Two worlds collide!

Julian Foley
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Two worlds are about to collide and we might all be the better for it!

The world of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) research and the new world of social networking are coming together to offer a fresh take on how best we can work together online. This might be a new direction for the field.

Or it might be a costly distraction.

Let’s look at this by tracking the potential impact on the huge and mobile workforce of the community sector. The more than 700,000 workers in this sector visit older people and people with disability in their own homes to offer healthcare and support with daily living. They work with kids on the streets, homeless people and women escaping domestic violence. They are mobile and often work alone. They may be on call 24/7.

These workers sometimes have access to a collaborative corporate internet – MS SharePoint, for example - at their home base. Sites like these have emerged from decades of CSCW research and they work well in large enterprises, especially where there is a consistency in goals and strategies.

But the community worker spends much of their time on the road, sometimes with a mobile phone but more usually only a sheaf of paper forms on a clipboard as their primary link to their corporate base!

Should the sector devise a new system to keep these workers connected? Should it borrow tools from both the social networking world (after all, networking is at the heart of community sector work) and CSCW (after all, so is cooperation!) to frame a new mobile solution?

The head office would still run a corporate site – all of the agency staff need to work well together across a wide area (there is a community sector organisation in practically every community across the continent). But it may not look so corporate. CollectiveX has bundled Web 2.0 tools into a “groupsite”[1] that offers much of the SharePoint functionality, but can be configured as a congenial and personal social networking experience.

How would this be extended to the workers in the field?

The community worker works in the community! This is a world of sights, sounds, stories and snippets of information which the worker can use to build an authentic picture of a client’s needs or how a response might work best. So why not give them all the tools to capture all these inputs?

For example, freshen up the information flow with a link to Twitter. Tag the posts to an agency (or just a small team within it; as Shirky suggest, “spare the group from scale”[2]) and workers can swap information on the road as they visit their clients and meet with their networks. Or they can quickly act together in an emergency.

Configure the location in a Google map and share that, too.

Better still, why not set up a Tweeterfall on the site and organise the tweets by topic and place? Link the workers in the office into the conversation.

Capture recordings of client interviews and upload them to AudioBoo (sure, it’s only for iPhones, but that might be another part of the solution!) The folk back in the office can use these recordings for case coordination meetings and then discard them. Or they may store them as evidence of client agreement and quality practice.

While you’re at it, enable a direct link to an agency YouTube channel and a Flickr photostream. A video of a discussion among at-risk youth can spice up a funding application wonderfully.
And if you don’t think the original video is up to it, offer staff a link to a video solution platform like Kaltura and challenge them to mash it up into something more decent. You’ll get surprising results from the younger staff!

Bringing all this functionality together makes for a pretty active looking site, and some functions will immediately appeal. But is that all there is to it? Does this then constitute a collaboration site? Have we broached the social-technical gap – “the great divide between what we know we must support socially and what we can support technically”[3]

Sadly, far from it.

The field of CSCW is pretty clear about the parameters required for a true online collaborative experience.

One of these is that the site has to be engaging for the user – the term “entrainment” is more precise. This means the user’s “level of desire to use a system and whether they will continue to rely upon it for performing routine work”.[4]

A good level of entrainment is reflected in a critical mass of users which shows the site is a useful place to exchange information with many others.

Another big issue is awareness. A person can’t work well in a group unless they are aware of who they’re working with. “User-interfaces have to be built in such as way that they always indicate if people are either working alone, in one of several possible sub-group constellations, or with all members of their teams or organisation.”[5]

Shared goals are another question. The field worker and management have very different experiences of their work and may need to constantly re-negotiate shared goals and strategies. Shared meaning and histories are key here and it may be important to configure this into the way the site works.[6]

Users will quickly come up against what is known as the privacy problem.[7] A lot of information will flood through this site and the user has a wide network of others who may want to access the information. How do they control the flow?

Concurrency is another issue. While field staff are working with distinct clients in dispersed locations there might be few occasions when several users need to access the same data at the same time. But bring several clients or workers together and this might rapidly change. Add to this the need for workers to access common organisation information, and the complexity compounds. Social networking tools haven’t had to seriously address concurrency but it is central to the CSCW agenda.

The conclusion? Simply bundling all this Web 2.0 functionality won’t build a collaborative site. But it might be a useful prototype.

Web 2.0 has offered up a host of new solutions that can be now considered as part of the CSCW toolkit. But unless they are shaped and evaluated through CSCW research frameworks, they are not likely to deliver collaborative workers who are fully engaged with the corporate direction.








[1] “Groupsites are collaboration communities that enable groups to communicate, share and network to make things happen. They do this by combining the most useful (but not all) features of online groups and listservs (like Yahoo! Groups), collaboration software (like Sharepoint) and Social Networks (like Facebook and Linkedin).” From http://www.crunchbase.com/company/collectivex (accessed 27 March 2009).
[2] C. Shirky, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. Blog post on http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/, April 26 2008 (accessed 29 March 2009)
[3] M. S. Ackerman, “The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility”, in Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millennium. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2002, p 303
[4] D. Ambaye, A Socio-centric Model of User Interaction, in Human-Computer interaction: Theory and Practice (Part 1), Volume 1, Mahwah, 2003, p 10.
[5] N. A. Streitz, P. Tandler, C. Muller-Tomfelde and S. Konomi, “Roomware: Toward the Next Generation of Human-Computer Interaction Based on an Integrated Design of Real and Virtual Worlds”, in Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millennium. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2002, p 554
[6] Boland – p305 HCI
[7] M. S. Ackerman, op cit., p 308