Judith S. Olson

Psychological research online: report of Board of Scientific Affairs' Advisory Group on the Conduct of Research on the Internet.

As the Internet has changed communication, commerce, and the distribution of information, so too it is changing psychological research. Psychologists can observe new or rare phenomena online and can do research on traditional psychological topics more efficiently, enabling them to expand the scale and scope of their research. Yet these opportunities entail risk both to research quality and to human subjects. Internet research is inherently no more risky than traditional observational, survey, or experimental methods. Yet the risks and safeguards against them will differ from those characterizing traditional research and will themselves change over time. This article describes some benefits and challenges of conducting psychological research via the Internet and offers recommendations to both researchers and institutional review boards for dealing with them. ((c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)

Effects of four computer-mediated communications channels on trust development

When virtual teams need to establish trust at a distance, it is advantageous for them to use rich media to communicate. We studied the emergence of trust in a social dilemma game in four different communication situations: face-to-face, video, audio, and text chat. All three of the richer conditions were significant improvements over text chat. Video and audio conferencing groups were nearly as good as face-to-face, but both did show some evidence of what we term delayed trust (slower progress toward full cooperation) and fragile trust (vulnerability to opportunistic behavior)

A study of preferences for sharing and privacy

We describe studies of preferences about information sharing aimed at identifying fundamental concerns with privacy and at understanding how people might abstract the details of sharing into higher-level classes of recipients and information that are treated similarly. Thirty people specified what information they are willing to share with whom.. Although people vary in their overall level of comfort in sharing, we identified key classes of recipients and information. Such abstractions highlight the promise of developing expressive controls for sharing and privacy.

How does radical collocation help a team succeed

Companies are experimenting with putting teams into warrooms, hoping for some productivity enhancement. We conducted a field study of six such teams, tracking their activity, attitudes, use of technology and productivity. Teams in these warrooms showed a doubling of productivity. Why? Among other things, teams had easy access to each other for both coordination of their work and for learning, and the work artifacts they posted on the walls remained visible to all. These results imply that if we are to truly support remote teams, we should provide constant awareness and easy transitions in and out of spontaneous meetings.

From Shared Databases to Communities of Practice: A Taxonomy of Collaboratories

Promoting affiliation between scientists is relatively easy, but creating larger organizational structures is much more difficult, due to traditions of scientific independence, difficulties of sharing implicit knowledge, and formal organizational barriers. The Science of Collaboratories (SOC) project conducted a broad five-year review to take stock of the diverse ecosystem of projects that fit our definition of a collaboratory and to distill lessons learned in the process. This article describes one of the main products of that review, a seven-category taxonomy of collaboratory types. The types are: Distributed Research Centers, Shared Instruments, Community Data Systems, Open Community Contribution Systems, Virtual Communities of Practice, Virtual Learning Communities, and Community Infrastructure Projects. Each of the types is defined and illustrated with one example, and key technical and organizational issues are identified.

Video helps remote work: speakers who need to negotiate common ground benefit from seeing each other

More and more organizations are forming teams that are notco-located. These teams communicate via email, fax, telephone andaudio conferences, and sometimes video. The question often ariseswhether the cost of video is worth it. Previous research has shownthat video makes people more satisfied with the work, but it doesnthelp the quality of the work itself. There is one exception;negotiation tasks are measurably better with video. In this study,we show that the same effect holds for a more subtle form ofnegotiation, when people have to negotiate meaning in aconversation. We compared the performance and communication ofpeople explaining a map route to each other. Half the pairs havevideo and audio connections, half only audio. Half of the pairswere native speakers of English; the other half were non-nativespeakers, those presumably who have to negotiate meaning more. Theresults showed that non-native speaker pairs did benefit from thevideo; native speakers did not. Detailed analysis of theconversational strategies showed that with video, the non-nativespeaker pairs spent proportionately more effort negotiating commonground.

Trust without touch: jumpstarting long-distance trust with initial social activities

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is thought to be inadequate when one needs to establish trust. If, however, people meet before using CMC, they trust each other, trust being established through touch. Here we show that if participants do not meet beforehand but rather engage in various getting-acquainted activities over a network, trust is much higher than if they do nothing beforehand, nearly as good as a prior meeting. Using text-chat to get acquainted is nearly as good as meeting, and even just seeing a picture is better than nothing

Groupware in the wild: lessons learned from a year of virtual collocation

Current research on CSC W for remote groups focuses on one technology at a time: shared editing on the desktop, video conferencing, glancing at others’ offices, email, etc. When a real group sets out to work remotely, however, they need to consider all aspects of work, synchronous, asynchronous, and the transitions to and tkom. This paper explores the planning, implementation, and use of a suite of groupware tools over the course of a year in a real group with remote members. We found that groupware atlkted people’s commitments and the nature of the work distribution.

i2i trust in e-commerce

The Internet has brought about the New Economy and with it a host of research on e-commerce. Most people familiar with ecommerce think of it as, first, the ability of consumers to buy products and services online (an arrangement known as B2C). Alternatively, it’s also the ability of businesses to interact with one another electronically (B2B) in the interests of, say, supporting the supply chain, the next step beyond electronic data interchange. Another important change the Internet has meant for commerce is that individuals have the ability to communicate with one another, independent of location (or i2i, for individual-toindividual). i2i plays a big role in e-commerce in two main scenarios: global teams inside organizations and advisor/advisee interactions from one organization to another or from an agent to a customer. Global teams. For global teams, managers can choose members from around the world, extending their reach to find the most appropriate experts for the job at hand. Many companies have gone global, assigning people from different continents, time zones, areas of expertise, even from outside the organization, to work toward a common goal. Ford Motor Co. is an example of a global organization assigning global teams to design various automobile components and produce cars for all regions, rather than different cars for different regions, as it had previously; Ford calls it “virtual collocation.” Meanwhile, although a number of companies have been doing software development around the world and around the clock, such global work has become much easier in recent years thanks to the Internet. Where these companies used to work through ftp and version-control software to share the code itself, today’s Netbased communication makes it easier to discuss the work, clarify misunderstandings, coordinate changes, and monitor and maintain the schedule through email, attachments, and textchat capabilities, as well as through audio and videoconferencing. Advisor/advisee relations. The Internet was originally expected to be a great medium for “disintermediation,” or the elimination of people as intermediaries to sources and services. We would be able to explore enormous digital libraries without a reference librarian; access medical information before meeting a physician; view ongoing changes in the stock market, allowing us to make decisions without a broker; or secure travel arrangements without a travel agent. Although such access is widespread today, and many of us are able to work independently, people are beginning to reappear in our online interchanges. We now recognize the value these intermediaries might offer us, including counsel, guidance to the right sources of information, assessment of the quality of the sources, and customized advice, because they understand our overall goals and needs. Today, we are seeing “reintermediation,” or the reintroduction of people to online interaction to link sources and services. Services include live chat with human advisors—on-screen videoconferencing to hone the advice for the individual being served. Reintermediation via i2i affects both B2C and B2B. Trust is the principle challenge in both areas—connecting teammates across long distances and the interaction of advice seekers and advisors on the Internet. In order for teammates to work productively and efficiently, they have to trust one an-

User‐centered design of collaboration technology

Groupware, like other forms of information technology, should be designed with the users’ needs and capabilities as the focus. User‐centered system design consists of observation and analysis of users at work, assistance in design from relevant aspects of theory, and iterative testing with users. We illustrate the various stages of this approach with our development of group ware for software designers. We have extensive studies of designers at work, have developed the beginnings of a theory of distributed cognition, and are at the first stages of iterative testing and redesign of a prototype of a shared editor to support their work.