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Design Challenges in Supporting Distributed Knowledge: An Examination of Organizing Elections
Abstract
This paper identifies the design challenges for creating collaborative technologies supporting the practices of organizing elections. We ethnographically investigate the distributed nature of knowledge as enacted between heterogeneous groups over the course of three elections in Denmark. We 1) identify fundamental characteristics of elections, 2) provide a comprehensive account of the distributed nature of knowledge in organizing and executing elections, and 3) point to new challenging areas for human-computer interaction (HCI) design supporting distributed collaborative knowledge practices. We found that organizational pattern of elections complicates the embodiment of nomadic knowledge, which is crucial for managing the effective organization of an election. Thus, one of the relevant design challenges is finding out how to support the timely distribution of large amounts of information, while still ensuring it is appropriately divided and delivered to various groups participating in planning and executing elections.
... Most work investigating volunteer collaboration focuses on non-profit organizations and online communities [3,10,50] while small loosely coupled groups have not been a strong focus so far. Small loosely coupled volunteer groups often focus on organizing series of dedicated activities such as discussion meetings, food giveaways or social events. ...
... There is a large body of work around volunteering and volunteer collaboration. Scholars have studied volunteers supporting elections [3], sports events [10] or natural disasters [8]. There are also studies covering individuals that volunteer their time for longer term activities such as political activism [46] or contributing to online production communities [50]. ...
Volunteers provide a large variety of valuable services to society spanning from local community efforts to global non-profit organizations and online communities. While larger volunteer groups and online communities in particular have been studied extensively, there is a lack of research on small loosely coupled volunteer groups especially with respect to the way they collaborate to organize activities. Our work attempts to shed light onto such groups. In this paper, we present results from an exploratory study of five student organizations. Based on a literature analysis we developed an interview protocol and corresponding coding scheme that allowed us to analyse how such groups cooperate and how they use technology to communicate and organize activities. Our findings indicate areas of improvement around higher levels of transparency, well defined procedures, effective knowledge management and exchange between similar groups. We discuss these potentials and propose an initial socio-technical conceptualization to overcome current issues and support collaboration in such groups.
... Volunteer groups provide a large variety of valuable contributions to local communities and society at large. They support elections (Boulus-Rødje and Bjorn, 2015) and sports events (Cuskelly et al., 2006), contribute to larger non-profit organizations (Garner and Garner, 2011), devote their time to open source software (Crowston, 2011) or support online production communities such as Wikipedia (Farzan et al., 2012). Most research investigating volunteer collaboration focuses on large non-profit organizations or open source and online production communities (Boulus-Rødje and Bjorn, 2015;Crowston et al., 2007). ...
... They support elections (Boulus-Rødje and Bjorn, 2015) and sports events (Cuskelly et al., 2006), contribute to larger non-profit organizations (Garner and Garner, 2011), devote their time to open source software (Crowston, 2011) or support online production communities such as Wikipedia (Farzan et al., 2012). Most research investigating volunteer collaboration focuses on large non-profit organizations or open source and online production communities (Boulus-Rødje and Bjorn, 2015;Crowston et al., 2007). Few studies so far have focused on small volunteer groups that collaborate on dedicated activities such as discussion meetings, food giveaways, social events or creating a product. ...
In this paper, we present a study on group work in which student volunteers from different disciplines worked together to create an augmented reality expedition. The goal of the project was to develop an augmented campus tour for students. The project was successful in delivering the app but through post project interviews we found that volunteers were not satisfied with the process and expressed negative insights. In order to understand this phenomenon, we developed and applied a set of categories for detecting underlying problems in socio-technical processes of volunteer group work. Applying those categories to the aforementioned project allowed us to assess their feasibility. This led to refined categories that can potentially support other volunteer groups to create a suitable socio-technical environment.
... In other cases, these periods present overlapped dates between different activities, with different duration. Thus, it was not possible to clearly calculate the total period of time in which the data collection were carried out in these articles, such as in (BOULUS-RØDJE;BJORN, 2015). ...
Ethnography is a qualitative research method frequently used in social science. We performed a Systematic Literature Review to know better its use in Computer Science research. We selected 273 papers published at ACM Digital Library in 2015 and 2016, and extracted information about their research goals, characteristics of the samples, investigation period, data collection and data analysis procedures. The main contribution of this work is to provide researchers with a pragmatic understanding of the method, presenting references for specific situations such as small samples, studies that applied specific types of ethnography or used research instruments different from observation and interview.
... This mixture of experts and non-experts makes knowledge work of public welfare workers particularly interesting. Recent work within CSCW has expanded to include other forms of knowledge communities, for example, social movements (Saeed et al. 2010), hobbyist groups (Torrey et al. 2007), and election officials and volunteers (Boulus-Rødje and Bjørn 2015). This study enrols a new form of community constituting experts and non-experts in a municipal jobcentre. ...
This paper investigates the collaborative practices and computational artifacts that welfare workers use in a public welfare agency. Specifically, the paper focuses on caseworkers’ knowledge practices related to assessing unemployed citizens and identifying ‘perfect’ pathways. I draw upon an ongoing ethnographic study, carried out in one of the largest municipal jobcentres in Denmark. Findings from this research point out that existing computational artifacts support compliance with welfare policy, while limited support is provided to caseworkers in helping citizens obtain an employment. The contribution of the paper is three-folded: 1) identifying fundamental characteristics of the caseworkers’ knowledge work entailed in assessing unemployed citizens and identifying appropriate pathways, 2) examining the conditions surrounding these knowledge practices, and 3) discussing implications for the design of computational artifacts that better support local knowledge practices. While maintaining support to policy compliance, I argue that computational artifacts can also support ‘data-driven knowledge’, meaning the creation of knowledge that is based on data collected from the wide range of cases of unemployed.
Fieldwork is a central component in several research methodologies and traditions, and there are many handbooks dedicated to the craftmanship of how to do fieldwork. Nevertheless, fieldwork often tends to be described in many of these books in a relatively problem-free fashion. Within the fields of HCI and CSCW, most literature typically focuses on research outcomes and findings, providing a limited description of the fieldwork process. This is typically sanitized from the messy complexities that fieldwork unavoidably entails. This chapter lifts the veil and sheds light on the behind-the-scenes processes of constructing the research project and the field site, focusing specifically on messy encounters experienced during fieldwork. Drawing inspiration from feminist studies, reflexive research, and confessionals, I provide snapshots of messy situations from four different research projects. The intention of this chapter is to orient fieldwork gaze towards messy uncertainties and demonstrate how these can be used as a catalyst for learning, challenging perceived understandings, and sparking new insights about the research, the researcher, and the participants.
Working on research in equity, inclusion, and diversity in technology development has brought us many interesting reflections on the kinds of research we do, what we include, and what we exclude – and on the kind of institutions we are part of, were part of earlier, and will take an active part in creating in the future.
When beginning our research on equity, diversity, and inclusion under the umbrella of FemTech.dk research, we engaged with new literature, theory, and analytical approaches from research on equity and inclusion – research we did not know prior to FemTech.dk but which has been fundamental to our activities. In this chapter, we introduce the theoretical vocabulary we have learned as we entered this research space. Our purpose is to provide a short introduction to the most important concepts we found essential and relevant for our purpose of exploring diversity in computer science and to give readers a quick introduction to the most important concepts, which they then can use to initiate equity work in their institutions.
In this chapter, we situate how the insights in equity and inclusion we have gained through the FemTech research can inform how organizations such as computer science departments or tech companies can step up and improve inclusivity. We cannot offer a complete set of guidelines, but we can propose agendas, questions, and considerations which hopefully can assist organizations in creating their own strategies for intervention.
‘Datalogy’ (or computer science) is the academic foundation and practice that determines how digital technologies are designed, developed, and introduced into peoples’ lives. Digital technologies shape society, life, and work and influence how people think and act with technology in all aspects of life. In a democracy it is vital that the people who create technology mirror the society’s diversity, to ensure that new digital technologies do not constrain people’s agency but enable people to act and take part in society. Today, in 2022, diversity and inclusion is one of the main challenges for computer science as a field and profession in Western countries such as Denmark and the USA (Frieze and Quesenberry 2019; Borsotti and Bjørn 2022), and studies have shown that computer science will not reach gender parity in this century (Holman et al. 2018) without interventions directed at change.
As digital technologies are integrated into societies, questions about who participates in technology development become increasingly crucial. When in 2016 we began FemTech, we wanted to redefine the nature of computer science in a way to reach out to people who were not already within the field – and who did not consider or see themselves as potentially successful in technology development. To make such change through interventions, in some of our first initiatives, we sought ways to create design artefacts that manifested alternative narratives of computer science while meaningfully interlinking with people outside computer science. Thus, our interest was to strive for gender equity in computing with an impact not only on educational programs but also on the underlying structures and society, through opening educational programs in alternative ways.
FemTech.dk is situated in the Department of Computer Science at University of Copenhagen Denmark and has been an ongoing inquiry into the specific circumstances within computer science that produce gender imbalance and includes activities dedicated to making a change through design interventions. FemTech.dk was created in 2016 to engage with research within gender and diversity and to explore the role of gender equity as part of digital technology design and development. FemTech.dk considers how and why computer science as a field and profession in Denmark has such a distinct unbalanced gender representation in the twenty-first century. The focus was initially on the student base of the bachelor’s program in computer science, which from the 1980s until 2016 was remarkably smaller than for other science programs at the University of Copenhagen. In terms of numbers, only 15 women students entered the bachelor’s degree program in 2012 and 2013, and only 12 women students entered the program in 2014. In each of these 3 years, more than 160 students entered the program in total. Reviewing the 15-year period 2000–2014, the share of women students in the program was 7–9%, the lowest percentage of women in a study program across all of the University of Copenhagen. To compare, in 2016 the share of women students in the Math program was 30%, and in Physics was 25%.
This chapter introduces GRACE, a FemTech sociomaterial assemblage that performs concerns related to equity in computing. GRACE is an interactive installation combining IoT, origami paper, and the history of computing performed at three events in Denmark, the USA, and France. Each event was designed to unpack equity in computing through different types of sociomaterial performances, while allowing us to collect data about the lived experiences of equity in computing. GRACE is both reconfigurable and relational. It is reconfigurable because GRACE is malleable and can take different forms (reaching out to people who are committed to the agenda as well as to people who are within the domain but not necessarily committed to the agenda) – even though its core remains the same. GRACE is relational because the nature of the installation emerges in use and thus is shaped by the relational connections created through specific use and people enacting the artefact. Through sociomaterial manifestations, GRACE seamlessly integrates the performance of equity in computing with data collection on equity in computing. We argue that designing GRACE as a sociomaterial assemblage allowed for long-term engagement with a gender-equity agenda across multiple diverse encounters and over several years.
FemTech.dk is fundamentally about combining research and interventions with a focus on making long-term change. Inspired by sociotechnical design (Mumford 2006) and action research (Bjørn and Boulus 2011; Bjørn and Boulus-Rødje 2015), FemTech.dk follows two main interlinked paths: (1) unpacking and understanding the challenges related to unbalanced gender representation in computer science, and (2) intervening and extending the field of computer science to allow for multiple, diverse agendas. In this way, the overall methodological approach is characterized as action research.
The four FemTech design principles which underscore all our work are that design artefacts must (1) produce alternative narratives of computer science, which (2) challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions about computer science, by (3) embedding a story into the design while (4) allowing for surprising interactive opportunities. However, before we dive into the details of these principles, we contextualize the principles in the design practices by which they were made.
In intercultural collaboration, the lack of a common ground, typically evidenced by language differences, can result in misunderstandings. Many times, team members do not realize that a misunderstanding exists during the collaboration. One solution is to identifying the words that have a high probability of causing misunderstanding. However, it is difficult for people to identify those words, especially for monolingual and monocultural people, as they have never experienced the language and culture of the other party. Many researchers have been trying to identify cultural differences using survey studies but the resulting coverage is limited, requires excessive effort, and can yield bias. In this paper, we propose a novel method that applies an image comparison technique to an image database to automatically detect words that might cause misunderstanding. We test our method on 2,500 words in a Japanese-English concept dictionary called Japanese WordNet. This paper provides explains the results gained. We also discuss the use of the proposal and visualization as a support tool to enhance intercultural workshops.
In this article, we examine the fundamental and taken-for-granted infrastructures that make tech entrepreneurship possible. We report from a longitudinal ethnographic study of tech entrepreneurs situated in occupied Palestine. By investigating this polar case of tech entrepreneurship, we identify critical infrastructures that are otherwise invisible and go unnoticed. We propose infrastructural accessibility as a method to identify available and absent infrastructures in concrete trans-local situations. Infrastructural accessibility leads us to identify multiple dimensions of critical infrastructures necessary for the success of tech startups. This includes infrastructures related to location, community, funding, digital platforms, politics, and history. Our study shows how these multiple dimensions of infrastructural accessibility shape the everyday practices of tech entrepreneurs. Furthermore, our study reveals how Palestinian tech entrepreneurship is characterized by infrastructural inaccessibility due to missing infrastructures related to mobility, legal frameworks, payment gateways, and mobile Internet. Infrastructural inaccessibility seriously limits tech entrepreneurs’ potential to succeed in creating a long-term sustainable tech industry.
The authors in this study examined the function and public reception of critical tweeting in online campaigns of four nationalist populist politicians during major national election campaigns. Using a mix of qualitative coding and case study inductive methods, we analyzed the tweets of Narendra Modi, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, and Geert Wilders before the 2014 Indian general elections, the 2016 UK Brexit referendum, the 2016 US presidential election, and the 2017 Dutch general election, respectively. Our data show that Trump is a consistent outlier in terms of using critical language on Twitter when compared to Wilders, Farage, and Modi, but that all four leaders show significant investment in various forms of antagonistic messaging including personal insults, sarcasm, and labeling, and that these are rewarded online by higher retweet rates. Building on the work of Murray Edelman and his notion of a political spectacle, we examined Twitter as a performative space for critical rhetoric within the frame of nationalist politics. We found that cultural and political differences among the four settings also impact how each politician employs these tactics. Our work proposes that studies of social media spaces need to bring normative questions into traditional notions of collaboration. As we show here, political actors may benefit from in-group coalescence around antagonistic messaging, which while serving as a call to arms for online collaboration for those ideologically aligned, may on a societal level lead to greater polarization. © 2018 Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature
Despite the widespread introduction of information technology into primary health care within the United Kingdom, medical practitioners continue to use the more traditional paper medical record often alongside the computerized system. The resilience of the paper document is not simply a consequence of an impoverished design, but rather a product of the socially organized practices and reasoning which surround the use of the record within day to day consultative work. The practices that underpin the use of the medical records may have a range of important implications, not only for the general design of systems to support collaborative work, but also for our conceptions of `writers', `readers', `objects' and `records' utilized in those designs.
Tweets exchanged over the Internet are an important source of information even if their characteristics make them difficult to analyze (e.g., a maximum of 140 characters; noisy data). In this paper, we address the problem of extracting relevant topics through tweets coming from different communities. More precisely we are interested to address the following question: which are the most relevant terms given a community. To answer this question we define and evaluate new variants of the traditional TF-IDF. Furthermore we also show that our measures are well suited to recommend a community affiliation to a new user. Experiments have been conducted on tweets collected during French Presidential and Legislative elections in 2012. The results underline the quality and the usefulness of our proposal.
As the utilization of various e-voting technologies has notably increased
in the past few years, so has the amount of publications on experiences with these
technologies. This article will, therefore, map the literature while highlighting
some of the important topics discussed within the field of e-voting. Particular
attention will be paid to the non-technical dimensions of implementation, including
the socio-cultural, organizational, and political dimensions.
We synthesize findings from longitudinal case studies examining work practices in three different organizations and propose
analytical and methodological frameworks to guide the design and implementation of technologies for expertise and knowledge
management. We appropriate the concept of ecosystem to argue that we can create active and useful solutions for knowledge
management through a focus on interaction between two mutually intertwined elements of an ecosystem—artifacts and actors.
We show that in expertise and knowledge sharing systems domain knowledge and technological knowledge are complementary and
we present evidence that small solutions can have far reaching effects. Finally, we make a case for full integration of IT
developers as an element of expertise sharing ecosystem.
Key wordsknowledge management–expertise sharing–case studies–IT ecosystems–CSCW
In this paper we portray a specific type of knowledge which we term 'nomadic knowledge'. It is required periodically by different actors and travels along foreseeable paths between groups or communities of actors. This type of knowledge lets us question generally held assumptions about the way knowledge is enacted. We illustrate our point with an ethnographical field study analyzing the European Social Forum (ESF), a network of political activist organizations. In this network different actors organize a periodic (biannual) event in which some 13,000 activists participated in 2008. We investigate how knowledge about organizing and managing the ESF is transferred between two events respectively, the actors and communities involved. Our study highlights the specific challenges in sharing nomadic knowledge and the consequences of deficiencies on the organizing process. The paper contributes to a better understanding of knowledge sharing practices and opens new directions for technical support.
In the United States, computer-based voting machines are rapidly replacing other older technologies. While there is potential for this to be a usability improvement, particularly in terms of accessibility, the only way it is possible to know if usability has improved is to have baseline data on the usability of traditional technologies. We report an experiment assessing the usability of punch cards, lever machines, and two forms of paper ballot. There were no differences in ballot completion time between the four methods, but there were substantial effects on error rate, with the paper ballots superior to the other methods as well as an interaction with age of voters. Subjective usability was assessed with the System Usability Scale and showed a slight advantage for bubble-style paper ballots. Overall, paper ballots were found to be particularly usable, which raises important technological and policy issues.
In the 2006 U.S. election, it was estimated that over 66 million people would be voting on direct recording electronic (DRE) systems in 34% of the nation's counties (8). Although these computer-based voting systems have been widely adopted, they have not been empirically proven to be more usable than their predecessors. The series of studies reported here compares usability data from a DRE with those from more traditional voting technologies (paper ballots, punch cards, and lever machines). Results indicate that there were little differences between the DRE and these older methods in efficiency or effectiveness. However, in terms of user satisfaction, the DRE was significantly better than the older methods. Paper ballots also perform well, but participants were much more satisfied with their experiences voting on the DRE. The disconnect between subjective and objective usability has potential policy ramifications. Author Keywords Voting, electronic voting, DRE, usability, preference
In this panel, a group of practitioners and researchers in the area of online political organizing will present their own research in this area and discuss the relevance of online political organizing to the current political scene - including the U.S. general presidential election, which has just been completed. Panelists come from across the political spectrum and also represent views of the political process in countries other than the United States. What are the tools used in online political organizing? What role do each of these new tools bring to the campaign/election process? How effective have they proven in this election cycle? What is their utility outside the scope of the presidential election cycle? Are they merely "teaser" tools to get people in the door or do they have the potential to facilitate lasting political change in all political arenas large and small? In addition, electronic voting is a current open research area. What do systems need to take into account to assure voters' confidence that their votes are being collected and tallied correctly and securely? What information needs to be presented to the voter at the time of polling to ensure the most effective voting systems available? What do we know at this point and where are the future research areas that need scrutiny? Each panelist will present their current research related to this area and comment on the ways in which their findings add to the current body of knowledge. Particular attention will be paid to articulating research streams that currently need to be addressed and positing methods to address these open research questions.
Electronic voting support systems should not focus only on ballot casting and recording. Instead, a user-centered perspective should be adopted for the design of a system that supports information gathering, organizing and sharing, deliberation, decision making, and voting. Relevant social science literature on political decision making and voting is used to develop requirements. A design concept is presented that supports extended information browsing using combined filtering from ballot materials and voter profiles. The system supports information sharing and participation in electronic dialogues. Voters may interweave information browsing, annotation, contextualized discussion, and ballot markup over extended time periods.
ABSTRACT 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 practical achievement of safety by service engineers. Their resolution of repair requests was preserved in the organization’s memory,via three 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. KEYWORDS
Building on the literature that investigates citizen and voter trust in government, we analyze the topic of voter confidence in the American electoral process. Our data comes from two national telephone surveys where voters were asked the confidence they have that their vote for president in the 2004 election was recorded as intended. We present preliminary evidence that suggests confidence in the electoral process affects voter turnout. We then examine voter responses to determine the overall level of voter confidence and analyze the characteristics that influence the likelihood a voter is confident that their ballot was recorded accurately. Our analyses indicate significant differences in the level of voter confidence along both racial and partisan lines. Finally, we find voter familiarity with the electoral process, opinions about the electoral process in other voting precincts, and both general opinions about voting technology and the specific technology the voter uses significantly affect the level of voter confidence.
Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation—its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory—"in the wild."
Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen in the cracks between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that are different from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them. Each action for bringing a large naval vessel into port, for example, is informed by culture: the navigation team can be seen as a cognitive and computational system.
Introducing Navy life and work on the bridge, Hutchins makes a clear distinction between the cognitive properties of an individual and the cognitive properties of a system. In striking contrast to the usual laboratory tasks of research in cognitive science, he applies the principal metaphor of cognitive science—cognition as computation (adopting David Marr's paradigm)—to the navigation task. After comparing modern Western navigation with the method practiced in Micronesia, Hutchins explores the computational and cognitive properties of systems that are larger than an individual. He then turns to an analysis of learning or change in the organization of cognitive systems at several scales. Hutchins's conclusion illustrates the costs of ignoring the cultural nature of cognition, pointing to the ways in which contemporary cognitive science can be transformed by new meanings and interpretations.
Bradford Books imprint
Most people associate with people like themselves, a process called homophily. Exposure to diversity, however, makes us more informed as individuals and as a society. In this paper, we investigate political disagreements on Facebook to explore the conditions under which diverse opinions can coexist online. Via a mixed methods approach comprising 103 survey responses and 13 interviews with politically engaged American social media users, we found that participants who perceived more differences with their friends engaged less on Facebook than those who perceived more homogeneity. Weak ties were particularly brittle to political disagreements, despite being the ties most likely to offer diversity. Finally, based on our findings we suggest potential design opportunities to bridge across ideological difference: 1) support exposure to weak ties; and 2) make common ground visible while friends converse.
Public dialogue plays a key role in democratic society. Such dialogue often contains factual claims, but participants and readers are left wondering what to believe, particularly when contributions to such dialogue come from a broad spectrum of the public. We explore the design space for introducing authoritative information into public dialogue, with the goal of supporting constructive rather than confrontational discourse. We also present a specific design and realization of an archetypal sociotechnical system of this kind, namely an on-demand fact-checking service integrated into a crowdsourced voters guide powered by deliberating citizens. The fact-checking service was co-designed with and staffed by professional librarians. Our evaluation examines the service from the perspectives of both users and librarians.
Knowledge Management (KM) is a diffuse and controversial term, which has been used by a large number of research disciplines. CSCW, over the last 20 years, has taken a critical stance towards most of these approaches, and instead, CSCW shifted the focus towards a practice-based perspective. This paper surveys CSCW researchers' viewpoints on what has become called 'knowledge sharing' and 'expertise sharing'. These are based in an understanding of the social contexts of knowledge work and practices, as well as in an emphasis on communication among knowledgeable humans. The paper provides a summary and overview of the two strands of knowledge and expertise sharing in CSCW, which, from an analytical standpoint, roughly represent 'generations' of research: an 'object-centric' and a 'people-centric' view. We also survey the challenges and opportunities ahead.
In this paper, we study the case of the Ugandan election 2011 and the non-governmental organization DEMGroup, who set up two SMS-enabled election monitoring platforms: 1) UgandaWatch, an open crowdsourcing platform for citizen election monitoring via SMS, and 2) a systematical election observation, deploying 6'000 trained observers for bounded crowdsourcing. By reaching out to the potential and the actual users of these two crowdsourcing initiatives, we examine the nature of the opportunities and challenges when using mobile phones for participation. In doing so, we will draw on theories of incentives for participation and crowdsourcing.
The analysis relies on three different sources of data; 1) SMS-survey of a randomized sample of Ugandan mobile phone users; 2) SMS-survey of a sample of users of UgandaWatch; 3) SMS-survey of a randomized sample of election observers using SMS to monitor the elections.
This study explains why people are attracted to open crowdsourcing platforms, the reasons for staying away from the service and the challenges in actually using it. In our surveys we asked questions such as preferred method for political participation, main challenges in using UgandaWatch and if users ever visited the website www.ugandawatch2011.org, where the reports were published.
The key findings were; a) Citizen reporting platforms provides a useful channel in cases when citizens experience that there is nowhere else to turn, and when citizens need help; b) The major reasons for not using UgandaWatch was not having heard of the service and not having anything to report; c) The primary challenges in using the citizen reporting service, were fear of personal safety, the cost factor, and the perception of participation not having any effect. Using mobile phones for participation seem to attract groups of citizens not participating in other arenas, which suggest that this channel is contributing positively to political equality. Drawing on our findings, we recommend; 1) Strategic and educational marketing: Inform the public why the service should be used and how to use it, and keep context in mind when choosing marketing channels; 2) Closing the feedback-loop and using the data: Decide how to use the crowdsourced data and communicate this to the users; 3) Using multiple channels: Combine a spectrum of traditional and ICT-enabled channels to increase accessibility and solidity.
CSCW has long been concerned with formal and informal knowledge practices in organizations, examining both the social and
technical aspects of how knowledge is sought, shared, and used. In this study, we are interested in examining the set of activities
that occur when co-located knowledge workers manage and resolve issues by seeking, sharing, and applying their informal knowledge.
Informal knowledge seeking involves more than identifying the expert who has the knowledge or accessing the knowledge through
physical artifacts. It also involves working with that expert to identify and apply the appropriate knowledge to the particular
situation. However, our understandings of how people collaboratively work together to find, share and apply this knowledge
are less well understood. To investigate this phenomenon, we conducted a field study of how professionals in three IT teams
of a regional hospital managed and resolved IT issues. These knowledge workers used various collaborative practices such as
creation of ad-hoc teams and the use of email to identify, share, and use informal knowledge to resolve IT issues. In addition,
particular team practices such as how issues are assigned affected these knowledge activities. Our findings highlight how
informal knowledge activities are affected by a variety of implicit and sometimes subtle features of the organization and
that organizational knowledge management systems should support informal knowledge seeking activities and collaboration amongst
the knowledge sharers.
The field of knowledge management focuses on how organizations can most effectively store, manage, retrieve, and enlarge their intellectual properties. The repository view of knowledge management emphasizes the gathering, providing, and filtering of explicit knowledge. The information in a repository has the advantage of being easily transferable and reusable. But it is not easy to use decontextualized information, and users often need access to human experts. This book describes a more recent approach to knowledge management, which the authors call "expertise sharing." Expertise sharing emphasizes the human aspects--cognitive, social, cultural, and organizational--of knowledge management, in addition to information storage and retrieval. Rather than focusing on the management level of an organization, expertise sharing focuses on the self-organized activities of the organization's members. The book addresses the concerns of both researchers and practitioners, describing current literature and research as well as offering information on implementing systems. It consists of three parts: an introduction to knowledge sharing in large organizations; empirical studies of expertise sharing in different types of settings; and detailed descriptions of computer systems that can route queries, assemble people and work, and augment naturally occurring social networks within organizations.
With recent troubles in U.S. elections, there has been a nationwide push to update voting systems. Municipalities are investing heavily in electronic voting systems, many of which use a touch screen. These systems offer the promise of faster and more accurate voting, but the current reality is that they are fraught with usability and systemic problems. This paper surveys issues relating to usability of electronic voting systems and reports on a series of studies, including one with 415 voters using new systems that the State of Maryland purchased. Our analysis shows these systems work well, but have several problems, and many voters have concerns about them.
In an economy where the only certainty is uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge. Yet, few managers understand the true nature of the knowledge-creating company-let alone know how to manage it. According to this 1991 article by Japanese organizational theorist Ikujiro Nonaka, the problem is that most Western managers define knowledge-and what companies must do to exploit it-too narrowly. They believe that the only useful knowledge is "hard" (read "quantifiable") data. And they see the company as a kind of machine for information processing. Nonaka shows us another way to think about knowledge and its role in business organizations. He uses vivid examples from highly successful Japanese companies such as Honda, Canon, NEC, and Sharp. Managers at these companies recognize that creating new knowledge is not simply a matter of mechanistically processing objective information. Rather, it depends on tapping the tacit and often highly subjective insights, intuitions, and ideals of employees. The tools for making use of such knowledge are often soft"-such as slogans, metaphors, and symbols-but they are indispensable for continuous innovation. The reasons Japanese companies are especially adept at this holistic kind of knowledge creation are complex. But the key lesson for managers is quite simple: Much as manufacturers worldwide have learned from Japanese manufacturing techniques, companies that want to compete on the knowledge playing field must also learn from Japanese techniques of knowledge creation.
For proper knowledge management, organizations must consider how knowledge is kept and reused. The term organizational memory is due for an overhaul. Memory appears to be everywhere in organizations; yet, the term has been limited to only a few uses. Based on an ethnographic study of a telephone hotline group, this paper presents a micro-level, distributed cognition analysis of two hotline calls, the work activity surrounding the calls, and the memory used in the work activity. Drawing on the work of Star, Hutchins, and Strauss, the paper focuses on issues of applying past information for current use. Our work extends Strauss' and Hutchins' trajectories to get at the understanding of potential future use by participants and its role in current information storage. We also note the simultaneously shared provenance and governance of multiple memories – human and technical. This analysis and the theoretical framework we construct should be to be useful in further efforts in describing and analyzing organizational memory within the context of knowledge management efforts. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/42609/1/10606_2004_Article_DO00000135.pdf
To identify and characterize enabling factors that support a continuous adaptation of technology and work practices in the health care sector.
Cross-case analysis of two longitudinal ethnographic studies of managing the gradual adaptation of electronic patient records, one in Canada and one Norway.
The cross-case analysis revealed that technology-in-use practices developed more rapidly in one of the cases, and one of the major driving forces was the establishment of a special committee and the associated project meetings. Based on the literature and grounded in the empirical observations, we complement and expand the notion of project meetings as composed of continuous reflection-on-practice activities to construct technology-in-use practices.
We characterize reflection-on-practice activities as frequent encounters of negotiations of work practices and technology use, providing internal actors a space for systematic evaluation of suggested changes. Further we argue that representatives of the affected professions should not only participate, but also have a mandate to make and evaluate decisions of the technology-in-use practices of the particular group.
The term organizational memory is due for an overhaul. Memory
appears to be everywhere in organizations; yet, the term has been
limited to only a few uses. Based on an ethnographic study of a
telephone hotline group, this paper presents a micro-level, distributed
cognition analysis of two hotline calls, the work activity surrounding
the calls, and the memory used in the work activity. We find a number of
interesting theoretical concepts that are useful in further describing
and analyzing organizational memory
Volkmar Pipek, Sharing Expertise: Beyond Knowledge Management
- S Mark
- Volker Ackerman
- Wulf
Online political organizing: Lessons from the field: Panel
- K Carpenter
- B Nardi
- J Moore
- S Roberson
- K Foot
- D Drezner
- I Benson
- Q Jett
Sharing Knowledge and Expertise: The CSCW View of Knowledge Management, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, v.22 n.4-6
- S Mark
- Juri Ackerman
- Volkmar Dachtera
- Volker Pipek
- Wulf