Christine A. Halverson’s research while affiliated with Silicon Valley University and other places

Looking at the design and benefits of X10.

In 2002 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) launched a major initiative in HPCS (high-productivity computing systems). The program was motivated by the belief that the utilization of the coming generation of parallel machines was gated by the difficulty of writing, debugging, tuning, and maintaining software at peta scale.

Troubleshooting large computer systems is often highly collaborative. Because these systems consist of complex infrastructures with many interdependent components, expertise is spread across people and organizations. Those who administer such systems are faced with cognitive and social challenges, including the establishment of common ground and coordination of attention, as they troubleshoot in collaboration with peers, technical support, and software application developers. To investigate these aspects of administration work, we take a distributed cognition approach to interpreting a specific instance of problem-solving in administering a Web-based system, examining the movement of representational states across media in a single system administrator’s environment. We also apply the idea of language use as a joint activity to understand how discourse attributes affect what is accomplished collaboratively. Our analysis focuses on information flow among participants and other sources and how these affect what information is attended to, transmitted, and used.

In this chapter, we describe the genesis and use of an artifact that became a resource for a wide range of activities. We discuss how the creation and use of the rush cheat sheet (RCS) and its associated representations at the Dallas-Ft. Worth TRACON (Tower Radar Approach Control) brought together information and expert knowledge across organizational boundaries. Multi-organizational information became synthesized in a composite that could be used as a resource uniquely by the contributing organizations, as well as by different roles within each organization.

In large organizations, people often take part in processes in which they have no prior experience. In such situations a common problem is figuring out how to begin, and a common solution is the simple expedient of talking to others who have more expertise. However, in large distributed organizations, this expedient is often not so simple. In this chapter, we describe two applications—Babble, and its Web-based successor, Loops—which people have turned to this end. We discuss the design of the systems, with particular attention to the ways in which they make people and their activities visible and thus available to one another, and illustrate how people make use of this availability in seeking expertise. We conclude with a discussion of the ways in which the functionality of such systems can aid people in drawing upon one another for assistance and expertise.

We present a case study of a project to introduce a new organization-wide, integrated information system within the UK healthcare sector that we conducted as part of a wider, socio-technical exploration of factors influencing the dependability of computer-based systems. We report in detail on the problems of working with and evolving a standardized classification of work procedures that is central to the organizational purpose of the new IT system, and the responses of both users and of the project team to these problems. These have important implications for the usability of computer-based systems and for the dependability of the information they contain. Drawing insights from sociological studies of classification and standardization, we reflect upon the lessons for the development and implementation of computer-based systems designed to serve as “common information spaces.”

How do software and other technical systems come to be adopted and used? People use software and other technical systems in many ways, and a considerable amount of time and energy may be spent integrating the functionality of the system with the everyday activities it is intended to support. Understanding how this comes about, and understanding how to design systems so that it happens more easily, is a topic of great interest to the CSCW, IT and IS communities. Resources, Co-Evolution and Artifacts: Theory in CSCW approaches this problem by looking at resources - artifacts that have come to be used in a particular manner in a given situation - and examining how they get created, adopted, modified, and abandoned. The theoretical and empirical studies in this volume examine issues such as: - how resources are tailored or otherwise changed as situations change; - how a resource is maintained and reused within an organization; - the ways in which the value of a resource comes to be understood; - the ways in which an artifact is transformed to function more effectively; - how one might approach the problem of designing a resource de novo.