Cryptocurrencies are proliferating as instantiations of blockchain, which is a transparent, distributed ledger technology for validating transactions. Blockchain is thus said to embed trust in its technical design. Yet, blockchain’s technical promise of trust is not fulfilled when applied to the cryptocurrency ecosystem due to many social challenges stakeholders experience. By investigating a cryptocurrency

While extant scholarship has yielded a nuanced picture of how people have used ICTs during political activism, less is known about why activists have appropriated and maneuvered some technologies but not others for political action, against different contexts. What, especially, would be the reasoning behind activists’ decision on use or nonuse of a specific technology? To answer the question, this

We propose to extend CSCW research to include the design of buildings for cooperative work and to engage in designing Human-Building Interaction supporting cooperative practices. Concretely, we design and implement an immersive Cooperative Work Environment in Virtual Reality using real-life 3D architectural models of a hospital. We then invite healthcare practitioners to cooperatively resuscitate patients

10 years ago, Castellani et al. (Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, vol. 18, no. 2–3, 2009, pp. 199–227, 2009) showed that using just an audio channel for remote troubleshooting can lead to a range of problems and already envisioned a future in which augmented reality (AR) could solve many of these issues. In the meantime, AR technologies have found their way into our everyday lives and

As U.S. healthcare organizations transition to value-based healthcare, they are increasingly focusing on supporting patients who have difficulties managing chronic care, including mental health, through the growing role of care managers (CMs). CMs communicate with patients, provide access to resources, and coach them toward healthy behaviors. CMs also coordinate patient-related issues internally with

Online communities, socio-technical systems where people interact with others, depend on new members coming to the community. While the majority of research in online communities relation to the recruitment of new members has focused on new members’ socialization and retention, little work has focused on how potential new members who are not yet a member of the community make the decision on whether

This paper documents some details and some examples of the influence of ethnomethodological work in the fieldwork tradition associated with European CSCW; in particular what has been termed ‘ethnomethodologically informed ethnography’. In so doing, we do not wish to downplay other perspectival and methodological contributions but to simply suggest that much of the ethnomethodological work that was

This paper places observational studies of women’s work in historical perspective. We present some of the very early studies (carried out in the period from 1900 to 1930), as well as several examples of fieldwork-based studies of women’s work, undertaken from different perspectives and in varied locations between the 1960s and the mid 1990s. We outline and discuss several areas of thought which have

Despite sophisticated technologies for representational fidelity in hybrid meetings, in which co-located and remote participants collaborate via video or audio, meetings are still often disrupted by practical problems with trying to include remote participants. In this paper, we use micro-analysis of three disruptive moments in a hybrid meeting from a global software company to unpack blended technological

Risks associated with natural hazards such as hurricanes are increasingly communicated on social media. For hurricane risk communication, visual information products—graphics—generated by meteorologists and scientists at weather agencies portray forecasts and atmospheric conditions and are offered to parsimoniously convey predictions of severe storms. This research considers risk interactivity by examining

For public consultation in town planning, town planners can employ various software systems to improve the dialogue with citizens. This article looks at attempts to do so by following the work of a team of municipal town planners across four stages of public consultation held between 2012 and 2015. The study is based on detailed semi-structured interviews, field notes from regular visits to the planners’

Categorical work in chronic care is increasingly dependent on digital technologies for remote patient care. However, remote care takes many forms and while various types of digital technologies are currently being used, we lack a nuanced understanding of how to design such technologies for specific novel usages. In this paper, we focus on digital technologies for patient-generated health data and how

The digital presentation of gender and sexuality has been a long-standing concern in HCI and CSCW. There is also a growing interest in exploring more nuanced presentations of identity afforded in emerging online social spaces that have not been thoroughly studied. In this paper, we endeavor to contribute towards this research agenda in yet another new media context -- live streaming -- by analyzing

This paper empirically investigates a Common Information Space (CIS) established by medical secretaries so they could support each other during their workplace’s transition to a new comprehensive electronic health record, called the Healthcare Platform (HP). With the new system, the secretaries were expected to become partially obsolete, as doctors were to take on a significant load of the clerical

People can learn a lot through (collaborative) reflection at work: In organizations, staff debate experiences and due to issues every day, thus reflecting together and learning from each other. While this is desirable, it is often hindered by differences in time and space. Online discussions in community-like systems may provide a means to overcome this issue and enable staff to share experiences and

Various industries are developing information infrastructures to improve the efficiency and quality of work. Little research attention has been paid to how workers might resist the development of a new infrastructure beyond the point of technology use. In industries in which government agencies have taken a top-down, policy-driven approach to developing infrastructures, though, coordinated, distributed

As social media become a staple for knowledge discovery and sharing, questions arise about how self-organizing communities manage learning outside the domain of organized, authority-led institutions. Yet examination of such communities is challenged by the quantity of posts and variety of media now used for learning. This paper addresses the challenges of identifying (1) what information, communication

Case and knowledge management systems are spread at the frontline across public agencies. However, such systems are dedicated for the collaboration within the agency rather than for the face-to-face interaction with the clients. If used as a collaborative resource at the frontline, case and knowledge management systems might disturb the service provision by displaying unfiltered internal information

In this study, we explore the role of boundaries for collaborative learning and transformation of work practices to occur. We report from a three-year action research project including well over 1800 h of participation by the authors. The empirical data are based on project participation work including observations and field notes, project reports, interviews and a questionnaire, within a school development

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. Figures 6 and 7 have been swapped.

In this paper, we describe an ethnographic study of a mobile money infrastructure, especially its design, organization, and implementation, and its potential consequences for financial inclusion goals. Through using the analytic lens of infrastructure studies to ground our findings, we observe is that infrastructures emerge in organized practice and use. Moreover, they are constantly evolving with

Scientific collaboration is a long-standing subject of CSCW scholarship that typically focuses on the development and use of computing systems to facilitate research. The research presented in this article investigates the sociality of science by identifying and describing particular, common forms of organizing that researchers in four different scientific realms employ to conduct work in both local

Crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) are popular and widely used in both academic and non-academic realms, but privacy threats and challenges in crowdsourcing have not been extensively reviewed. To help push the field forward in important new directions, this paper first reviews the privacy threats in different types of crowdsourcing based on Solove’s taxonomy of privacy and

This paper examines the nature of discretion in social work in order to debunk myths dominating prevalent debates on digitisation and automation in the public sector. Social workers have traditionally used their discretion widely and with great autonomy, but discretion has increasingly come under pressure for its apparent subjectivity and randomness. In Denmark, our case in point, the government recently

The International Space Station (ISS) is research infrastructure enabling experiments in a microgravity environment. Building on a study of one of the ground control rooms in the ISS network, this paper concentrates on low-level operators and their efforts to display accountability in situations of trouble and problem solving. While the research infrastructure around the ISS is permeated by structural

Systems for preventive care seek to provide healthcare services to citizens at risk of developing disease. In doing so they wrestle with identifying the citizens at risk of developing lifestyle-related disease and with reshaping the existing healthcare infrastructure into effective health offers for these citizens. In this study we analyze how a system for preventive care was enacted through a pilot

We advance the concept of platformic management, and the ways in which platforms help to structure project-based or “gig” work. We do so knowing that the popular press and a substantial number of the scholarly publications characterize the “rise of the gig economy” as advancing worker autonomy and flexibility, focusing attention to online digital labor platforms such as Uber and Amazon’s Mechanical

This study aims to provide framework for considering fidelity in the design of simulator training. Simulator fidelity is often characterised as the level of physical and visual similarity with real work settings, and the importance of simulator fidelity in the creation of learning activities has been extensively debated. Based on a selected literature review and fieldwork on ship simulator training

The participatory design of CSCW systems increasingly embraces activities of reconfiguring the use of existing interconnected systems in addition to developing and implementing new. In this article, we refer to such activities of changing and improving collaboration through the means of existing information infrastructures as infrastructuring. We investigate a relational perspective on infrastructuring

This paper draws attention to the growing adoption of web and mobile apps in the enterprise, typically supported by digital storage in the cloud. While these developments offer several advantages, they also pose challenges for workers who must make sense of increasingly complex software configurations – with apps accessible from multiple devices (typically supporting different features or capabilities)

This paper takes as its starting place the rich context of many knowledge workers today—highly distributed, increasing project focused, typically atypical days, infrastructural—and attempts to push past extant descriptions of their practices as ‘flexible’. Using empirical data informed by a practice theory lens, we expand the understanding of flexibility with regard to work by augmenting how worker

An advisory service encounter brings together a domain expert with a layperson in a complex life situation. Because of the different backgrounds and expertise levels, the interlocutors and meanings is an essential part of advisory services and, generally, of expert-layperson collaboration. Establishing and maintaining a common lexicon is a specific and, at the same type, frequent type of collaborative

Collaboration and social networking are increasingly important for academics, yet identifying relevant collaborators requires remarkable effort. While there are various networking services optimized for seeking similarities between the users, the scholarly motive of producing new knowledge calls for assistance in identifying people with complementary qualities. However, there is little empirical understanding

The Open Science (OS) agenda has potentially massive cultural, organizational and infrastructural consequences. Ambitions for OS-driven policies have proliferated, within which researchers are expected to publish their scientific data. Significant research has been devoted to studying the issues associated with managing Open Research Data. Digital curation, as it is typically known, seeks to assess

Through a qualitative case study at Kalnes general hospital in Norway, we investigate the use of workflow information to manage hospital resources and coordinate patient flow from emergency unit admission to patient transfer and discharge. We draw on Zuboff’s (1988) notion of “informating” – turning descriptions and measurements of activities, events and objects into information – to examine how hospital

Telecare has the potential to increase the quality of care while also decreasing costs. However, despite great potential, efficiency in care practices and cost reduction remain hypothetical. Within computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), one focus of telecare research has been on awareness support in distributed real-time communication in comparison to physical meetings since face-to-face consultations

Understanding ideological conflict has been a topic of interest in CSCW, for example in Value Sensitive Design research. More specifically, understanding ideological conflict is important for studying social media platforms like Twitter, which provide the ability for people to freely express their thoughts and opinions on contentious political events. In this work, we examine Twitter data to understand

In this paper, we explore the role technology plays in online workplace harassment as it emerges in the legal verdicts of labour law courts. Analysing 106 official legal verdicts on labour law violations, we demonstrate how technological traces are used as evidence for both indictment and the defence. We find that chat technologies risk providing a platform for online workplace harassment which extends

Digital labor platforms are gaining in popularity in our societies. Information systems and software engineering disciplines have focused on organizational and technological aspects of these platforms, favoring the views of platform owners. At the same time, extensive knowledge of how workers use these platforms, and how they are affected by them, is emerging within computer-supported collaborative

Personal health information management (PHIM) is a broad endeavor that requires the patient to navigate many different types of information. Including patients performing a variety of tasks and roles to make information useful. I ask the question: what practices constitute a patient’s personal health information management socio-technical assemblage? By doing this I am interested in understanding how

Financial inclusion has been defined and understood primarily in terms of access, thereby constituting ‘inclusion’/‘exclusion’ as a binary. This paper argues such a view to be myopic that risks treating financial inclusion as an end in itself, and not as means to a larger end. ‘Access’ oriented perspectives also fail to take into account considerations of structural factors like power asymmetries and

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are currently attracting a great deal of attention as a part of the discourse surrounding the fourth industrial revolution. Thus far, the chief focus has been upon complex architectures for supply chain-wide data exchange between intelligent machines. Here, however, we take a very different tack by examining the support CPS may offer for the exchange and acquisition of

This paper examines territorial functioning in collaborative writing through a mixed methods study involving interviews and analysis of collaboratively authored documents. Our findings have implications for the way we think about collaborative writing as a design problem, in that current conceptualizations of collaborative writing emphasize the work context rather than the work itself, at the cost

The emergence of various interest-based online communities has led to the popularity of new forms of distributed creative teamwork such as citizen science, crowdsourcing, and open source software development. These new phenomena further complicate the context and content of distributed creative teamwork: what are the characteristics of these new forms of creative teams? And how do they shape people’s

The “sharing economy” has promised more sustainable use of the world’s finite resources, exploiting latency and promoting renting rather than ownership through digital networks. But do the digital brokers that use networks at global scale offer the same care for the planet as more traditional forms of sharing? We contrast the sustainability of managing idle capacity with the merits of collective local

This paper reports on a “Industry 4.0” project supported by the government through the French public investment bank. This project was launched by a major industrial actor in the gas domain and aims at equipping its factories with digital technologies, and at connecting all these factories through a centralized supervision center, named Operational and Optimization Remote Center (OORC). Based on our

Collocated interaction has received growing interest in both academic research and the design of information and communication technological applications. An emergent research topic within this area relates to technological enhancement of social interaction. Various envisioned systems aim beyond simply enabling interaction, to actively enhance—i.e., improve the quality or extent of—social interaction

Knowledge bases are becoming a key asset leveraged for various types of applications on the Web, from search engines presenting ‘entity cards’ as the result of a query, to the use of structured data of knowledge bases to empower virtual personal assistants. Wikidata is an open general-interest knowledge base that is collaboratively developed and maintained by a community of thousands of volunteers

While crowds online are increasingly used for data gathering and problem solving, the relationships and structures within these processes remain largely unexamined. For understanding the usage of crowdsourcing and to design appropriate technologies and processes, it is important to understand how different tools support relationships in these contexts. Based on an extensive literature review of existing

The knowledge infrastructures of the sciences have been considered as human-made networks or ecologies of people, artifacts, and institutions that enable the production, calibration, storage, dissemination and re-use of data. Complementing these studies, this paper examines how scientists use the digitally mediated, shared availability of “natural” environments and objects for infrastructural purposes

To enable elderly people to live independently in their homes, the government aims to de-institutionalize elderly care services by upscaling home care services and care housing and downscaling long-term stays at nursing homes. Increasing use of assistive technologies will play a significant role in the ongoing transformation of care services, however our empirical data shows how difficult appropriation

On-site work of emergency service teams consists of highly cooperative tasks. Especially during distributed search and rescue tasks there is a constant mix of routinized and non-routinized activities. Within this paper we focus on the work practices of the German Red Cross Rescue Dog Units who deal with several uncertainties regarding the involved dogs, the fragility of the respective situations as

The suitability of crowdsourcing to solve a variety of problems has been investigated widely. Yet, there is still a lack of understanding about the distinct behavior and performance of workers within microtasks. In this paper, we first introduce a fine-grained data-driven worker typology based on different dimensions and derived from behavioral traces of workers. Next, we propose and evaluate novel

An influx of newcomers is critical to the survival, long-term success, and continuity of many Open Source Software (OSS) community-based projects. However, newcomers face many barriers when making their first contribution, leading in many cases to dropouts. Due to the collaborative nature of community-based OSS projects, newcomers may be susceptible to social barriers, such as communication breakdowns

Advisory service encounters evolve from providing expertise to joint problem-solving. Additionally, advisees depend on persuasion, which drives them to follow the advisor’s recommendations. However, advisors can be insufficiently equipped to persuade, resulting in advisees who are incapable of action or are unmotivated. Persuasive technology (PT) research proves that technology can motivate and enable

Fixing software bug is part of the daily work routine in software engineering which requires collaboration and thus has been explored as a core CSCW domain, since the early inception of the research field. In this paper, we explore the use of chat technology in software engineering by analyzing the coordination between client and vendor in a large government software project in Brazil (Gov-IT). We

In this paper, we report on interviews with 11 Shia content creators who create and share graphic, bloody photos of Tatbeer, a religious ritual involving self-harm practices on Ashura, the death anniversary of the prophet Muhammad’s grandson. We show how graphic images serve as an object of communication in religious practices with the local community, the inner-self, and a wider audience. In particular

The notion of sociomaterial practices speaks to a view of routine work in which people and materials are always already entangled. This implies that the commonsense tendency to treat concrete materials and social activity as separate analytical categories may actually muddy more than illuminate our understanding of practices. Engaging work from science and technology studies, this broad view of materiality

This paper investigates how different collaboration styles and view independence affect remote collaboration. Our remote collaboration system shares a live video of a local user’s real-world task space with a remote user. The remote user can have an independent view or a dependent view of a shared real-world object manipulation task and can draw virtual annotations onto the real-world objects as a

Computational research and data analytics increasingly relies on complex ecosystems of open source software (OSS) “libraries” – curated collections of reusable code that programmers import to perform a specific task. Software documentation for these libraries is crucial in helping programmers/analysts know what libraries are available and how to use them. Yet documentation for open source software