Collab-Or-Ate

Another interesting paper at HICSS:

“Cultural Diversity, Perception of Work Atmosphere, and Task Conflict in Collaboration Technology
Supported Global Virtual Teams: Findings from a Laboratory Experiment”
by Souren Paul and Sumati Ray

The main findings:

• perceived work atmosphere is positively related to participation in work groups
• participation increases task conflict which is required for high quality decisions (see pre-existing literature on the value of conflict in teams!)
• the findings highlight the importance of developing favorable perception of work atmosphere inculturally diverse virtual teams.

Conclusion: perceived work atmosphere is critical in shaping the performance of virtual teams

Here is the paper’s official abstract:

In this paper, we focus on work atmosphere and
conflict in global virtual teams and report the
findings of a laboratory experiment that involved
twenty-seven cross-cultural virtual teams. The
members of the teams used IBM’s Lotus Sametime to
work on decision-making tasks. The findings of the
study reveal that in collaboration technology
supported virtual teams, the cultural heterogeneity of
the team members influences their perceptions of the
work atmosphere, which in its turn influences
members’ participation in group work. We also find
that the number of occurrences of task conflict
related discussion among the group members is
positively related to their participation in group
work. The findings of the study are interesting and
provide motivation for future research on work
atmosphere and conflict in virtual teams.

I’m at HICSS right now and listening to Yannick Assogba present a paper “Mycrocosm: Microblogging” during the Social Spaces mini-track. Below are 2 graphs I made on the mycrocosm site, showing what time I woke up each day of the conference and what I’ve eaten in Hawaii.

Mycrocosm is a mix of many eyes light-weight visualizations and twitter light-weight sharing. It was so easy to make the graph that I’m tempted to start using this for different things. I need to start looking for personal data to collect and share. In some ways, this is similar to Slifeshare, a retired feature in Slife.

Signing off for the year before heading off to the warmth of California and Hawaii….

In January, I’ll be at the Social Spaces mini-track at HICSS, presenting the paper “People Sensemaking and Relationship Building on an Enterprise Social Network Site.” Hope to see you there!

Don’t forget, before the end of the year, send an email off to Future You!

When I initially heard about Twitter, I thought it sounded crazy and way too mega-ego and, hello, why would I care that you just got a haircut? Now that I have been using it, oh, every day, for the past 6 months, I guess I have to admit that I find it is kind of useful and appealing. I finally put it together what is so appealing about it. Twitter is a persistent chat room. It is Babble!

Babble is similar to a multi-channel textual chat system except that its conversation persists over sessions, allowing both synchronous and asynchronous talk. Its aim is to support everyday, opportunistic interaction among members of a workgroup. [link]

I never used Babble (it was built in 1997 and used internally at IBM before I joined), but it is one of the projects that inspired my thesis research. Its key concept is social translucence:

Social translucence is the idea that we should make some (but not all) cues about the presence and activity of users of digital systems available to one another. [link]

Twitter fits this criteria and has a lot of the same features as Babble:

• you can communicate either synchronously or asynchronously (txt, mobile, browser, etc… )
• you can see who is present (Twitter’s following and followers pictures)
• you can see who is active (Twitter’s time-sorted list of who said what)
• you can selectively determine who sees your posts (direct messages, @ messages, broadcast)

The main differences between Twitter and Babble are:

• Babble has a graphical visualization showing who is currently engaged in the conversation
• Twitter’s “groups” are not bounded. Even though you and I might be following each other, my group is probably different than your group. It is possible there could be 0% overlap, but we could still communicate.
• The cultural norms of Twitter are pretty distinctive in that people use “tweets” to give casual updates on their latest thoughts, ideas, opinions and experiences. The updates are not solely focused on workgroup interaction, like Babble was conceptualized to be for. But I see this as Twitter’s unusual strength.

It would be great if Twitter had some social visualization capability. (Maybe it does? Anyone know?) Then it really would be Babble, adapted for the flexible, ad-hoc type of collaboration and communication we do in this post-2000 world.

If you haven’t read them already, I highly recommend these papers on Babble and social translucence:

Socially Translucent Systems: Social Proxies, Persistent Conversation, and the Design of “Babble”, by Thomas Erickson, David N. Smith, Wendy A. Kellogg, Mark Laff, John T. Richards, Erin Bradner. In Human Factors in Computing Systems: The Proceedings of CHI ‘99. ACM Press, 1999.

Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes by Thomas Erickson and Wendy A. Kellogg. In Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. Vol. 7, No. 1, pp 59-83. New York: ACM Press, 2000.

Went to a talk today at MIT by Craig of craigslist. (As a side note, Sergey of Google was sitting a few seats away, but I was a little slow to pick up on this, despite Craig calling on him by name when he asked a question.)

I really enjoyed hearing Craig talk about his original vision for craigslist that continues to drive the site today. Some of his points:

• He recently realized he is a community organizer. In 1994 when he started craigslist it was about connecting people, mostly nerds, together so that they could get what they needed. For a long time he was an engineer. Now his title is customer service rep.
• The experience of exchanging goods is social — people really enjoy doing it. Like flea markets and the Roman Forum, places where people come together to buy and sell are enjoyable places to be.
• Craigslist is fast and simple. He’s not a designer but he knows how to make things fast and simple. He thinks the front page of craigslist is too cluttered today, but it is pretty simple in terms of figuring out what to do.
• He doesn’t care to define “web 2.0″ (yay!!) and says that craigslist is web 0.1. He wasn’t interested in talking about “what’s next” for craigslist (people were asking about video, multimedia, blah, blah), because he is more interested in doing what is best for the community.

He kept returning to the point that the no-ads and no-selling-out isn’t because he is altruistic or charitable, but rather because of his nerd ethos. He believes that everyone in the world just wants to have things simple and easy and wants to be given a break once in a while. His original decision to not have banner ads in the 1990’s was because he thought banner ads were usually lame and distracting. He always goes with his gut instinct on how best to provide a service to his users and does not think of how best to make the most money, because he’s always made plenty of money.

He still uses pine for email. How awesome is that? I miss pine!

Since I’m now a super-fan, I’ll point you towards Craig’s blog, twitter feed, and interview on the Colbert Report.

While off in our ivory tower this week, we missed the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Some interesting stories that came out of it:

• Ross Mayfield says SocialText will be a better sell in this economy than IBM and Microsoft’s solutions because SocialText is cheaper. I don’t know the prices, but this sounds pretty logical.
• Facebook and Twitter don’t plan to become profitable any time soon. I think this is a good sign that the fun isn’t over yet.
• LinkedIn has released some “all work, no play” applications. Will be very interesting to see where this takes LinkedIn.

I’m listening to this CSCW paper being presented:

Being Online, Living Offline: The Influence of Social Ties Over the Appropriation of Social Network Sites
by Bernd Ploderer, Steve Howard and Peter Thomas from The University of Melbourne

The authors are saying that bodybuilders use social networking for self-promotion. Bodybuilding competitions are very competitive and not very supportive, so SNSs offer a way to gain praise, acknowledgment, and encouragement for your bodybuilding. This seem so explicit when described from an outsider, ethnography perspective, but I think these are the exact factors going on with all social network site use.

I’m combining my blogging and twitter personalities. You can see my most recent tweet on my blog (look at the header) and when I blog, it will automatically fire off a tweet from joandimicco. At least that is what I’m hoping this blog post will successfully test.

It is just two short weeks away from the CSCW conference in San Diego, where we’ll be presenting Beehive in a variety of ways. The conference full program (in PDF) is available on the conference website.

On Sunday, 11/9, 9:00 – 13:00, we are hosting a workshop: Workshop 8: Social Networking in Organizations. To see who is participating in the workshop and more information, we have a workshop website.

Workshop Description: 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 bring together those with a research or applied industry interest in social networking in organizational or enterprise settings.

On Monday, 11/10, 19:30 – 22:00, we will be demoing Beehive at the Demo Session:

Beehive: Social Networking inside the Enterprise

Demo Description: Beehive is an internal social networking site that gives enterprise users a “rich connection to the people they work with” on both a personal and a professional level. Beehive helps employees make new connections, track current friends and coworkers, and renew contacts with people they have worked with in the past.

And on Wednesday, 11/12, 15:00 – 16:30, in the afternoon paper session Social Networking at Work and School, we will be presenting a Note and a Paper on Beehive:

It’s All About You: Diversity in Online Profiles
Casey Dugan, Werner Geyer, Michael Muller, Joan DiMicco, Beth Brownholtz, David R. Millen

We report on an alternative way for users to richly describe themselves, by entering not only responses, but their own questions as well.

Motivations for Social Networking at Work (download PDF)
Joan DiMicco, David R. Millen, Werner Geyer, Casey Dugan, Beth Brownholtz, Michael Muller

Our analysis of user behavior and interviews presents the case that professionals use internal social networking to build stronger bonds with their weak ties and to reach out to employees they do not know.

And here is the “view” we’ll be seeing in San Diego more than the sun and surf. :)

Last weekend, NPR’s On the Media had a story called “Reading Between the Lines” on CNN’s squiggly lines that run underneath the debating presidential candidates. The movement of the lines are driven by knobs turned by uncommitted Ohio voters, sitting in CNN’s studio during the debate.

As you watch the debates, even though CNN has told you that these uncommitted Ohioans are not a statistically representative sample, you are influenced by their knob turning. Just like you can be influenced by your friends’ laughter and comments in a face-to-face group setting, as you watch those lines moving up and down, you are convinced that McCain is angry and Obama is presidential. There is lots of experimental evidence of this from previous elections (read the OTM transcript).

My PhD thesis focused on this exact issue: real-time visualizations of social behavior and how this information changes the dynamics and your perceptions of an interaction. For my project, Second Messenger, I focused on small, face-to-face groups receiving feedback about their group dynamics, but the phenomenon is universal and extends beyond social visualization. Behavioral economists refer to it as framing.

Besides being interesting to think about, it is important to consider the influence of the squiggly lines. First, CNN should be aware of its power to influence viewers. Second, viewers should be aware that their attitudes can be manipulated by this relatively simple and unrepresentative data point. They discussed this a bit on OTM:

BOB GARFIELD (interviewer): We have established that the squiggly lines do not represent any statistically significant data. And … we’ve established that people are influenced by the squiggly lines. Does that not mean that it is journalistically irresponsible to put them on the TV? I mean, is CNN doing the right thing in adding this feature to its coverage?

SAM SCHECHNER: We’re social animals. We process information in the context of the people around us. We do watch our debates with friends or at a bar or in some sort of group environment, frequently, in part because we want to hear the reactions of other people. That’s in part why … you and I can’t stop looking at that CNN line on the bottom of the screen.

I think it’s hard to argue, necessarily, that it’s a bad thing. In fact, the people who do it – the professors at SMU – see it as a way of shifting some of the balance of influence from pundits, who have been shown to be able to have a pretty strong effect with their pre- and post-debate spin and how they set expectations and frame the debates to actual voters.

I’m not sure I agree that uncommitted Ohio voters are the antidote to polarizing pundits, but something to think about.

More information on the report:

WSJ, 10/10/08: “When Your Political Opinion Isn’t Yours Alone” Broadcasts of Political Debates That Include Live Audience Feedback Can Influence What You’re Thinking

More on my research:

Joan Morris DiMicco, Kate J Hollenbach, Anna Pandolfo, Walter Bender. (2007) “The Impact of Increased Awareness while Face-to-Face.” Special Issue on Awareness Systems Design, Human-Computer Interaction. Volume 22 (2007), Number 1.

The NYTimes has an interesting article about the promotion side of invention: If No One Sees It, Is It an Invention?. It is the story of Johnny Chung Lee, an HCI PhD student at CMU, who posted his research ideas on YouTube. If Lee had only pursued the traditional avenue of sharing his HCI inventions by publishing and presenting at CHI, the premier HCI conference, he would not have had nearly the impact. For example, Bill Gates probably wouldn’t know his name.

If you create the coolest widget, it can’t have impact unless people see it, use it, experience it. I guess that is basically Marketing 1.0. But something computer scientists aren’t always so savvy to.

Ok, time to go review CHI papers for publication. It would be so much more fun to be reviewing YouTube videos…

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