Volkmar Pipek

Engaging with practices: design case studies as a research framework in CSCW

Information and communications technology (ICT) pervades most aspects of our lives and changes everydays practices in work and leisure time. When designing innovative ICTs, we need to engage with given practices, institutional arrangements, and technological infrastructures. We describe the research framework used at the University of Siegen. It is based on a collection of design case studies in particular fields of practice and identifies cross-cutting issues to compare and aggregate insights between these cases. To illustrate this framework, we describe our research activities and discuss three themes which became important in different design case studies.

A groupware's life

The paper describes a long-term study of a groupware application which covers the complete lifecycle from the groupwares introduction to its removal. During that time our field of application offered the opportunity to gain deep insights into personal, organizational and technical aspects of the groupwares usage. We focus on the late phases of a groupwares life, i.e. on the new aspect of groupware removal and the resulting requirements for groupware platforms. Additionally we contribute to the current discussion on organizational change processes which are initiated by the introduction of groupware.

Supporting Collaborative Tailoring

In this chapter we depict collaborative aspects of tailoring software. We provide a categorization distinguishing between three levels of intensity of user ties regarding tools usage (“shared use”, “shared context”, and “shared tool”) and discuss approaches to support collaborative tailoring in these scenarios. For the two levels with the most intense ties (“Shared Context” and “Shared Tool”) we provide the relevant theoretical background as well as empirical evidence from our own fieldwork. Additionally, we point out existing problems with collaborative tailoring support in “shared infrastructure” scenarios, which reflect the technological richness at today’s workplace. Finally, it turns out that there is a need as well as an opportunity for a broader technological support of processes of technology appropriation including better means of communicating and negotiating about aspects of the joint use of a software artefact.

Crisis Management 2.0: Towards a Systematization of Social Software Use in Crisis Situations

In this paper, the authors propose a systematization of social software use in crisis situations, examining different types of cooperation and challenges. The authors discuss how the organizational actors involved in crisis management (police, fire-fighters, organizations, etc.) and the affected citizens are communicating and can communicate and collaborate through the use of social software. After defining the term ‘social software,’ the authors outline its use in crisis management. They present two case studies where they have examined the use of social software in 2010: first during the disruption of air travel caused by the eruptions of the volcano Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland and second during the mass panic at the Love Parade music festival in Germany. Based on both previous work and case studies, the authors discuss potentials and weaknesses and propose a classification matrix for different types of cooperation as a step toward a systematization of social software use in crisis situations. DOI: 10.4018/jiscrm.2012010101 2 International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, 4(1), 1-16, January-March 2012 Copyright

Supporting improvisation work in inter-organizational crisis management

Improvisation is necessary when planned decision-making as the main managerial activity does not fit the conditions the practice provides. In these cases, information technology should not just automate planned and structured decisions, but support improvisational practice. In this contribution we present an empirical study about the improvisation work in scenarios of medium to large power outages in Germany. Our focus is on inter-organizational cooperation practices, thus we examined the cooperation of fire departments, police, public administration, electricity infrastructure operators and citizens. Our empirical material allows to describe reasons and conditions for improvisation. Our resulting recommendations address the support of aggregation and visualization of information, a necessary individualization of information compositions, options for collaborative situation assessment, requirements for informal and formal communication, and accessibility of information resources.

CrowdMonitor: Mobile Crowd Sensing for Assessing Physical and Digital Activities of Citizens during Emergencies

Emergencies such as the 2013 Central European flood or the 2013 typhoon Haiyan in Philippines have shown how citizens can organize themselves and coordinate private relief activities. These activities can be found in (physical) groups of affected people, but also within (digital) social media communities. There is an evident need, however, for a clearer picture of what exactly is going on to be available for use by the official emergency services: to enlist them, to keep them safe, to support their efforts and to avoid needless duplications or conflicts. Aligning emergency services and volunteer activities is, then, crucial. In this paper we present a mobile crowd sensing based concept, which was designed as well as implemented as the application CrowdMonitor and facilitates the detection of physical and digital activities and the assignment of specific tasks to citizens. Finally we outline the findings of its evaluation.

Appropriation Infrastructure: Supporting the Design of Usages

End User Development offers technical flexibility to encourage the appropriation of software applications within specific contexts of use. Appropriation needs to be understood as a phenomenon of many collaborative and creative activities. To support appropriation, we propose integrating communication channels into software applications. Such an appropriation infrastructure provides communication and collaboration support to stimulate knowledge sharing among users and between users and developers. It exploits the technological flexibility of software applications to enable these actors to change usages and configurations. Taking the case of the BSCWeasel groupware, we demonstrate how an appropriation infrastructure can be realized. Empirical results from the BSCWeasel project demonstrate the impact of such an infrastructure on the appropriation and design process. Based on these results, we argue that appropriation infrastructures should be tightly integrated in the application using the IT artifact itself as a boundary object as well as a bridge between design and use.

Pruning the answer garden: knowledge sharing in maintenance engineering

The Answer Garden supports knowledge sharing in two intertwined ways: by making relevant information retrievable and by mediating access to people with knowledge. We present a case study in which the Answer Garden approach was applied to encourage knowledge sharing in maintenance engineering of a steel mill. The results show that the sheer amount of drawings and the long history of chaning classification schemes challenge the Answer Garden apporach as well as domain-specific needs for technically mediated communication. Moreover, the given divison of labor and organizational micro-politics prevent the Answer Garden apporach from encouraging knowledge sharing. Based on these expriences, design directions for knowledge management systems are pointed out. Finally, the results of the study are related to a recent controversy on technology support for expertise location.

Information and Expertise Sharing in Inter-Organizational Crisis Management

Emergency or crisis management, as is well-attested, is a complex management problem. A variety of agencies need to collaborate and coordinate in real-time and with an urgency that is not always present in other domains. It follows that accurate information of varying kinds (e.g. geographical and weather conditions; available skills and expertises; state-of-play; current dispositions and deployments) needs to be made available in a timely fashion to the organizations and individuals who need it. By definition, this information will come from a number of sources both within and across organizations. Large-scale events in particular necessitate collaboration with other organizations. Of course, plans and processes exist to deal with such events but the number of dynamically changing factors as well as the high number of heterogeneous organizations and the high degree of interdependency involved make it impossible to plan for all contingencies. A degree of ongoing improvisation, which typically occurs by means of a variety of information and expertise sharing practices, therefore becomes necessary. This, however, faces many challenges, such as different organizational cultures, distinct individual and coordinative work practices and discrete information systems. Our work entails an examination of the practices of information and expertise sharing, and the obstacles to it, in inter-organizational crisis management. We conceive of this as a design case study, such that we examine a problem area and its scope; conduct detailed enquiries into practice in that area, and provide design recommendations for implementation and evaluation. First, we will present the results of an empirical study of collaboration practices between organizations and public authorities with security responsibilities such as the police, fire departments, public administration and electricity network operators, mainly in scenarios of medium to large power outages in Germany. Based on these results, we will describe a concept, which was designed, implemented and evaluated as a system prototype, in two iterations. While the first iteration focuses on situation assessment, the second iteration also includes inter-organizational collaboration functionalities. Based on the findings of our evaluations with practitioners, we will discuss how to support collaboration with a particular focus on information and expertise sharing.

What You See is What I Need: Mobile Reporting Practices in Emergencies

Decisions of emergency response organisations (police, fire fighters, infrastructure providers, etc.) rely on accurate and timely information. Some necessary information is integrated into control centre’s IT (weather, availability of electricity, gauge information, etc.), but almost every decision needs to be based on very specific information of the current crisis situation. Due to the unpredictable nature of a crisis, gathering this kind of information requires much improvisation and articulation work which we aim to support. We present a study on how different emergency response organisations communicate with teams on-site to generate necessary information for the coordinating instances, and we described, implemented and evaluated an interaction concept as well as a prototype to support this communication by a semi-structured request-and-report system based on Android devices. We learned that (1) the accuracy of request and reports can be improved by using an appropriate metadata structure in addition to creating multimedia-based information content, (2) requirements of trusted and fast information need to be respected in support concepts although they may even be contradictory, and (3) the coordination strategy of the emergency response organisation also shapes the way this interaction needs to be designed.