CSCW '96 Workshop Papers
During the main phase of the study we collected data on
two wards over several weeks, both before and after the
introduction of the Nurse Communicator, using forms,
questionnaires, tape recordings and interviews, and
included information on the number of nurses present
during handover, time taken, which shift, type of ward,
amount of time to discuss each patient etc. Other factors
were taken into account such as the number of telephones
and where they were situated.
This paper will present findings from this study which
suggests that using the Nurse Communicator is less time
consuming than traditional handovers, leads to reevaluation of the process of handovers, and allows the
nurses more time for the patients. These factors lead to
greatly increasing patient satisfaction and a perceived
improvement in the quality of care they receive (Fox,
1995 and HMSO, 1992). We are continuing the study with
a view to the introduction of a fully operational telephone
based system for nursing handovers and future plans are to
develop a specification of requirements for a sociotechnological solution to the problem of nursing
handovers as a part of the process of total patient care.
References
Footitt, B. (1995), Director of Nursing Services, South
Tees Acute Hospitals NHS Trust. Personal
Communication.
Fox, J. (1995), Nurses time and technological change.
MBA thesis.
Shapiro D., Hughes J., Randall D. and Harper R. (1994),
Visual Representation of Database Information: the
Flight Data Strip in Air Traffic Control, Cognitive
Aspects of Visual Languages and Visual Interfaces, (eds)
M.J. Tauber, Marhling D.E. and Arefi F., Elsevier
HMSO, (1992), Making Time for Patients, A handbook
for Ward Sisters, HMSO, London.
Childe, S. J. and Maull, R. S. (1994), Frameworks for
Understanding Business Process Re-engineering,
Submitted to JPM, Vol 14 No 12.
Harrington, H. J. (1992), Business Process Improvement,
McGraw-Hill.
Rogers, Y (1992), Ghosts in the Network: Distributed
Troubleshooting in a shared Working Environment,
Proceedings of CSCW 92, Toronto November 1992.
CSCW '96 Workshop: Widening the Net,
the Theory and Practice of Physical and Network Communities
Nov. 16-17, 1996, Cambridge, MA
Organizers: Steve Whittaker (AT&T Labs), Ellen Isaacs
(Electric Communities), Vicki O'Day (Xerox PARC)
Participants: Annette Adler (Xerox Systems Architecture),
Daniel Bobrow (Xerox PARC), Joern Bollmeyer
(Paderborn University, Germany), Bruce Darner
(Contact Consortium), Paul Dourish (now Apple
Research Lab), Thomas Erickson (Apple Research
Lab), Mark Jones (Andersen Consulting), Jim Larson
(Intel Architecture Labs), Jin Li (IBM Software
Solutions Toronto Lab), Wayne Lutters (UC Irvine),
Ioannis Paniaras (University of Art and Design
Helsinki, Finland), Gail Rein (Xerox Systems
Architecture), Duncan Sanderson (University of
Brighton), Jeff Sokolov (GTE Labs), Konrad Tollmar
(KTH/IPLab, Stockholm, Sweden), Catherine Wolf
(IBM Watson)
INTRODUCTION
Gail L. Rein
Xerox Corp.
800 Phillips Rd., 0128-29E
Webster, NY 14580
Tel: +1-716-422-5111
Fax: +1-716-265-7441
rein @wrc.xerox.com
This introduction is a summary of the workshop from the
perspective of one of the workshop participants. It is
followed by a report written by the workshop organizers,
giving their perspective, and then the position papers.
The workshop was a 1-1/2 day event in which the goals
were to develop the design requirements for community
systems, to understand the factors that differentiate them
and their relation to design, and to identify outstanding
issues. We spent most of day one talking about
'community,' and it was quite discouraging because it was
hard to believe we were going to make any progress on
SIGGROUP Bulletin, Vol. 18, No. 1 (April 1997)
27
CSCW '96 Workshop Papers
the goals with only half a day left and no consensus about
what was a community. As it turned out, this was one of
the best workshops I have ever attended. The organizers
did a super job of turning things around. The next
morning they provided the following framework
(extracted from the pile of flip chart sheets generated the
first day), split us into two groups (those who returned,
that is), and asked us to come up with design
requirements/issues for community systems. We
addressed two different sets of issues: at-the-session and
lifetime levels of the system.
Session Level Issues
* communication
* navigation
* identity
* object building
* awareness
Communities),
(AT&T
Vicki
Labs),
O'Day
Ellen
(Xerox
Isaacs
You might want to check out the Web site
http://www.ccon.org--it is rumored to contain the most
complete compendium of virtual worlds :)
(Electric
PARC)
Motivation
We report the main discussions and highlights of a
workshop held at the Computer Supported Cooperative
Work conference in Boston, on November 16th and 17th,
1996. The word 'community' is now a popular and loaded
one in the context of the Internet. A number of
independent factors seem to be contributing its popularity.
On the one hand, new classes of application are being
developed (eg MOOs, MUDS, Virtual Worlds). These are
specifically intended to provide environments in which
large numbers of users can 'live', work and play together.
28
The outcome from this exercise was surprising: the group
I was in generated a decent set of design requirements,
and the other group produced a great list of issues.
Combining the work of the two groups, we ended up with
a set of design guidelines (see organizers' report for
details). Some of the design guidelines apply to social
worlds more so than they do to work-based and
interest/goal-based worlds (I'm sure you'll notice which
ones). It is a useful exercise, however, to consider the
implications of each guideline to work-based and
interest/goal-based worlds.
For me, 'community' throws CSCW into a new arena of
supporting groups that are large enough that one
member cannot know all other members. Most CSCW
work until now has been looking at small groups--work
groups and teams--where all the members can know
each other. This scaling issue--size of the group--is a
significant consideration when we start thinking about
technology and design.
ORGANIZERS' REPORT
Whittaker
Types of worlds
* work-based worlds (e.g., Project World)
* interest/goal-based worlds (e.g., Ski World)
* social worlds (e.g., Worlds Away)
By the end of the workshop, I personally had a strong
sense of what differentiates 'community' from the groups
that CSCW has traditionally been concerned with; and
although I don't think it was a conclusion of the workshop,
I still feel it is worth sharing...
Lifetime Level Issues
* Creation
- seeding content
- setting up roles, etc.
- signaling place's identity/profile
* Newbies / Orientation
- membership criteria
- cues for appropriate behavior
- way to find/meet people
- getting engaged
* Maintenance / Ongoing
- more roles & responsibilities - status
- more evolving conventions
- staying engaged
- protection of people, property
- collaborative activity
- history
- conflict resolution
Steve
- garbage collection
SIGGROUP Bulletin, Vol. 18, No. 1 (April 1997)
The designers of these systems often deliberately label
these as 'community systems'. There are also recent
attempts to provide existing real-world communities with
electronic support and services (Agre & Shuler, 1996,
Carroll & Rosson, 1996, Mukhopadhyay et al., 1996). In
addition, social scientists who have studied real world
communities are beginning to look at established on-line
systems such as UseNet, MUDs, Bulletin Boards, chat
rooms and Internet Relay Chat to determine whether the
behaviour of users of these systems does indeed concur
with their theoretically derived (real-world) definitions of
community (Baym, 1995, Kollock & Smith, 1996, Reid,
1991, Wellman & Gulia, in press). Finally, there are
futurists and social critics predicting widely different
implications arising from the growth of these virtual
'communities'. These virtual communities will either
CSCW '96 WorkshopPapers
undermine or revitalise their real-world parallels
depending on the writer's bias and sensitivities (Mitchell,
1995, Rheingold, 1993, Stoll, 1995).
There are good reasons why the issue of community and
systems to support it should be of interest to CSCW
researchers. In the past, CSCW systems have tended to
focus on the support of relatively small groups in work
settings carrying out work-related tasks (Greif, 1988). In
contrast, the goal of these new 'community' systems is to
support groups of hundreds or even thousands of
interacting users, who can contribute to the construction
and maintenance of their own virtual environments and
sometimes set collective policies for their governance.
Some of these systems also allow embodiment and
provide extensible spatial environments for navigation and
object construction. Given the interest in this new class of
system and these differences from current CSCW systems,
it is important that the field arrive at some insights into the
theory and design principles associated with this novel
class of system. The workshop aims were to (a) identify
outstanding theoretical issues in our understanding of
physical and network communities, and (b) develop a set
of design requirements and principles for building
community systems. The goal was to bring together
participants from different disciplines and research
backgrounds to promote cross fertilisation between social
theorists and 'community system' builders.
Defining community
Our first sessions addressed the issue of definition, by a
process of generating positive and negative exemplars of
community. There was a remarkable diversity of opinion
about the positive examples, with suggestions ranging
from swarms of bees to 'doggie parties'--pet owners who
get together to talk about and play with their pooches.
More classical (non-animal) examples of community
included an English town, or a parent participation group.
We were able to identify a set of key dimensions of
community, by analysing and contrasting the underlying
characteristics of both positive and negative examples.
We settled on an approach of defining the concept by
'prototypical attributes', so that communities with more
such attributes were clearer examples of communities than
those that had fewer.
Core attributes were:
• members have some shared goal, interest, need, or
activity that provides the primary reason for belonging
to the community
• members engage in repeated active participation and
there are often intense interactions, strong emotional
ties and shared activities occurring between participants
• members have access to shared resources and there are
policies for determining access to those resources
• reciprocity of information, support and services
between members
• shared context (conventions, language, protocols)
Less central attributes were:
• differentiated roles and reputations
• awareness of boundaries and group identity (being able
to determine who is excluded from membership)
• initiation criteria
• history and long duration
• events or rituals
• shared physical environment
• voluntary membership
Virtua/ worlds
There then followed a series of demonstrations of Virtual
Worlds, including WorldsAway, AlphaWorld,
WorldsChat, Starbright and Onlive, (for more information
see Contact Consortium Web page, http://www.ccon.org)
and the Pueblo MOO (O'Day et al., 1996). All these have
been described as 'community systems'. We identified a
number of key differences between these worlds. One
difference is the extent to which users are visually
embodied. For example, in MUDS users communicate
using text only, and sense of location and navigation is
achieved through textual description and commands. In
contrast, in Graphical Worlds, users have visual
manifestations as avatars and environments are depicted
rather than realised in text. A second major distinction
between the worlds lies in the importance of object
building and object construction. In MUDS and certain of
the Graphical Worlds such as AlphaWorld, there is
support for object and environment construction. In
contrast, the focus in WorldsAway (and other worlds we
did not examine such as The Palace) is more on
interpersonal communication and interaction than in
complex environment construction. In addition to these
differences in primary activity, we also identified
differences in the character and 'feel' of the different
systems depending on the nature of the participants and
their interaction topics and conventions.
We also discussed the commonalities between phenomena
observed in Virtual Worlds and those occurring in
physical communities. People pointed out the capacity of
these systems for engendering strong emotional
behaviours. Virtual Worlds have promoted on-line
romances, sometimes leading to real-world meetings and
long-term real-world relationships. On the negative side,
Virtual Worlds have also suffered from some of the same
problems as real-world communities, there have been
SIGGROUP Bulletin, Vol. 18, No. 1 (April 1997)
29
CSCW'96 WorkshopPapers
power disputes, as well as personal and property
violations.
We then examined the central characteristics of these
virtual communities to determine the overlap with our
earlier discussion of community definitions. We hotly
debated which of the core aspects of our definitions were
critical in design. Some participants felt that the central
issues surrounded support for social interaction: namely
how we promote intense interactions with others. Others
felt that the crucial issues concern collective action and
the ethos of the system: given that users share resources,
what policies do they have to regulate access to those
resources, what conventions are in place for interaction
with others and how do users learn these policies and
conventions?
Design requirements
Without reaching definitive agreement on this issue, we
identified a number of key areas that need to be addressed.
Some of these apply to fundamental behaviours in these
systems, such as interaction, self-presentation, actions and
movement:
a) Conversation - given the centrality to community of
repeated interactions between participants, how are these
supported, especially given the fact that there are often
large numbers of participants sometimes holding multiple
simultaneous conversations?
b) Identity and self-presentation - these are inherently
social environments, so how in a virtual world do users
provide others with social cues about their personality and
characteristics? This is a critical issue because interactions
often occur between people who are strangers. In addition,
in some virtual worlds, role-playing and exploration of
identity is the primary focus of many participants.
specifying one of multiple channels, and there is little
capacity for constructing objects. Given the lack of
embodiment in IRC, there was some discussion about the
appropriateness of the term 'community' to IRC
behaviours, but this was countered by the observation that
repeated interactions, strong ties, and social conventions
are pervasive on IRC. The other central design issues
concerned the longer term ('lifetime') aspects of the
system:
e) Culture and policies - how are shared resources
managed, how are individuals and individual property
protected, how is reciprocity promoted, how are
newcomers encouraged and assisted and how do they
know the norms of the world when they first enter it?
f) Change and growth - these worlds are organic, so given
that neither the structure of the world nor its set of
inhabitants is preordained, how is change managed?
Design principles
Our final session involved taking these general design
requirements and trying to provide a set of specific
guidelines to address them. We examined different system
exemplars namely MUDs, Internet Relay Chat, Virtual
Worlds and UseNet newsgroups. For each we considered
different contexts, namely work, social and interest-based
settings, to consider design choices and evaluate the tradeoffs between them. We came up with the following set of
guidelines:
d) Navigation - for worlds with a spatial component, how
do users move, determine where they are and where they
can go to next?
Conversation
Users should be able to...
•
Tell who is speaking
•
Provide feedback to a speaker verbally or non
verbally
•
Follow a conversational thread when there are
multiple speakers
•
Backtrack on a conversation
•
Know if conversation is being logged
•
Signal which conversational thread they are attending
to
•
'Hear' everything that is said (locally) with enough
time to process it
•
Communicate with different 'voices' (say, emote,
think, change realvoice)
•
Indicate level of engagement (e.g. be able to indicate
when otherwise engaged in real world conversation)
We debated how the realisation of these behaviours and
the consequent design choices differ according to the
nature of the system. In Internet Relay Chat for example,
there is no embodiment, self-presentation is limited to a
choice of name ('handle'), navigation consists of
Identity
Users should be able to...
•
Have control over their own
avatar/identity/presentation
•
Know how they appear
c) Activity and object building - many of these
environments allow users to construct or modify
objects and make their own personal spaces, but what
are the rules that govern this and what are the tools
and materials that support it?
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SIGGROUP Bulletin, Vol. 18, No. 1 (April 1997)
CSCW '96 Workshop Papers
•
•
Express subgroup identity (e.g. via status symbols)
Know when others are playing a role vs. being
themselves
Activity and object building
Users should be able to ...
•
Control their own objects and conduct actions on
them
• Be aware of in-world changes but not out-of-world
changes (e.g. a change in server should not be
signalled to participants)
•
See the same changes that others see
•
Be aware of possible agents of change and be able to
find out who brought about changes
• Determine rules of ownership regarding: deletion,
addition, changing, copying (trademark issues),
giving access, sharing ownership
Modify existing objects with owner's permission
Create new objects from existing ones
Navigation
Users should be able to...
• Tell where they are
•
Get back to 'ground zero' easily
• Determine consistent navigation rules (ie the rules of
navigation should be location independent)
• Easily gain a sense of the world layout (eg. from
maps)
•
•
•
•
•
Provide assurances for security, reliability
Provide ways to resolve conflict and sanction
antisocial behaviour
Enable users to sanction new objects
Enable users to modify the structure of the world
Maintain peripheral areas (web sites, maps,
schedules) to attract newbies
In all areas, virtual communities and worlds should enable
things that are not possible in the real world, e.g. thinking
versus saying, being in two places at once, telepathy,
teleporting, sharing a personality.
It was clear from our discussions that the principles for
conversation, identity, navigation and object building are
more specific than those for orientation/help and
maintenance/growth. We concluded that part of the reason
was that the first four topics address concrete issues in the
user interface and basic user actions, where the design
space and options are reasonably well-defined. In contrast,
orientation/help and maintenance/growth concern the
ethos and policies that are associated with the community.
These depend partially on judgments made by the
community designers at the outset, but more importantly
on decisions made by the participants of the community as
it evolves. It is therefore harder to legislate for these,
given that much will depend on the nature of the
community, its context of operation and evolving
ethos.
Orientation and help
Users should be able to:
•
Do meaningful activities at the outset without help
• Be rewarded for helping others learn the rules and get
oriented
•
Gain access to formal helpers and help documents
•
Determine the norms for helping
• Easily install, and maintain the software
Maintenance and growth
It is useful to:
~, Have explicit rules for membership
• Provide support and rewards for leaders, good
examples and altruistic behaviour
•
Provide mechanisms for 'repossessing' content
• Allow, and build in, 'interesting' changes in structure
(eg add 'weather' or natural disasters
• Allow safe ways to try out changes, and allow these
to be reversed easily
• Minimise surprises in work setting
Support development of individual credibility, in part
by enabling persistent identity
Provide artifacts to show, record history
Allow people to bring in stuff from the real world
References
Agre, P. & Shuler, D. (1996). Reinventing technology,
rediscovering community: critical explorations of
computing on social practice. Ablex, Norwood, N.J.
Baym, N. (1995). From practice to culture on Usenet. In
S. Star (Ed.), The cultures of computing. Blackwell,
Oxford, UK.
Carroll, J. & Rosson, M-B. (1996). Developing the
Blacksburg Electronic Village, Communications of the
ACM, 39 (12), 69-74.
Contact Consortium, http://www.ccon.org.
Greif, I. (1988). Computer Supported Cooperative Work.
Morgan-Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA.
Kollock, P. & Smith, M. (1996) Managing the virtual
commons. In S. Herring (Ed.), computer mediated
communication: linguistic, social and cross-cultural
perspectives. John Benjamin, Philadelphia.
SIGGROUP Bulletin, Vol. 18, No. 1 (April 1997)
31
CSCW '96 WorkshopPapers
Kraut, R., Scherlis, W., Mukhopadhyay, T., Manning, J.
& Kiesler, S. (1996). The Homenet field trial of
residential Internet services. Communications of the
ACM, 39, (12), 55-63.
Mitchell, W. (1995). City of Bits. MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA. O'Day, V., Bobrow, D., & Shirley, M. (1996). The
Social-Technical Design Circle, Computer Supported
Cooperative Work, 160-169.
Reid, E. (1991). Electropolis: communications and
community on internet relay chat. Unpublished masters
thesis, University of Melbourne.
Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community:
homesteading on the electronic frontier. Addison-Wesley,
Reading, MA.
Stoll, C. (1995). Silicon snake oil. Doubleday, New York.
Wellman, B. & Gulia M. (in press). Netsurfers don't ride
alone: In S. Kiesler (Ed.), The culture of the Internet.
Backgrounds of Authors
Steve Whittaker is a researcher at A'VF Labs, where he
works on computer mediated communication. He is
Annette Adler
Manager, Use Architecture
Xerox Systems Architecture
Humans are social animals. We exist in social groupings
such as families, communities and tribes, and exhibit
social behaviors such as shared means of communication
and coordinated tool creation and use. In contrast with
other social animals, e.g. ants or bees, our social
groupings and behaviors are characterized by being
creations or recreations both of history and the moment,
rather than of genetically-encoded instincts suited to
particular (unchanging) niches. That people can deal with
the unexpected -- creatively, resourcefully, gracefully and
collectively, in highly sophisticated ways and pass these
lessons to others across space and time in adaptable
patterns, is perhaps the single most definitive
characteristic of human sociality. Community plays a
crucial role in our ability to do this.
By community, I mean a social grouping that is larger
than 'family' yet smaller than 'society'. Family ties are
those that are seen as given and unchangeable, by biology
or marriage or lineage; societal ties are seen as more allencompassing for very large groups of people--certainly
more than I can expect to know in any direct way, and are
not viewed as relevant for most dally situations.
32
SIGGROUP Bulletin, Vol. 18, No. 1 (April 1997)
interested in the impact of communication technologies
(eg. Media spaces, shared workspaces, videoconferencing,
email, Lotus Notes, voicemail) on the structure and
conduct of interpersonal communication, with the
objective of designing more effective and enjoyable
communication technologies to support distributed
organisations and communities.
Ellen Isaacs is a user interface designer at Electric
Communities, a startup company building a platform for,
and instances of, on-line virtual worlds. Her previous
work focused on the design and use of multimedia-based
communication and collaboration tools to support
distributed groups, with a focus on awareness and
enterprise-wide communication.
Vicki O'Day is a researcher at Xerox PARC. She
participates in, studies, and contributes to the design of an
educational MOO called Pueblo. She is especially
interested in the ways technical mechanisms and social
practices develop and evolve together in successful
network communities. Her past work includes
ethnographic studies of librarians and other information
experts and the design and implementation of new
technologies for sharing information.
Communities are 'local' social groupings based around
some initial definition such as neighborhood, hobby, skills
or language (and one that is changeable and chooseable by
individuals making up that communities in some
situations) -- but that have broadened their range of
activities gradually and informally into some other areas.
That is, communities offer a fairly robust set of
opportunities for people to come together and be together-more than just a single topic or event. Attendees of last
Saturday night's opera performance or signers of
supermarket petitions o not a community make. Yet
regular attendees of Saturday opera performances year
after year might well be a community, since they might get
to know each other in a deeper way than just the
expectations about what the opera that ostensibly brought
them together. This example suggest two crucially
important characteristics for communities beyond just
being 'local' in some sense: (1) communities members
recognize their joint membership for the most part and
this membership is also agreed upon for the most part by
non-members and (2) members, at least, share some
reasonable set of understandings and expectations about
what it means to be a member of the community. That is,
members can recognize each other through some means
and can also recognize non-members, new members, etc.
(and vice versa). There is some sort of boundary,
however abstract or intangible, loosely encircling the