Data science teams working on a shared analysis face coordination problems such as dividing up the work to be done, monitoring performance and integrating the pieces. Research on distributed software development teams has raised the potential of stigmergic coordination, that is, coordination through a shared work product in place of explicit communication. The MIDST system was developed to support stigmergic coordination by making individual contributions to a shared work product visible, legible and combinable. In this paper, we present initial studies of a total of 40 student teams (24 using MIDST) that shows that teams that used MIDST did get the planned benefits for their work, did seem to coordinate at least in part stigmergically and performed better on an assigned project.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449110
To increase patient engagement and facilitate patient-provider collaboration, tools that incorporate patients’ goals into medical care plans are needed. However, few studies have explored how hospitalized patients set and share goals to communicate with their caregivers and clinical care teams. Even less is known for how pediatric patients experience sharing their goals during hospitalization. This paper presents a technology probe study to characterize how pediatric patients perceive goal-setting, and how goal-sharing affects their collaboration with their caregivers and clinical care teams. We conducted this study with 13 patient families and 4 clinicians. We found that goals set and shared by pediatric patients foster the patients’ autonomy to participate in care decision-making, reveal the gaps of understanding between patients and caregivers, support the patients emotionally during patient and care team interaction, and convey the patients’ personalities and preferences to the clinical care team. In addition, we recommend design opportunities to support the different ways that patients’ goals can foster high-quality patient care. We also discuss how patients’ goals impact the tension of shared decisional authority between patients and caregivers, and how goals support pediatric patients transition to self-care.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449238
A large body of research has underscored the importance of the cognitive process of team cognition and its relation to team performance. However, little research has focused on applying such an important teamwork process to computer-mediated collaboration within a fast-paced virtual environment. In this paper, we use esports as a research platform to address this limitation due to its fast-paced nature and its heavy reliance on teamwork. We report the experience and perceptions of 20 players with regard to their descriptions of team cognition within esports. We found that esports players relied on their game experience and understanding of role interdependencies in order to develop team cognition with strangers. We also found that experienced teams utilized a mutual understanding of teammate skills and personalities in order to predict responses and limit the verbal communication required to make quick team decisions. We contribute to CSCW by extending the cognitive understanding of computer-mediated collaboration and by advancing research on team cognition and how it can occur within a fast-paced virtual environment.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449123
Besides the merits of increasing digitization and interconnectedness in private and professional spaces, critical infrastructures and societies are more and more exposed to cyberattacks. In order to enhance the preventative and reactive capabilities against cyberattacks, Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) are deployed in many countries and organizations. In Germany, CERTs in the public sector operate on federal and state level to provide information security services for authorities, citizens, and enterprises. Their tasks of monitoring, analyzing, and communicating threats and incidents is getting more complex due to the increasing amount of information disseminated into public channels. By adopting the perspectives of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Crisis Informatics, we contribute to the study of organizational structures, technology use, and the impact on collaborative practices in and between state CERTs with empirical research based on expert interviews with representatives of German state CERTs (N=15) and supplementary document analyses (N=25). We derive design and policy implications from our findings, including the need for interoperable and modular architecture, a shift towards service level agreements, cross-platform monitoring and analysis of incident data, use of deduplication techniques and standardized threat exchange formats, a reduction of resource costs through process automation, and transparent reporting and tool structures for information exchange.
Peer evaluations are critical for assessing teams, but are susceptible to bias and other factors that undermine their reliability. At the same time, collaborative tools that teams commonly use to perform their work are increasingly capable of logging activity that can signal useful information about individual contributions and teamwork. To investigate current and potential uses for activity traces in peer evaluation tools, we interviewed (N=11) and surveyed (N=242) students and interviewed (N=10) instructors at a single university. We found that nearly all of the students surveyed considered specific contributions to the team outcomes when evaluating their teammates, but also reported relying on memory and subjective experiences to make the assessment. Instructors desired objective sources of data to address challenges with administering and interpreting peer evaluations, and have already begun incorporating activity traces from collaborative tools into their evaluations of teams. However, both students and instructors expressed concern about using activity traces due to the diverse ecosystem of tools and platforms used by teams and the limited view into the context of the contributions. Based on our findings, we contribute recommendations and a speculative design for a data-centric peer evaluation tool.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479576
Game jams are intense and time-sensitive online or face-to-face game creation events where a digital game is developed in a relatively short time frame (typically 48 to 72 hours) exploring given design constraints and end results are shared publicly. They have increasingly become emerging sites where non-professional game developers, amateurs, and hobbyists engage in bottom-up technological innovation by collaboratively designing and developing more creative and novel digital products. Drawing on 28 interviews, in this paper we focus on how game developers collaborate as small teams to innovate game design and development from the bottom up in virtual game jams (i.e., exclusively online) and the unique role of virtual game jams in their technological innovation. We contribute to CSCW by providing new empirical evidence of how team practices for innovation may emerge in a novel technology community that is not widely studied before. We also expand a growing research agenda in CSCW on explicating nuanced social behaviors, processes, and consequences of bottom-up technological innovation.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449150
Although player performance in online games has been widely studied, few studies have considered the behavioral preferences of players and how that impacts performance. In a competitive setting where players must cooperate with temporary teammates, it is even more crucial to understand how differences in playing style contribute to teamwork. Drawing on theories of individual behavior in teams, we describe a methodology to empirically profile players based on the diversity and conformity of their gameplay styles. Applying this approach to a League of Legends dataset, we find three distinct types of players that align with our theoretical framework: generalists, specialists, and mavericks. Importantly, the behavior of each player type remains stable despite players becoming more experienced. Additionally, we extensively investigate the benefits and drawbacks of each type of player by evaluating their individual performance, contribution to the team, and adaptation to changes in the game environment. We find that, overall, specialists tend to outperform others, while mavericks bear high risk but also potentially reap great rewards. Generalists are the most resilient to instability in the environment (game patches). We discuss the implications of these findings in terms of game design and community management, as well as team building in environments with varying levels of stability.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449290
Effective teamwork is critical to improve patient outcomes in healthcare. However, achieving this capability requires that pre-service nurses develop the spatial abilities they will require in their clinical placements, such as: learning when to remain close to the patient and to other team members; positioning themselves correctly at the right time; and deciding on specific team formations (e.g. face-to-face or side-by-side) to enable effective interaction or avoid disrupting clinical procedures. However, positioning dynamics are ephemeral and can easily become occluded by the multiple tasks nurses have to accomplish. Digital traces automatically captured by indoor positioning sensors can be used to address this problem for the purpose of improving nurses’ reflection, learning and professional development. This paper presents a modelling approach that transforms nurses’ low-level position traces to higher-order proxemics constructs in simulation-based teamwork training.To illustrate our approach, we conducted an in-the-wild study with 55 undergraduate students and five educators from whom positioning traces were captured in eleven authentic nursing education classes. Low-level x-y data was used in models of three proxemics constructs: i) co-presence in interactional spaces, ii)socio-spatial formations (i.e. f-formations), and ii) presence in spaces of interest. Through a number of vignettes, we illustrate how indoor positioning analytics can be used to address questions that educators and researchers have about teamwork in healthcare simulation settings.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449284