computer-mediated voice communication channels. These channels show the richness of IP-based communication as compared to conventional mobile telephony, adding audio processing and storage in the network, and flexible, user-centered call control protocols. These channels may be synchronous, asynchronous, or eventtriggered, or even change modes as a function of other user activity. The demands of these modes plus the need to navigate with an entirely non-visual user interface are met with a number of audio-oriented user interaction techniques.

Context-aware computing offers the promise of significant user gains-the ability for systems to adapt more readily to user needs, models, and goals. Dey, Abowd, and Salber (2001 [this special issue]) present a masterful step toward understanding context-aware applications. We examine Dey et al. in the light of privacy issues-that is, individuals' control over their personal data-to highlight some of the thorny issues in context-aware computing that will be upon us soon. We argue that privacy in context-aware computing, especially those with perceptually aware environments, will be quite complex. Indeed, privacy forms a co-design space between the social, the technical, and the regulatory. We recognize that Dey et al. is a necessary first step in examining important software engineering concerns, but future research will need to consider how regulatory and technical solutions might be co-designed to form a public good.

Locating the expertise necessary to solve difficult problems is a nuanced social and collaborative problem. In organizations, some people assist others in locating expertise by making referrals. People who make referrals fill key organizational roles that have been identified by CSCW and affiliated research. Expertise locating systems are not designed to replace people who fill these key organizational roles. Instead, expertise locating systems attempt to decrease workload and support people who have no other options. Recommendation systems are collaborative software that can be applied to expertise locating. This work describes a general recommendation architecture that is grounded in a field study of expertise locating. Our expertise recommendation system details the work necessary to fit expertise recommendation to a work setting. The architecture and implementation begin to tease apart the technical aspects of providing good recommendations from social and collaborative concerns.

Over the last 10 years, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has identified a base set of findings. These findings are taken almost as assumptions within the field. In summary, they argue that human activity is highly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized and that computational entities such as information sharing, roles, and social norms need to be similarly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized. However, current systems cannot fully support the social world uncovered by these findings. In this article I argue that there is an inherent gap between the social requirements of CSCW and its technical mechanisms. The social-technical gap is the divide between what we know we must support socially and what we can support technically. Exploring, understanding, and hopefully ameliorating this social-technical gap is the central challenge for CSCW as a field and one of the central problems for human-computer interaction. Indeed, merely attesting the continued centrality of this gap could be one of the important intellectual contributions of CSCW. I also argue that the challenge of the social-technical gap creates an opportunity to refocus CSCW.

Privacy is a necessary concern in electronic commerce.It is difficult, if not impossible, to complete a transaction without revealing some personal data -a shipping address, billing information, or product preference.Users may be unwilling to provide this necessary information or even to browse online if they believe their privacy is invaded or threatened.Fortunately, there are technologies to help users protect their privacy.P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences Project) from the World Wide Web Consortium is one such technology.However, there is a need to know more about the range of user concerns and preferences about privacy in order to build usable and effective interface mechanisms for P3P and other privacy technologies.Accordingly, we conducted a survey of 381 U.S. Net users, detailing a range of commerce scenarios and examining the participants' concerns and preferences about privacy.This paper presents both the findings from that study as well as their design implications.

Article Considering an organization's memory Share on Authors: Mark S. Ackerman Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CAView Profile , Christine Halverson IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NYView Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '98: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1998 Pages 39–48https://doi.org/10.1145/289444.289461Online:01 November 1998Publication History 93citation1,318DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations93Total Downloads1,318Last 12 Months24Last 6 weeks3 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Article Free Access Share on Tutorials (summary) Authors: Tom Finholt University of Michigan University of MichiganView Profile , Mark S. Ackerman University of California, Irvine, University of California, Irvine,View Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '98: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1998 Pages 427–431https://doi.org/10.1145/289444.289522Published:01 November 1998Publication History 0citation512DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads512Last 12 Months8Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Everyday, people in or-tions mti solve their problm to get their work accomp~dTo do so, they oti must tid others with kowldge and tiormatiom Systems tiat assist users \titi tiding sach qertise are rncreasin~y interesdng to orgtitions and scientic communities.But as we begin to design md co~ct sach systems, it is important to determine ~vhatwe are attempting to augment Accordin@y, \ve condnctd a fi'e-month fidd tidy of a mtium-tied sotiare h We found the participants use compl~% iterative behaviors to ~e the number of possiile eqertise somces, tie at the same time, provide a hi@ possii@ of garnering the nmessary qerdse.We briefly consider the design implications of the identicatiou seldoq and esctition behaviors found during om field etady. Ke~ords Ex~ertise nehvo*knowledge netwo*, compntermtiated comnmnications, qert locators, qertise lom-tio% ex~ertise &ding, tiomtion seeking, Wm, com-pnt~-mpported cooperative work 1NTRODUCTION Wayne is a support rep for a sofivare company.Today, a cfient sent ~ra~me a probl~one he -t seen before.Wa>me spent sevd how @g to diagnose the problem and eventn~y re&d that he codd not solve it done.Now Wayne has another probIa -deciding whom he Iti ask to help h Utiortnnately, this is not simple; Rrayne is not sure of the problem's react cme.k the problem rehted to mer training?Or, is the problem the retit of a recent custo=on by the developers?Wfi Waynend to resortto~asking aromd?Wayne must fid the experdse nded to solve his cfient's problm Hen-to ad the people who are most appropnateto =k and get&&help.. . .

A growing concern for organizations and groups has been to augment their knowledge and expertise. One such augmentation is to provide an organizational memory, some record of the organization's knowledge. However, relatively little is known about how computer systems might enhance organizational, group, or community memory. This article presents Answer Garden, a system for growing organizational memory. The article describes the system and its underlying implementation. It then presents findings from a field study of Answer Garden. The article discusses the usage data and qualitative evaluations from the field study, and then draws a set of lessons for next-generation organizational memory systems.

No abstract available.

The primary focus of this article is an analysis of an audio-only media space from a computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) perspective. To explore whether audio by itself is suitable for shared media systems, we studied a workgroup using an audio-only media space. This media space, called Thunderwire, combined high-quality audio with open connec-tions to create a shared space for its users. The two-month field study provided a richly nuanced understanding of this audio spaces social use. The system afforded rich sociable interactions. As well, users were able to create a useful, usable social space; however, through an analysis of the social norms that the participants formulated, we show that they had to take into account being in an audio-only environment. Within the field study, then, audio by itself was sufficient for a usable media space and a useful social space, but users were forced to adapt to many audio-only and system conditions. The article also considers audios implications for privacy.

If Computer-Supported Cooperative W o r k (CSCW) systems are to be successful over time, it will be necessary to promote ongoing and continuing activity, not just initial adoption.In this paper, we consider what technical and social affordances are required to encourage the continued use of a CSCW system.To explore these issues, we exanaine a'chat-like system, the Zephyr Help Instance, which is used extensively at MIT.The Help Instance facilitates users asking questions of one another, and is an example of a distributed help and problem-solving system.We provide an overview of the system's use as well as those mechanisms, both technical and social, that facilitate continuing its use over time.

This research examines a collaborative solution to a common problem, that of providing help to distributed users. The Answer Garden 2 system provides a secondgeneration architecture for organizational and community memory applications. After describing the need for Answer Garden 2’s functionality, we describe the architecture of the system and two underlying systems, the Cafe ConstructionKit and Collaborative Refinery. We also present detailed descriptions of the collaborative help and collaborative refining facilities in the Answer Garden 2 system.

Article Free Access Share on Thunderwire: a field study of an audio-only media space Authors: Debby Hindus Interval Research, 1801 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA Interval Research, 1801 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Mark S. Ackerman Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CAView Profile , Scott Mainwaring Interval Research, 1801 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA Interval Research, 1801 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Brian Starr Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CAView Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1996 Pages 238–247https://doi.org/10.1145/240080.240262Published:16 November 1996Publication History 56citation791DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations56Total Downloads791Last 12 Months47Last 6 weeks6 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

This half-day workshop will aim to build a community of interest and research agenda around extending CSCW methods and technologies to home settings. Relevant issues include the coordination of activities in public and private spaces; shared resource technologies; distributed coordination in and between households and the role of technology in everyday life.

Knowing what social activity is occurring within and through a Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) system is often very useful. This is especially true for computer-mediated communication systems such as chat and other synchronous applications. People will attend to these systems more closely when they know that there is interesting activity on them. Interface mechanisms for indicating social activity, however, are often ad-hoc, if present at all. This paper argues for the importance of displaying social activity as well as proposes a generalized mechanism for doing so. This social activity indication mechanism is built upon a new CSCW toolkit, the Cafe ConstructionKit, and the Cafe ConstructionKit provides a number of important facilities for making construction of these indicators easy and straight-forward. Accordingly, this paper presents both the Cafe ConstructionKit as a CSCW toolkit as well as a mechanism for creating activity indicators.

A growing concern for organizations and groups has been to augment their knowledge and expertise. One such augmentation is to provide an organizational memory, some record of the organization's knowledge. However, relatively little is known about how computer systems might enhance organizational, group, or community memory.