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<p>This paper presents the results of a workplace study of two smaller companies in the design industry. The core issue has been to investigate the companies use of technical tools and to what extent social praxis influence the daily work. The methods used are based on a qualitative analysis of interviews and observations. Various kind of work procedures, such as verbal and computerized, have been identified, but the most important occurrence was how spontaneous conversations between employees required certain flexibility, since the actors repeatedly were required to change focus and quickly perceive different information. For that reason, a thesis has been defined regarding how the use of spontaneous communication put an indirect need of a flexible working environment and also how this lead to more significant participation and exchange of information, as well as more awareness at the companies.</p>

This paper presents the results of a workplace study of two smaller companies in the design industry. The core issue has been to investigate the companies use of technical tools and to what extent social praxis influence the daily work. The methods used are based on a qualitative analysis of interviews and observations. Various kind of work procedures, such as verbal and computerized, have been identified, but the most important occurrence was how spontaneous conversations between employees required certain flexibility, since the actors repeatedly were required to change focus and quickly perceive different information. For that reason, a thesis has been defined regarding how the use of spontaneous communication put an indirect need of a flexible working environment and also how this lead to more significant participation and exchange of information, as well as more awareness at the companies.

The thesis investigates the possibility to enrich standard mobile phone calls with cooperative web applications. Originating from the research field know as Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) this thesis report introduces and describes the implementation of several applications which can be used by the calling parties together during a phone call. Additionally, the report describes a proof-of-concept prototype for the Android platform, and discusses the performance of cooperative web application running on mobile devices in terms of network and CPU use. The conclusions of the thesis describe a prototype application addressing and implementing the requirements as described by the theory of computer supported collaborated work. The performance of the running application showed to be satisfactory, both regarding to network demand and processor use.

Collaborative work across different societal and multiple sectors has historically provided innovative solutions to address community development. It continues to be a crucial focus for funders and policymakers in all areas. This dissertation sought to extend organizational communication scholarship’s contribution by examining how collaborative work manifests at the meso level by interviewing 13 key informants who facilitate collaborations in various counties of Indiana and conducting a qualitative structural analysis of the ego-networks of nine community health workers (CHWs)situated in rural, urban and rural-urban counties of Indiana). The mesolevel communicative model of collaboration (Keyton et al., 2008) was applied to do so. The findings of this study support two key theoretical implications for collaborative work from an egocentric network perspective – 1) individual or personal ties of CHWs are perceived as close communicative relationships only when complemented by knowledge and social capital attributes, 2) While diverse ideas are essential for effective collaborations, lack of trust of new people and ideas, specifically in rural contexts may create tensions which can be navigated by finding common ground through close or dense relational ties with an individual already embedded in the socio-cultural context. Additionally, this dissertation extends the mesolevel communicative model to include examining socio-cultural contexts in their examination of communicative acts in assessing collaborative effectiveness. It also furthers the qualitative structural analysis to include case descriptive to understand an actor’s social embeddedness. Lastly, practical implications for those who fund and evaluate collaborative work are presented, including training funders (on local contexts) and collaborators (on determining their success metrics as a collaborative team).

Traditionally, security has been conceptualized as rules, locks, and passwords. More recently, security research has explored how people interact in secure (or insecure) ways in part of a larger socio-technical system. Socio-technical systems are comprised of people, technology, relationships, and interactions that work together to create safe praxis. Because information systems are not just technical, but also social, the scope of privacy and security concerns must include social and technical factors. Clearly, computer security is enhanced by developments in the technical arena, where researchers are building ever more secure and robust systems to guard the privacy and confidentiality of information. However, when the definition of security is broadened to encompass both human and technical mechanisms, how security is managed with and through the day-to-day social work practices becomes increasingly important. In this dissertation I focus on how sensitive information is collaboratively managed in socio-technical systems by examining two domains: childcare centers and physicians' offices. In childcare centers, workers manage the enrolled children and also the enrolled child's personal information. In physicians' offices, workers manage the patients' health along with the patients' health information. My dissertation presents results from interviews and observations of these locations. The data collected consists of observation notes, interview transcriptions, pictures, and forms. The researchers identified breakdowns related to security and privacy. Using Activity Theory to first structure, categorize, and analyze the observed breakdowns, I used phenomenological methods to understand the context and experience of security and privacy. The outcomes from this work are three themes, along with corresponding future scenarios. The themes discussed are security embodiment, communities of security, and zones of ambiguity. Those themes extend the literature in the areas of usable security, human-computer interaction, and trust. The presentation will use future scenarios to examine the complexity of developing secure systems for the real world. / Ph. D.

Since the late twentieth century, open source software projects (e.g., the GNU/Linux operating system, the Apache web server, Perl and many others) have achieved phenomenal success. This success can be attributed to a new paradigm of productivity in which individuals voluntarily collaborate to produce knowledge, goods and services. Benkler claims this productivity paradigm is a “new, third mode of production” particularly suited for “the digitally networked environment” (2002). In addition to its application to open source software projects, the peer production model, in different forms, has been used in areas such as science/citizen science (Silvertown, 2009), library science (Weinberger, 2007), politics (Castells, 2007; Jenkins, 2006), education (Daniel, 2012), journalism (Gillmor, 2004), and culture (Jenkins, 2006; Lessig, 2004). As peer production has flourished, merely describing successful cases has become less useful. Instead, scholars must identify the dynamics, structures, and conditions that contribute to or impede that success. In this dissertation, I focus on three management challenges at three distinct levels that impede the success of peer production. At the individual level, one significant question is how to best organize individual contributors with differing goals, experience, and commitment to achieve a collective outcome. At the practice level, peer production communities, like corporations, must often transfer best practices from one unit to another to improve performance. This transfer process poses the challenge of how to adapt and modify an original practice to make it effective in the new context. At the community level, peer production communities must learn to survive and succeed in a large ecosystem of related communities. This dissertation combines theoretical approaches in organization science with in-depth empirical analysis on a range of peer production communities to examine the mechanisms that help the communities overcome these three management challenges and succeed in peer production. The contributions of my dissertation are twofold. For scholars and researchers, my dissertation advances the theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanisms of successful peer production systems. For practitioners, my dissertation offers practical advice to build more effective peer production projects and platforms.

There has long been a concern about the research-practice gap within Library and Information Science (LIS). Several authors have highlighted the disconnection between the world of professional practice, interested in service and information system development, and the world of the academy, focused on the development of theory and the progress of the discipline. A virtual organization, such as a collaboratory, might support collaboration between LIS professionals and academics in research, potentially transforming the way research between these two groups is undertaken. The purpose of this study was to examine how sociotechnical aspects of work organization influence the initiation, development, and conclusion of collaboration between LIS academics and professionals in distributed research projects. The study examined the development of three collaborative projects from the start to completion in two countries, Italy and another European country. The data analysis aimed at deriving implications for the further development of theory on remote scientific collaboration, and for the design of a sustainable collaboratory to support small-scale, distributed research projects between LIS academics and professionals. The research design, data collection, and data analysis were informed by Actor- Network-Theory (ANT), in particular by Callon’s model of translation of interests. Qualitative interviews and analysis of literary inscriptions formed the key sources of data for the three case studies. The analysis of how and why collaborations between LIS academics and professionals initiated and developed revealed that the initial motivation to pursue collaboration has to do with the lack of economic and organizational resources on either or both sides, and with a genuine interest in a topic by both academics and professionals. The case studies in this study were decentralized and bottom-up projects in which LIS academics and professionals pursued collaboration because they had a genuine interest in a given topic and not because they were mandated by their employers, or they hoped to be acknowledged and promoted by them on the basis of their participation in the project. Market conditions and/or institutional pressures did not exert much influence on the start and development of these collaborations, although one project was influenced by political considerations and funding conditions in healthcare. The patterns emerged from the findings of the three cases underpin the development of a sociotechnical framework aimed at providing a better understanding of remote collaboration between academics and professionals not only in LIS but also in other fields affected by the research-practice gap. / <p>Akademisk avhandling som med tillstånd av samhällsvetenskapliga fakulteten vid Göteborgs universitet för vinnande av doktorsexamen framläggs till offentlig granskning kl. 13.15 torsdagen den 29 april 2010, i hörsal C203, Högskolan i Borås, Allégatan 1, Borås.</p>

<p>Denna forskningsrapport undersöker hur nya teknologier kan verka som stöd för visuellt informationsutbyte och koordination för kreativa arbeten på distans. Arbetsgruppen genomförde denna undersökning för att kunna utbyta prototyper och annat visuellt material på regelbunden basis med en beställare av ett projekt som har sitt säte i New York. Projektet använde sig av en så kallad projektblogg som kanal för att förmedla utfört arbete samt för att föra en diskussion och ge feedback på det. Eftersom detta projekt skulle genomföras inom ramen för detta examensarbete valde arbetsgruppen att även undersöka hur examensarbetet skulle kunna koordineras genom projektbloggen. Dessa två undersökningar skedde genom en fallstudie under 8 av examensarbetets totala 10 veckor. Samtidigt som fallstudien genomfördes gjordes även en litteraturstudie som undersökte om det fanns teori som kunde stödja användandet av en projektblogg på detta sätt. Efter fallstudien utvärderades resultatet och genom intervjuer med användare och enkätundersökningar med en referensgrupp framkom det att projektbloggen hade upplevts vara ett mycket användbart hjälpmedel för att förmedla visuell information samt för att ge feedback för det ena projektet. Det andra projektet (examensarbetet) hade mindre behov av visuellt informationsutbyte då arbetet huvudsakligen bestod av längre textdokument. Eftersom dessa dokument skulle editeras fann användaren inte projektbloggen som ett optimalt verktyg för detta, bloggen verkade i det projektet mer som samlingsställe för dessa dokument, där användarna kunde hämta informationen för att sedan editera på traditionellt vis. Litteraturstudien som genomfördes visade att det fanns gott om stöd som pekade på att en projektblogg skulle vara användbar för koordinering av kreativa projekt som skedde på distans, och en av de mest intressanta möjligheterna som beskrevs inom ämnet computer supported collaborative work(CSCW) var att den nya tekniken att genomföra distansarbeten framförallt öppnade dörrar för de yrkesgrupper som hade behov av att visa upp grafiskt material, en yrkesgrupp som normalt blir väldigt belastad om arbetsgruppen inte är närvarande.</p>

This thesis is concerned with shared virtual environmentsfor collaborative work. An important aspect of shared virtualenvironments is the avatar, the representation of the user inthe virtual world. The proper design of the avatar has been thesubject of considerable research, aimed at allowing the avatarsto express as much as possible of human non-verbalcommunication and, as it were, tie the user closer to thevirtual world. I will go through the historical development of sharedvirtual environments and how the design principles for avatarshave followed the available technology over time. I describeearlier research on extending avatars and environments in orderto better support collaboration in virtual spaces. I will thendescribe a user study where pairs of subjects cooperated on aconstruction task, and the implications for design ofcollaborative applications in VEs that can be drawn from thisstudy. In particular I show how the subjects used the availableresources in the environment to negotiate a sharedunderstanding of the environment and the task. Some of thesubjects had no visible avatars, but still solved the task byusing the environment itself to orient themselves and drawattention to important features of the environment. Following this, I and co-workers have designed virtualenvironments which have had no explicit avatars, nor have usedtraditional methods for navigation in 3D space, but ratherrelied on task-oriented features of the space, such asagglomerations of other users or interesting objects in orderto present a relevant view of the environment. A view positionmay be shared by several users, or be“unoccupied”,merely representing a potential site for interaction. Based on these experiences, I make the claim that atraditional anthropomorphic avatar is neither necessary norsuffcient for successful collaboration in virtual spaces, butthe design of navigation and user representation is contingenton the specific application, some reasonable applications notutilising a user representation at all. / <p>QC 20161027</p>