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.

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The design of patient-centred e-health services embodies an inherent tension between the concerns of clinicians and those of patients. Clinicians’ concerns are related to professional issues to do with diagnosing and curing disease in accordance with accepted medical standards. In contrast, patients’ concerns typically relate to personal experience and quality of life issues. It is about their identity

This paper addresses the design of hybrid information spaces supporting patients and healthcare providers to have information in common and also, patients to manage privately personal health information. We studied efforts to develop such information spaces by following the design of two Personal Health Record applications and focusing particularly on design tensions that relate to their hybrid role

The relations between technology, work organization, worker power, workers’ rights, and workers’ experience of work have long been central concerns of CSCW. European CSCW research, especially, has a tradition of close collaboration with workers and trade unionists in which researchers aim to develop technologies and work processes that increase workplace democracy. This paper contributes a practitioner

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

Over the past decade, crowdfunding has emerged as a legitimate, albeit niche, resource for public service delivery. Predicated on utilizing the resources of the crowd to address public issues, civic crowdfunding has the potential to offer citizens a greater role in service delivery and community development. This study investigates community dynamics and their potential impact on project success in

We developed TurkBench to better understand the work of crowdworkers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) marketplace. While we aimed to reduce the amount of invisible, unpaid work that these crowdworkers performed, we also probed the day-to-day practices of crowdworkers. Through this probe we encountered a number of previously unreported difficulties that are representative of the difficulties that

Prior CSCW research on awareness in clinical settings has mostly focused on higher-level team coordination spanning across longer-term trajectories at the department and inter-department levels. In this paper, we offer a perspective on what awareness means within the context of an ad hoc, time- and safety-critical medical setting by looking at teams treating severely ill patients with urgent needs

We report findings from a study that set out to explore the experience of older people living with assisted living technologies and care services. We find that successful 'ageing in place' is socially and collaboratively accomplished - 'co-produced' - day-to-day by the efforts of older people, and their formal and informal networks of carers (e.g. family, friends, neighbours). First, we reveal how

Voice loops, an auditory groupware technology, are essential coordination support tools for experienced practitioners in domains such as air traffic management, aircraft carrier operations and space shuttle mission control. They support synchronous communication on multiple channels among groups of people who are spatially distributed. In this paper, we suggest reasons for why the voice loop system

In domains such as nuclear power, industrial process control, and space shuttle mission control, there is increased interest in reducing personnel during nominal operations. An essential element in maintaining safe operations in high risk environments with this 'on-call' organizational architecture is to understand how to bring called-in practitioners up to speed quickly during escalating situations