Gregorio Convertino

The singularity is not near: slowing growth of Wikipedia

Prior research on Wikipedia has characterized the growth in content and editors as being fundamentally exponential in nature, extrapolating current trends into the future. We show that recent editing activity suggests that Wikipedia growth has slowed, and perhaps plateaued, indicating that it may have come against its limits to growth. We measure growth, population shifts, and patterns of editor and administrator activities, contrasting these against past results where possible. Both the rate of page growth and editor growth has declined. As growth has declined, there are indicators of increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits. We discuss some possible explanations for these new developments in Wikipedia including decreased opportunities for sharing existing knowledge and increased bureaucratic stress on the socio-technical system itself.

Articulating common ground in cooperative work: content and process

We study the development of common ground in an emergency management planning task. Twelve three-person multi-role teams performed the task with a paper prototype in a controlled setting; each team completed three versions of the task. We use converging measures to document the development of common ground in the teams and present an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of the common ground development process. Our findings indicate that in complex collaborative work, process common ground increases, thus diminishing the need for acts like information querying or strategy discussions about how to organize the collaborative activities. However, content common ground is created and tested throughout the three runs; in fact dialogue acts used to clarify this content increase over time. Discussion of the implications of these findings for the theory of common ground and the design of collaborative systems follows.

A multiple view approach to support common ground in distributed and synchronous geo-collaboration

In this paper we investigate strategies to support knowledge sharing in distributed, synchronous collaboration. Our goal is to propose, justify, and assess a multiple view approach to support common ground in geo-collaboration within multi-role teams. We argue that a collaborative workspace, which includes multiple role-specific views coordinated with a team view, affords a clear separation between role-specific and shared data, enables the team to filter out role-specific details and share strategic knowledge, and allows serendipitous learning about knowledge and expertise within the team. We discuss some key issues that need to be addressed when designing multiple views as a collaborative visualization. We illustrate the design features of a geo-collaborative prototype that address these issues in the context of two collaborative scenarios. We finally describe a laboratory method for investigating how multi-role teams establish common ground while the amount of prior shared knowledge and the type of visualization are experimentally manipulated.

Supporting content and process common ground in computer-supported teamwork

We build on our prior work with computer-supported teams performing a complex decision-making task on maps, where the distinction between content and process common ground is proposed. In this paper we describe a distributed geo-collaboration software prototype. The system design rationale was gleaned from fieldwork, literature on team cognition, and an earlier lab study introducing a reference task with face-to-face teams. We report on a controlled experiment that evaluates this design rationale. Distinct sets of measures show that that the prototype supported both content and process common ground, offsetting the costs imposed by the distributed setting. We interpret the results in relation to prior work on common ground and draw implications for moving beyond current models of sharing and coordination.

Supporting collaborative sense-making in emergency management through geo-visualization

In emergency management, collaborative decision-making usually involves collaborative sense-making of diverse information by a group of experts from different knowledge domains, and needs better tools to analyze role-specific information, share and synthesize relevant information, and remain aware of the activities of others. This paper presents our research on the design of a collaborative sense-making system to support team work. We propose a multi-view, role-based design to help team members analyze geo-spatial information, share and integrate critical information, and monitor individual activities. Our design uses coordinated maps and activity visualization to aid decision-making as well as group activity awareness. The paper discusses design rationale, iterative design of visualization tools, prototype implementation, and system evaluation. Our work can potentially improve and extend collaborative tasks in emergency management.

Supporting common ground and awareness in emergency management planning: A design research project

We present a design research project on knowledge sharing and activity awareness in distributed emergency management planning. In three experiments we studied groups using three different prototypes, respectively: a paper-prototype in a collocated work setting, a first software prototype in a distributed setting, and a second, enhanced software prototype in a distributed setting. In this series of studies we tried to better understand the processes of knowledge sharing and activity awareness in complex cooperative work by developing and investigating new tools that can support these processes. We explicate the design rationale behind each prototype and report the results of each experiment investigating it. We discuss how the results from each prototyping phase brought us closer to defining properties of a system that facilitate the sharing and awareness of both content and process knowledge. Our designs enhanced aspects of distributed group performance, in some respects beyond that of comparable face-to-face groups.

End-user oriented strategies to facilitate multi-organizational adoption of emergency management information systems

Response to large-scale emergencies is a cooperative process that requires the active and coordinated participation of a variety of functionally independent agencies operating in adjacent regions. In practice, this essential cooperation is sometimes not attained or is reduced due to poor information sharing, non-fluent communication flows, and lack of coordination. We report an empirical study of IT-mediated cooperation among Spanish response agencies and we describe the challenges of adoption, information sharing, communication flows, and coordination among agencies that do not share a unity of command. We analyze three strategies aimed at supporting acceptance and surmounting political, organizational and personal distrust or skepticism: participatory design, advanced collaborative tools inducing cognitive absorption, and end-user communities of practice.

The CACHE Study: Group Effects in Computer-supported Collaborative Analysis

The present experiment investigates effects of group composition in computer-supported collaborative intelligence analysis. Human cognition, though highly adaptive, is also quite limited, leading to systematic errors and limitations in performance – that is, biases. We experimentally investigated the impact of group composition on an individual’s bias, by composing groups that differ in whether their members initial beliefs are diverse (heterogeneous group) or similar (homogeneous group). We study three-member, distributed, computer-supported teams in heterogeneous, homogeneous, and solo (or nominal) groups. We measured bias in final judgment, and also in the selection and evaluation of the evidence that contributed to the final beliefs. The distributed teams collaborated via CACHE-A, a web-based software environment that supports a collaborative version of Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (or ACH, a method used by intelligence analysts). Individuals in Heterogeneous Groups showed no net process cost, relative to noninteracting individuals. Both heterogeneous and solo (noninteracting) groups debiased strongly, given a stream of balanced evidence. In contrast, individuals in Homogenous Groups did worst, accentuating their initial bias rather than debiasing. We offer suggestions about how CACHE-A supports collaborative analysis, and how experimental investigation in this research area can contribute to design of CSCW systems.

Collective Intelligence in Organizations: Tools and Studies

Web 2.0 tools are penetrating into organizations after their successful adoption in the consumer domain (e.g., social networking; sharing of photos, videos, tags, or bookmarks; wiki-based editing). Some of these new tools and the collaborative processes that they support on the large scale are often referred to as Collective Intelligence (CI). The workshop brings together leading researchers and designers who are studying or developing CI tools aimed at workers in organizations. The goal is to further articulate the emerging research agenda for this new CSCW area and define new observed forms of CI in organization. Studies of communities, CI tools, and new methods are discussed. Author Keywords

Supporting intergenerational groups in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW)

The workforce is ageing as older workers re-enter the workforce or delay retirement. One consequence is that work groups are increasingly becoming intergenerational. Because group work relies on many collaborative tools (e.g. email, shared calendars), it is essential to understand the special requirements that intergenerational groups have for groupware. Can we design collaborative tools that leverage the differing abilities and contributions of older and younger workers in groups? We focus on how best to support intergenerational groups, offering an analytical framework that combines ideas from the theory of small groups and activity theory. We consider design implications for computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and outline design principles for groupware that supports intergenerational groups. Finally, we discuss methodological issues that arise when studying intergenerational cooperative work.