Online creative collaboration is challenging our basic assumptions about how people can create together. Volunteers from around the world who meet and communicate over the Internet have written the world's largest encyclopedia, developed market-leading software products, solved important open problems in mathematics, and produced award-winning films, among many examples. A growing body of research refutes the popular myth that these projects succeed through "self-organization" and instead points to the critical importance of effective leadership. Yet, we know little about what these leaders actually do, the challenges they must manage, and how technology supports or hinders their efforts. In this dissertation, I investigated the role of leadership in online creative collaboration. I first conducted two empirical studies of existing leadership practices, focusing on the domain of online, collaborative animation projects called "collabs." In the first study, I identified the major challenges faced by collab leaders. In the second study, I identified leader traits and behaviors correlated with success. These initial findings suggested that many collab leaders, overburdened and lacking adequate technological support, respond by attempting less ambitious projects and adopting centralized leadership styles. Despite these efforts, leaders frequently become overburdened, and more than 80% of collabs fail. To ease the burden on leaders and encourage more complex, successful projects, I led the development of a web-based, open-source software tool called Pipeline. Pipeline can support leadership by reinforcing a traditional, top-down approach, or transform leadership by redistributing it across many members of a group. This latter approach relies on social processes, rather than technical constraints, to guide behavior. I evaluated Pipeline's ability to effectively support and transform leadership through a detailed case study of Holiday Flood, a six-week collaboration involving nearly 30 artists from around the world. The case study showed that formal leaders remained influential and Pipeline supported their traditional, centralized approach. However, there was also evidence that Pipeline transformed some leadership behaviors, such as clarifying, informing, and monitoring, by redistributing them beyond the project's formal leaders. The result was a significantly more ambitious project which attained its goals and earned high praise from the community. The main contributions of this dissertation include: (1) a rich description of existing leadership practices in online creative collaboration; (2) the development of redistributed leadership as a theoretical framework for analyzing the relationship between leadership and technological support; (3) design implications for supporting and transform leadership; (4) a case study illustrating how technology can support and transform leadership in the real world; and (5) the Pipeline collaboration tool itself, released as open-source software.

有別於傳統新聞學研究探討記者與消息來源的互動關係，因礙於研究對象的預設限制，因而相關研究大多僅探討記者如何與消息來源培養、鞏固、強化及修補關係，對於記者如何尋覓至消息來源卻少有著墨。有鑑於此，本研究試圖跳脫以往僅以政治人物或公關人員作為研究對象，乃以低社會能見度之小人物作為消息來源，試以探究記者在尋找小人物消息來源的過程中，如何運用環境周遭的物質工具及人際關係網絡等中介資源以達成任務。 透過深度訪談及參與觀察方式，本研究發現記者尋找小人物消息來源乃是一種富涵新聞機構性的行為，在尋人初始階段，記者乃會對於尋找何種類型的小人物存有特定假設；然而，假設的形成並非全然由表徵系統進行控制，而是一循環建構的過程；另一方面，在新聞常規的作用之下，本研究發現小人物新聞乃需與其他新聞類型進行版面競爭，此時，在突發新聞不可獨漏的情況下，又需兼顧因時事議題所發展的小人物專題，記者乃會利用傳播或資訊科技工具來縮短一般新聞的處理時間，進而延長小人物新聞資訊素材的蒐集時間；再者，新聞常規亦會造成小人物新聞遺漏的現象產生，而記者亦會適時選擇特定傳播或資訊科技工具以彌補小人物新聞遺漏的缺口。 除此之外，人際關係網絡更是記者尋人不可或缺的資源之一。本研究發現記者在選擇資訊中間人時，乃會依據雙方之間的關係特質，以形成各式不同策略來與資訊中間人應對，藉以獲取尋人線索或相關資訊素材，尤其記者乃會利用與自身擁有弱連結關係的資訊中間人，作為新資訊擷取與流通的橋樑，而利用強連結關係作為與這些弱連結關係資源交換的籌碼。 綜言之，記者尋人行為乃是一種「配置型智能」的展現，將原先大腦所需承擔的認知負荷交由環境中各式中介資源分散處理；另一方面，記者尋人行為更加蘊含「行動中思考」之過程，任何中介資源的使用，乃是端視記者當下所處情境，是否賦予記者視見中介資源之功能性用途。由此可知，記者尋人的知識即是展現在記者審時度勢的功夫上，以適時運用環境周遭的中介資源，協助解決任務、尋覓至小人物消息來源。 / As previous studies have emphasized on journalist-source relationship for a long time, they provide a jumping-off point for this study to divert from them. In terms of traditional research subjects (politicians and public relations), most of those studies mainly focus on how journalists develop, cement, augment and repair mutual relationship with their sources. However, the question of how journalists seek for their sources has been rarely discussed. Therefore, this study attempts to turn to low-status sources (i.e. ordinary people) and examine how journalists manipulate artifacts and social networks to seek for them. This study conducted by in-depth interview and participant observation shows that the institutionalization of newspapers makes big impacts on journalists’ people-seeking behavior. At the first phase, journalists will be cultivated to form specific hypotheses for the type of sources they are seeking for. Second, it may cause ordinary people news necessary to compete with other news genres for news pages. Finally, it may also cause some of ordinary people news stories to be omitted. However, even though journalists’ people-seeking behavior is constricted to the social structure, they are still able to exercise their agency in the use of information and communication technology to extend the time of newsgathering and to ensure all potential ordinary people news will be found. Moreover, those hypotheses for the people they are seeking for are not totally controlled by journalists’ representational systems either but constituted recursively. In addition, social networks are also one of indispensable resources for journalists’ people-seeking behavior. According to research results, the factor that impacts journalists on deciding which intermediary they will ask help for is based on mutual relational characteristics. Journalists will use weak ties to access new information and strong ties as a bargain chip to negotiate with weak ties for resource exchange. In sum, during the process of people-seeking, journalists’ cognitive functions will be distributed and offloaded to the mediated resources in the situation in a cooperative way to ease the cognitive burden imposed on their brains. In addition, the usage of mediated resources also depends on the situation journalists stay in, which enables them to perceive the function of each mediated resource. All in all, journalists’ knowledge of people-seeking behavior rests on how they consider the situation and manipulate mediated resources properly to solve their tasks.

In recent years, the research approach known as Resilience Engineering (RE) has offered a promising new way of understanding safety-critical organizations, but less in the way of empirical methods for analysis. In this master’s thesis, an extensive comparison was made between RE and two different research approaches on cognitive systems: Distributed Cognition (DC) and Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE) with the aim of exploring whether these approaches can contribute to the analysis and understanding of resilience. In addition to a theoretical comparison, an ethnographic healthcare case study was conducted, analyzing the patient safety at a pediatric emergency department using the Three-Level Analytical Framework from DC and the Extended Control Model from CSE, then conducting an RE analysis based on the former two analyses. It was found that while the DC and CSE approaches can explain how an organization adapts to current demands, neither approach fully addresses the issue of future demands anticipation, central to the RE perspective. However, the CSE framework lends itself well as an empirical ground providing the entry points for a more thoroughgoing RE analysis, while the inclusion of physical context in a DC analysis offers valuable insights to safety-related issues that would otherwise be left out in the study of resilience.

(in English): This thesis focuses on the theories of Human-computer interaction, called by the selected authors "postcognitivistic", that react critically to the cognitivistic approach of the first- wave HCI. The working hypothesis of this work is to view the broader context of interface of technological objects as a medium of a sociotechnical relation between technological artefacts, human actors and the society. The goal of the thesis is to develop a theoretic-philosophical analysis and the comparison of how the primary sources focused on the HCI theory and sociotechnical systems, together with the chosen literature on the new media theory and philosophy of technology, contribute to the contemporary discussion about the contextual aspects of HCI, including the question of how seeing the interface as a sociotechnical relation influences the work of the designers who have to deal with the complexity of contemporary design problems.

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