Collab-Or-Ate

If you are working in the area of social networking within the workplace or organization, please submit a position paper to our CSCW 2008 workshop on Social Networking in Organizations! We expect it to be a great collection of people interested in this topic. Position papers are due Sept 26th and the workshop is Nov 19th in San Diego, CA. (We are excited to be part of a great line-up of workshops this year.)

Workshop on Social Networking in Organizations

Workshop Website: http://research.ihost.com/cscw08-socialnetworkinginorgs/

Overview:

Social networking websites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, are heavily used by students to maintain friendships and by professionals to maintain contacts with others such as potential customers and recruits. Technologies such as email, IM, and weblogs were initially adopted by students and consumers for personal use and then moved into enterprises, having a significant impact on business environments. Social networking technologies seem to be following suit, perhaps more rapidly, but we are just beginning to explore how these applications are being used inside enterprises and large organizations. To what extent are they used to maintain or establish external ties to family, friends, and professional colleagues? To what extent are they being used to meet internal team or organizational goals? How are organizations responding?

This workshop will assemble 15-20 people with a research or applied industry interest in social networking in organizational or enterprise settings.

Those wishing to participate in the workshop should submit a 1 to 2 page extended abstract describing their research, experiences, or analyses of social networking software.

Important Dates:

Friday, September 26: position papers due
Friday, October 10: notification of acceptance
Sunday, November 9: workshop in San Diego, CA

Organizers:

Joan DiMicco, IBM Research
Werner Geyer, IBM Research
David Millen, IBM Research
Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft Research

While at CHI last month (our international conference on human-computer interaction (HCI)), I went to two panels (”Celebrating ‘The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction’” and “Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful?“) that had really interesting discussions about what defines our research conference (CHI) and our field of study (HCI). I’m still synthesizing my thoughts around these panels and what I’ve been reading since, but based on them, here is how I think about the HCI field today:

1. The HCI field (and the CHI conference) began in the 1980’s with a strong grounding in computer science and cognitive science. Card, Newell, and Moran’s The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction is considered the seminal textbook describing this approach.
2. Computer science and cognitive science guide us towards taking a systematic, scientific approach to building and evaluating software (for e.g. GOMS). This is a solid way to build systems and many of the early successful HCI research projects utilized this approach.
3. As the software and consumer electronics industries exploded over the last two decades, it has become obvious that there is something more going on here driving user adoption, in addition to computer science innovation and cognitive science usability. You could summarize this as “design” or “context” or “the third paradigm.” However you describe it, it has to do with human emotions, social dynamics and desire.
4. As Greenberg pointed out in his paper presentation, evaluating an early prototype in a systematic way, particularly in terms of usability, can kill the innovation process. Early design often gets things wrong, but it is a critical stage in the product innovation cycle and should not be stunted through rigorous evaluation. He claims that inappropriate evaluation is harming the quality of the work presented at CHI — read Greenberg and Buxton’s paper for more details.
5. The CHI community is struggling to find an identity that simultaneously supports a scientific process (so that there is a criteria for judging quality) and product innovation (so that CHI has an influence over the technology world, outside of academics).
6. The paper The Three Paradigms of HCI (Harrison, S. Tatar, D. and Sengers, P.) tries to define exactly what this “third” thing is that is missing from our traditional HCI education, calling it the “phenomenological matrix.” Research practices this third paradigm include are ethnography, action research, practice-based research, and interaction analysis, where the “goal is to grapple with the full complexity around the system.”
7. Because I’ve been working within the space of design, social psychology, and “context” for so long, this approach to building technology seems so logical, yet surprisingly hard to justify to CHI paper reviewers. But on the other hand, my response should not be to reject the CHI’s body of work as misguided or uninformed. I think a rejection of stringent evaluation techniques should not lead to a rejection of the innovations that have been born out of this structure.
8. My conclusion from this is that I should read more, spending time becoming more aware of and inspired by the work done before us. I’m all in favor of coming up with alternative evaluation methods or no evaluation criteria so that we can foster risky, exciting ideas within HCI. But I don’t want to abandon all the early work’s ideas.

Some Recommended Readings:


The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction, Stuart K. Card, Thomas P. Moran, Allen Newell

Twenty-five years ago, Card, Moran and Newell’s book, “The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction”, named our field and launched us into a new world of user-centered design and development. These pioneers believed that “a scientific psychology should help us in arranging [the human-computer] interface so it is easy, efficient, error-free – even enjoyable.”

Saul Greenberg & Bill Buxton’s paper “Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful (Some of the Time).“

Current practice in Human Computer Interaction as encouraged by educational institutes, academic review processes, and institutions with usability groups advocate usability evaluation as a critical part of every design process. This is for good reason: usability evaluation has a significant role to play when conditions warrant it. Yet evaluation can be ineffective and even harmful if naively done ‘by rule’ rather than ‘by thought’. If done during early stage design, it can mute creative ideas that do not conform to current interface norms. If done to test radical innovations, the many interface issues that would likely arise from an immature technology can quash what could have been an inspired vision. If done to validate an academic prototype, it may incorrectly suggest a design’s scientific worthiness rather than offer a meaningful critique of how it would be adopted and used in everyday practice. If done without regard to how cultures adopt technology over time, then today’s reluctant reactions by users will forestall tomorrow’s eager acceptance. The choice of evaluation methodology - if any - must arise from and be appropriate for the actual problem or research question under consideration.

The Three Paradigms of HCI, S Harrison, D Tatar, P Sengers

Informal histories of HCI commonly document two major intellectual waves that have formed the field: the first orienting from engineering/human factors with its focus on optimizing man-machine fit, and the second stemming from cognitive science, with an increased emphasis on theory and on what is happening not only in the computer but, simultaneously, in the human mind. In this paper, we document underlying forces that constitute a third wave in HCI and suggest systemic consequences for the CHI community. We provisionally name this the ‘phenomenological matrix’. In the course of creating technologies such as ubiquitous computing, visualization, affective and educational technology, a variety of approaches are addressing issues that are bad fits to prior paradigms, ranging from embodiment to situated meaning to values and social issues. We demonstrate the underlying unity of these approaches, and document how they suggest the centrality of currently marginal criteria for design, evaluation, appreciation, and developmental methodology in CHI work.

Thomas Erickson, David W. McDonald’s new book, HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community

From Tom Erickson’s web page:

The goal of the HCI Remixed project is to produce a collection of essays in which researchers and practitioners reflect on a paper or other piece of work by someone else, that is at least 10 years old, and that has had a personal impact on their view of or approach to HCI.

I am listening to Eric Baumer present this paper at CHI 2008. It seems fitting to blog while listening….

Baumer, E., M. Sueyoshi, B. Tomlinson. 2008. “Exploring the Role of the Reader in the Activity of Blogging.” In: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008). Florence, Italy.

I think the paper will be available on Bill Tomlinson’s web page.

One of the interesting things Eric mentioned is that readers are much more forgiving of a blog of their friend than a blog of a stranger. They tolerate lame posts and poor visual design of friends, but not of strangers. (hmm, I hope I pass this stranger-test, but perhaps not always!) They also forgive erratic posting. I’m trying to fix that by posting this!

Both types of readers enjoy the random personal tidbits added to the otherwise professional blog, because it humanizes the blogger and makes the reader feel a personal connection to the blogger.

I recommend the paper based on his talk, and I definitely plan to read it.

Here’s my personal tidbit to keep you coming back for more… British Airways lost my luggage 9 days ago when I arrived in Scotland. I am now in Italy and have had to buy a new wardrobe, which is both excellent and kind of a pain. It has been quite an adventure and BA has been everything but helpful.

I’ve been working for a year now on Beehive, with Werner Geyer, Beth Brownholtz, and Casey Dugan. We can finally (officially) talk about it outside IBM, starting with Lotusphere, and there has been some buzz generated by that, in the press and the blogosphere:

In the press:
• eWeek: IBM`s Social Beehive and Discovery Search
• Business Week: Managing the Global Workforce (This is a more general article about IBM and mentions Beehive at the end as an example of how IBM is dealing with a globally distributed workforce.)
• CIO: IBM Shows Off Social Software for Business

And on the blogs:

• Judith Hurwitz’s Weblog: Is there a Link Between Social Computing and Business Networks?
• Collaborative Thinking: Lotusphere 2008: IBM Research - Glimpsing The Future
• Lotusphere 2008 - Day 2

This is a response to Chris Poile’s comment where he points to an interesting article by Cory Doctorow on Facebook friending….

What do you think the world (AKA the social networking website world) would be like if you didn’t need to confirm your friends on Facebook (LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, etc…) ? In that universe, it could be argued that friends lists would be meaningless. But as Chris, Cory, and many others point out, you often feel obligated to friend-back people you don’t particularly feel friendly with in our current universe, so how meaningful are friends lists now? You can draw a firm line and say you will only friend people you have met face-to-face, but that subset of “friends” still includes a lot of “non-friends” like the bully from high school.

If friends are unconfirmed, you would be freed to build your list anyway you like. You could actually create an accurate list of who you think are your close friends and colleagues. Or you could leave it empty. Or you could fill it with millions.

You could decide on a whim to add or remove people without offending anyone. Or would you still offend people? Is there so much pressure to reciprocate the friending (this pressure created by these websites, not by anything in our “real” lives) that we would carry that over to a universe with no required confirmation?

Real friendships are often not perfectly balanced. I consider my sister to be one of my best friends (yes!), but as we jokingly discuss, she might not even consider me a friend at all, but rather just a sister. I recently tried and failed to convince her to join Facebook so I can friend her. So where does that leave me? My Facebook friends list is totally wrong! I wish I could add her without requiring her to confirm or even join the site.

What do you think a no-confirm-required friending model would look like in practice?

There’s a new concept device out called the “Moody Sensiblog,” which the creaters at Yanko Design describe as a “biological twitter.” Much like twitter, it broadcasts what you are doing to your friends, but instead of sending text messages, this device automatically broadcasts your motion (from an accelerometer), sounds (from a microphone), and your galvanic skin response (your palm sweat detected from electrodes). Would you consider wearing this? Yea, me neither!

But it it similar to a project I worked on with Andrew Fiore and Vidya Lakshmipathy in 2002. Conductive Chat was an instant messaging interface that automatically changed the size and color of your typed text to reflect your level of excitement, becoming bigger as your galvanic skin response increased and turning red when you were at elevated levels.

I found out about this via Mobile Messaging 2.0.

Have you ever worked in an open office setting without any cubical walls? The closest I came was in 1997 at a 15 person company where the cubes were organized into groups of four. In that setting, when anyone entered our area, all four of us would look up.

Jeremy Birnholtz presented a very interesting paper at Group that discussed a study where he, Carl Gutwin and Kirstie Hawkey examined several 100% open office workspaces and the verbal and non-verbal negotiation people go through before initiating conversation. He talked about two concepts: “attentional legitimacy” (what are you legitimately allowed to look at within your co-workers workspace?) and “public displays of attention” (the acts you go through so that others know you are trying to get their attention). He talked about a 3-4 foot bubble that people hover within around your desk while they assess how available you are, before they approach you.

What I like most about his talk was how he highlighted that tools that have been built for managing awareness between remote colleagues have not taken into account that there is often a subtle, non-verbal, two-way negotiation going on between people to assess the availability of someone. If you are wearing headphones you are not available. But if you see your boss walk by slowly, looking over, you may take off those headphones and make yourself available. Both parties adjust their behavior to fit the environment and to signal to each other. How could you do that over an electronic mode of communication such as instant messenger?

Here is the paper:

Jeremy Birnholtz, Carl Gutwin, Kirstie Hawkey. (2007) “Privacy in the Open: How Attention Mediates Awareness and Privacy in Open-Plan Offices.” Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Organizational Computing and Goupware Technologies (GROUP 2007), Nov 2007.

* Image of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Company Headquarters building, Racine, WI

Yesterday, Warren Sack visited IBM to talk about his latest research thoughts about how to evaluate software, in particular the aesthetics of information visualization. Here is an excerpt from his talk’s abstract:

This presentation is a part of a larger project to articulate critical criteria for
evaluating information and communication technologies (ICTs): criteria of democracy and the public good. It is hoped that these evaluative criteria offer alternatives to the way hardware and software developments are usually evaluated by computer scientists and
information architects.

My interpretation of what he said, and a point I heartily agree with, is that we embed our values into the technology we design. A nice example he gave is of object-oriented programming paralleling the structure of modern top-down, distributed corporations. We believe that is how efficient programs and companies should be run. In some situations, the applied value structure is not the best design and it can be hard to break away from certain structures because our value systems are so ingrained into our models for thinking about systems. In particular, he is focusing on issues of democracy and deliberation (see his project Agnostics for some of this).

You know how once something is pointed out to you, you see it everywhere? Well, you have to read Walt Mossberg’s column yesterday, entitled “Free My Phone.” Mossberg is voicing a frustration that many cell phone users have over the limitations of the technology. He describes the problem as a conflict in values. There are two value systems at play: that of the cell phone service providers and that of the creators of the Internet. He claims the cell phone service providers are applying a “Soviet Ministry Model” (obviously that means it is evil) and the Internet was build upon the values of a free market and of free-flowing information (capitalism and free speech, can’t get less evil than that).

Here Mossberg outlines his values:

I refer to the big cellphone carriers as the “Soviet ministries.” Like the old bureaucracies of communism, they sit athwart the market, breaking the link between the producers of goods and services and the people who use them.
…
But, in my view, they shouldn’t be allowed to pick and choose what phones run on their networks, and what software and services run on those phones. We need a wireless mobile device ecosystem that mirrors the PC/Internet ecosystem, one where the consumers’ purchase of network capacity is separate from their purchase of the hardware and software they use on that network.

You will probably agree with him because you wish your phone were cooler and you were able to customize its applications. But do you agree with his value statement that the phone industry should reflect the Internet’s “ecosystem” that was largely invented by libertarian academics? If you are reading my blog, you probably do. But you should be aware that one value system that works for one technology may not be the best model to apply to the next. Our libertarian politics might be great for most things, but are these always the right values for all circumstances?

I think Facebook is killing itself with its applications. If you use Facebook, do you find the applications (and the associated notifications, installations, un-installations) to be overwhelming? What happened to Facebook being a lightweight way to keep up with what your friends are doing? I am having a really hard time filtering through the clutter (not to mention the ads) to keep up with people’s genuine activity.

This is hilarious and one of the many examples of how Facebook is going to way of MySpace: “New apps put the hate in online networking” (Boston Globe)

Here’s a mash-up of Google Maps with the ubiquitous Yet Another Social Networking Service (YASNS), Facebook.com:

MapYourBuddies!

Where did your friends grow up?

(Found on Google Maps Mania.)

Clusty generates a tag cloud for you from any search term. It seems pretty interesting. I found this through Ghostweather.

It is interesting to see what it comes up with from a search on my name — most prominent are my graduate school advisors who have been my most frequent co-authors. I’m impressed it got my current and past employers, but I wish it would drop the proper names entirely and show more descriptive keywords. But anyway, kind of a fun little widget to put out there.

I have an article in the latest volume of the HCI Journal, which is a special issue on awareness systems. My article is called “The Impact of Increased Awareness While Face-to-Face” and my co-authors are Katherine J. Hollenbach, Anna Pandolfo, and Walter Bender. Of course, I highly recommend reading it!

The issue’s introduction, written by the editors Markopoulos, de Ruyter, and Mackay, has a nice summary of the recent work done on awareness systems, which the individual articles respresent. Of most interest to me is the historical perspective. The editors make the point that:

Current awareness systems have been deeply influenced by the media spaces of the late
1980s, which supported sustained audio/video links among remote co-workers and emphasized
the importance of awareness for maintaining social coherence (see Bly, Harrison, and Irwin,
1993, for an excellent review of this literature). At the time, Computer-Supported Cooperative
Work systems were usually measured in terms of productivity. These benefits of social
awareness proved difficult to quantify (Gross and Stary, 2005). As a result, awareness systems
were sometimes criticized as having marginal benefit (Schmidt, 2002) and were largely ignored
for a decade.

I think the entire field of CSCW suffered a bit from this phenomenon. If the tool didn’t make meetings faster or didn’t demonstrate quantitative gains in decision-making, then the tool was considered useless or even harmful. Now, as social scientists have become more involved in the fields of CSCW and HCI, there is a much more holistic view on the benefits that interaction design and information visualization can bring to our human-human interactions. Additionally, the cost of technology has gone down so much that tools for collaboration and communication can be built for and designed for consumers, rather than just the executives in the boardrooms.

The editors summarize this nicely as:

The research culture has changed as well - valuing systems that move beyond simple
collaboration - making it easier to justify systems in terms of their support for maintaining
informal social relationships, both in the home and in the office. For example, Putman (2000)
defines the creation of social capital as an important feature of social organization and argues that
systems should support social relations, including the norms, networks, and trust that facilitate
cooperation and co-ordination for mutual benefit. We adopt a correspondingly broad
interpretation of awareness and a more inclusive consideration of potential benefits.

So I highly recommend checking out the articles in the Special Issue! Here’s a rundown of the articles in the issue:

• Incorporating Human and Machine Interpretation of Unavailability and Rhythm Awareness into the Design of Collaborative Applications
  James “Bo” Begole and John C. Tang
• The Impact of Increased Awareness While Face-to-Face
  Joan Morris DiMicco, Katherine J. Hollenbach, Anna Pandolfo, and Walter Bender
• Interpreting and Acting Upon Mobile Awareness Cues
  Antti Oulasvirta, Renaud Petit, Mika Raento, and Sauli Tiitta
• Announcing Activity: Design and Evaluation of an Intentionally-Enriched Awareness Service
  Markus Rittenbruch, Stephen Viller, and Tim Mansfield
• Exploring Awareness-Related Messaging Through Two Situated Display-Based Systems
  Keith Cheverst, Alan Dix, Daniel Fitton, Mark Rouncefield, and Connor Graham
• Defining, Designing, and Evaluating Peripheral Displays: An Analysis Using Activity Theory
  Tara Matthews, Tye Rattenbury, and Scott Carter

It is Friday afternoon and I can’t help but think, where has the week gone?? How many times have you asked yourself that?

If you are on a Mac, there’s a new application you can use to track what you do on your machine throughout the day. Maybe it can help you get a better answer to the eternal question “where does the time go?” It can definitely show you some interesting visualizations of how and when you use different applications on your machine.

The tool is called Slife, from Slife Labs. From the website:

Slife is a new application for the Max OS X that lets you visualize and organize your computer activities like never before. Slife observes your every interaction with applications such as Safari, Mail and iChat and keeps tracks of all web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more.

From what I keep reading and seeing from the “MySpace” generation, there is a strong desire to share status with friends, family, and even loose contacts. And Slife Labs has an add-on tool to allow you to share your Slife captured actions and publish them to your contacts. So if you want to share more information with your friends about how you are spending your time, SlifeShare offers you a new way to do that:

A Slifeshare is an online space where you share your digital life activities such as browsing the web and listening to music with your friends, family or anyone you care about.

It is all very interesting stuff and reflects the current trend of capturing and sharing life data.

This article on arstechnica discusses a backlash that Flickr is facing from its original members. Early users of Flickr are being forced to abandon their Flickr account names and switch over to Yahoo account names. I totally understand why this is annoying. Early Flickr users have cooler names and have much higher credibility on the site than some random yahoo user. Give them some sort of “founder badge” so they can continue to strut their stuff on the site.

It is Friday evening so I can’t think of anything more to say. But it is an interesting and not very long article.

For the paranoid, read this article on arstechnica.com: CIA uses Facebook, NSA wants social networking data. It poses this question:

Are Facebook et al. actually CIA/NSA-backed companies that the agencies are using to create massive databases on Americans without having to deal with that pesky congressional oversight?

My personal opinion is No. Although, see my previous post on the potential evil that can come out of Web 2.0.

— Next Page »