Motivations for playing

In the blog Mission Groupware there was a blog post “What makes online games successful?” – why people play online games and what is the motivation.

I would like to present Nick Yee’s model of player motivations in online games. In his model there are three main factors which motivate players. These main components are still divided into 10 minor subcomponents. According Yee, it is common that many of these factors can be motivating the player at same time.

Achievement:

• Advancement: Gamers who enjoy gaining power, reaching goals, leveling quickly and gather in-game resources.
• Mechanics: Gamers have an interest in analyzing the underlying numerical mechanics of the system in order to optimize the game character performance.
• Competition: Gamers who like to challenge others and compete with others gamers.
  

Social:

• Socializing: Gamers who enjoy knowing other gamers, helping them and chatting with them.
• Relationship: Gamers who are interested to form longer, meaningful relationships with others.
• Teamwork: Gamers who get satisfaction from being part of a group and achieve goals together.
  

Immersion:

• Discovery: Gamers who like to explore game world or things what most other gamers may not know.
• Role-Playing: Gamers who enjoy creating a game character with a background story.
• Customization: Gamers who enjoy customizing the appearance of their characters.
• Escapism: Gamers who use the game world as a place to relax or escape from the real life.
  

References:
[Yee, 2007] Nick Yee, Motivations of Play in Online Games. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 9, 772-775.

IRC, substitute for Babble?

Last lecture mentioned "Babble", a CMC-prototype by Erickson et al [1]. I found it to be interesting concept and decided to read the paper about it. I found out that many features it has somehow bring IRC into mind.

Users list and private chats are quite self-explanatory so I won't go deeper into them. Different topics in Babble are almost the same as channels in IRC, and "Get Info"-fuctionality in Babble seems to give almost the same information as /whois in IRC. "The spot" in Babble is functionality commonly found in IRC-clients, althought instead of having separate windows for it, they usually just flash their minimized window when something happens in a channel.

Of course, one key feature of Babble is missing from IRC: the Social Proxy.
You could mimic it somehow by using idle-information from /whois, but it wouldn't be the same as Babble's Social Proxy. Interesting visualization-idea for IRC nevertheless.

The paper also mentioned that users of Babble expressed concern about unwanted visitors joining in Babble. This problem could be solved in IRC by using password protected channels for sensitive topics.

Persistence of conversations was one merit of Babble mentioned in paper and this could be achieved in IRC by using screen to run your client. That way you can read the conversations that happened when you weren't there.


References:

[1]Erickson, T., Smith, D.N., Kellogg, W.A., Laff, M.R., Richards, J.T. , and Bradner, E. (1999). "Socially translucent systems: Social proxies, persistent conversation, and the design of 'Babble'," Proceedings of CHI '99 (Pittsburgh, PA May 15-20), ACM, New York.

Crtitical Success Factors of Groupware Implementation

CSCW (or groupware) tools and the research about them has been around for decades already. Today it is hard to even find a work community that would not utilize these tools at least to some extent. Still, comprehensive use of groupware is limited to special fields. I wanted to know, what are the reasons for the successful or unsuccessful implementation of groupware? Hung-Pin Shih's article Predicting Groupware Use from the Perspectives of Workflow, Information and Coordination gave me an excellent framework.

There are widely recognized benefits in the use of groupware, but also unintended consequences. In this paper Shih explores groupware implementation and goes through several other studies that relate to his work. He suggests that group members are most likely to achieve high outcome quality of groupware use in cooperative work through work-flow routinization, information integration and coordination fit. In other words, groupware should offer ways to reduce repetitive activities in order to save the energy for more creative work.

While the conclusions from Shih's own research are pretty predictable, his findings from other research are interesting and provide answers to my question. These are also managerial issues: the implementation of a new groupware can be a critical move.



Table references:
[15] J. Grudin, “Why CSCW applications fail: Problems in the design and evaluation of organizational interfaces,” Proceedings of the Computer-Supported Cooperative
Work, Portland, Oregon, USA, 1988, pp. 85-93.
[17] J. Grudin, “Groupware and social dynamics: eight challenges for developers,” Communications of the ACM 37(1), 1994, pp. 92-105.
[22] H. Karsten, “Collaboration and collaborative information technologies: a review of the evidence,” Database for Advances in Information Systems 30(2), 1999, pp. 44-65.
[23] S. Kelly and M. Jones, “Groupware and the social infrastructure of communication,” Communications of the ACM 44(12), 2001, pp. 77-79.
[31] W.J. Orlikowski, “Learning from Notes: organizational issues in groupware implementation,” Proceedings of the Conference on computer Supported Cooperative
Work, ACM, New York, 1992a, pp. 362-369.
[38] A.M. Townsend, A.R. Hendrickson, and S.M. DeMarie, “Meeting the virtual work imperative,” Communications of the ACM 45(1), 2002, pp. 23-26.
[46] C. Yu and D.C. Yen, “Extranet and groupware,” Journal of Computer Information Systems 40(4), 2000, pp. 32-40.

How the use of groupware improved our innovative thinking

I was a part of a group who tried several innovation techniques. We used the same techniques during both face-to-face meetings, and meetings through msn/google docs.
I noticed that the amount of innovative ideas increased during the use of google docs. This was mainly because we just wrote certain ideas up by ourselves, without explaining them to others. Then after someone else saw the written idea, it was easier to come up with some iterative innovation when you didn't have the same starting point that the person originally writing it had. That meant that by taking someone else's idea without actually hearing what the other person meant by it, increased the chance that you read it and came up with something totally different than what the original writer had thought of.

I think this partly because of the use of google docs platform, which doesnt allow for too much discussion during writing. I believe that the same results could have been met by creating ideas and then just swapping papers face-to-face, but it's not to say anything about your ideas when your doing it over the internet.

Maybe this kind of use of groupware could be studied more, since we never have too much innovation.

Group Tools for Writing Together in Praxis

Group Tools for Writing Together in Praxis

At the lesson n:o 7. Saila Ovaska explained about the tools for working together. I just have an experience about group writing and I like to analyze it shortly here.

This Group Writing project, which I like to speak here, took place in an international device development project. The tool for writing was Google group tools,
Member comes from France, Spain, Switzerland, Cyprus and German.

The purpose of the writing project was to define excellent specification to a high end electrical devise and later apply development funding from European Commission for it.

After wards, when I see the project writing history, the use of group writing deviates into three phases.

The ordinary plane was to make the application paper ready as normal group writing method. We taught that we do the writing together from beginning to the end with same writing code principles.

The writing of the paper began very well and after half year the nice “skeleton” was ready. The final writing the phase, where we start to write “meet around bones” begins.

During this writing process writers did well, but when the latest version of the application paper came closer to the final version the number of different versions increased so much, that no one of writers did not knew exactly are the handling the latest version of the paper.

The third phase of the writing project started, when the consortium management decided to stop the group writing. The next step was that the consortium management group nominated one person for responsible person (Author) for finalized the application paper.

During this very final writing “turning” of the paper all writers sent their latest modifications to the Author and he fitted all latest modifications together.

During this third phase of writing the amount of modification grew three times higher, what it was during the second phase of writing. This was somehow confusing. The Author managed to handle all changes and modifications very well.

At the end the modifications started to be very little details of the project. The Author decided to frees to final version and not aloud any more changes.

The Author sent the latest version to members of the consortium for approval.

My conclusion after the project was that group writing is good tool for developing ideas. As well it is great tool for developing new ideas.

When writing project goes to details and it takes official forms the code of group writing have to define accurately and the writing discipline have to be very tide.This means, that to allow new changes to document must be very difficult at the end of group writing project.

Erkki

How does group identity relate to new social media

Last week I wrote about group identity in MMO's, and especially looked at group identity theory, which consist of:
- Cognitive component, which represents person response to his own identity and how he categorizes himself as a part of a group.
- Affective component, which represents the group's attractiveness from the person's viewpoint and the group's ability to help the person to reach his goals.
- Behavioral component, which represents the group's dependancy on each other and it's ability to coordinate activities towards common goal.

All of these could be identified in groups found in MMO's, but can these same categories be applied to other new social media like Facebook?

First let's take a look at the cognitive component. Clearly each person in Facebook has certain idea of their own identity and they represent this with their profile page. They can also feel a part of a group, be it their group of friends or certain groups of people with similar ideas. The way I see it, cognitive component is quite strong in Facebook.

Then what about the affective component? Group's attractiveness is a difficult subject to cover. Could it be measured by the amount of comments a person sends to a group? I won't be going any deeper into that subject, but I think it's something that could be studied more.
Then the other part of affective component, group's ability to help a person to reach his goals. What kinds of personal goals are there in Facebook? Do people aim to befriend a certain individual? Or do they try to gather as many or as few friends as possible? This is a component that I feel Facebook is completely missing, and as such the affective component is not nearly as strong as cognitive component in Facebook.

Lastly the behavioural component. In Facebook, you could say people are dependant on each other, but that's mostly just an emotional connection between the people and not a practical one. Still the dependancy could be quite strong. The groups in Facebook might have a certain common goal, say reach 10000 members for a cause. They usually have a goal, but there's rarely any kind of activities organized to help them reach this goal. This is why I would place the behavioural component below cognitive, although the dependancies can not be ignored.

In conclusion, we can identify certain components which improve group identity in Facebook. It's mostly concentrated on cognitive side, but also people's dependancy on each other is quite strong. Still, when compared to communities in MMO's, I think that Facebook is lagging behind quite a bit. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is anyone's guess.

About NodeXL

NodeXL is a novel tool for visualization of networks. There are numerous tools for this-and-that available and coming on to, but the picture of HCI semi-god Ben Shneiderman in the contributors enlistment along with several “better schools” of the planet (i.e. Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge) woke my interest: There must be something in this!

Because of Moneysoft NodeXL works as an Excel plugin. This can be forgiven, because alongside with the vast arsenal of ready-made computing spells this selection offers familiar and somewhat intuitive user interface for, well, everybody. It does not take too long to figure out the main idea, but I would strongly suggest familiarizing yourself with the (slightly outdated) tutorial and example data sets. While NodeXL might be relatively easy to get up & running, creating visualizations like those presented in the flickr.com gallery will require deep understanding about the functions as well as some skills in visualization and computing.

The beauty of computing lies in handling big data. When your network has hundreds or thousands of nodes, it is likely that you find it fairly difficult to figure out even the most obvious patterns. This is where NodeXL really shines: Even though polishing the views might take time and effort, finding out the key metrics and arranging the set according to them with a selection of pre-defined models is very easy –and fast. For example, from the graph metrix tell you instantly the number of vertices and edges, and calculated values of graph density, maximum and average geosidic distance and vertex betweenness centrality.

To what NodeXL can be used for? Well, in case you have access to data, possibilities are various. For example, from the company mailing data you could figure out who are the central persons, and who do not interact. From your supply chain phone data you could see what are the bottle-necks in the information flow. From your Facebook friend network analysis you could figure out to whom to gossip in order to spread the message efficiently. And so on.

Few words about recommender systems

This weeks lecture mentioned recommender systems and I thought I'd share little of my experiences with them and how I use them. Lecture and many of the courses blog posts mention amazon.com as an example of site using recommender systems, but I think I'll talk about bookdepository.com as I've used it more. (And also because it's an excellent internet book store. Cheaper comics than here in Finland and books in english too.)

Often when I'm going to the store I'm looking for next book in a series.I may not remember the exact title, but I do know the name of the previous book. So I type the name of the previous book into the search field and hit search. This is the part where recommender systems come in. Usually what I'm looking for shows up in a box showing "Other people who viewed this bought"-items.

So I use recommender systems as a kind of extention to search. Impulse buying is other way of using them that comes to mind, but I usually leave that to actual stores. Internet stores just don't produce that impulse to buy something on a whim, when you just see the product but can't touch or examine it.

Thoughts about recommender systems

Lecture slides mentioned amazon.com as one example of site using recommendation system. I have myself found out that amazon's recommendations work extremely well. Only one starting point like book or audio record is needed and you can start to follow recommended links without need to use search or categorized navigation anymore. I have actually ended several times to order one of the recommended books.

Could recommendations be the most important way of browsing data in web site? Spotify and Last.fm (more about Last.fm in Minna's blog) music services has recommendation systems called introducing similar sounding artists to the user. Recommendations are based on data what users are really listening. In this case of music library recommendations are very convenient way to browse data. System allows user to find new bands and music without prior knowledge. It could be tedious to browse library of million records by clicking multilevel categories of different genres. It could be hard to imagine music service without recommendations.

How about implementing recommendations for the web site of daily newspaper with articles of various topics? I think in this case it's not so easy to collect data and give good recommendations. User behaves differently compared to previous examples. I guess that users are mainly interested in newest material. However, some newspaper offers recommendations based on similar keywords or popularity of the article with varying results.

Recommendations may be valuable addition for web site usability. Some cases it can even replace commonly used navigation structures. However this is highly depending about site content, user behaviour and how easy it is to collect meaningfull activity data for the basis of recommendations.

Blogging policy

Blogging policy

Groupwarecourse inspired me thinking, that it could be nice to do a little research in political parties in which kind of writing, blogging page they have!

The parliament elections is coming and one would think, that it appear as increase activities in Blog writing.

What are the main parties writing in their Blogs in their home pages?

Are party members acting before the elections? Political parties scribbling agitation increases or not! This should show as an increase in writings and diverse writings and discussion about the operative actions for common goal of parties.

What are Web tools and styles, which parties use. How parties show up values and options in blogs. All these styles vary many ways from each others.

Where blogs are placed in the homepages? What are in these pageses?

Very shortly

SDP http://www.sdp.fi/

Päivän blogi: is in the middle of the home page and it will be truncated on the display actual, not emerging topics and arguments and counter-arguments in special cases. These topics take distance to the actual political issues.

CENTRE http://www.keskusta.fi/

Blogeissa nyt: under the title has been selected topics to carry the party leader withdrawals and her arguments and as well selected comments against these ideas.
Discussion topics are not handling most burning political issues

KOKOOMUS http://www.kokoomus.fi

In the home page I do not find out the real blog. Instead, there is Jyri pages in, with Jyrki describe his thinking as a one voice of the party. No at diffused thinking or ideas are not presented.

GREEN http://www.vihreat.fi/

Vihreä blogi: is in the front page of the main webpage. There are given lot of space to active party members to express their ideas and opinions. Blogs are illustrated with advertise photos of all writers. Outside writers are pulled out from the website.

PERUSSUOMALISET http://www.perussuomalaiset.fi/

In webpage are not real blog. Instead there is the MIELIPITEET page. In “mielipiteet” page are selected writings of party members around Finland. The Timo Soini writes his own “ploki” in the webpage.


KRISTILLISET http://www.kd.fi/KD/www/fi/index.php

KD-blogt: You can find the KD-blog in the home page. There are selected writers with photos expressing their ideas. "Permissible" for discussion topics are proposals to build the good value society.

SFP http://rkp.fi/

Kolumnit: In the homepage there is not blog instead there are collected articles under the “Kolumnit”. There have been collected opinions. In this context does not blog just to talk.


It is obvious after looking these party homepages, that the debate happens in Face Book and WebPages of local party divisions. That's what this mini-review revealed in the first hand.

Another finding, which everyone knows, is that Parties do not discus in their Homepages about real problems.

The unemployment and how it can avoid or the national deficit and how the government should deal with it.

The coming parliament election is in a way or other possible to seen in blogging. The parties avoid discussion of real things. Which everyone in Finland has discovered without looking at websites of political parties.



Erkki

Need new music?

If that question sounds familiar, Last.fm can be the answer. Last.fm is a nice music recommendation service that uses The Scrobbler by which all music listened is added to user’s profile. Based on the tracks user has played with some media player, Last.fm helps user to find similar music.

Some features of Last.fm which I find useful:

- Neighbours: People listed with similar music taste, and possibility to see their top tracks and artists.
- Own profile and charts: Artists and tracks played.
- Music recommended for user by Last.fm
- Artist pages: The most popular tracks of some artist. It is especially useful with some new artist to try to listen some popular tracks first. Also it is interesting to see, what tracks of some artist the majority of the Last.fm users like most. On the artist page user can also look “other similar artists” to some artist.

There are many other useful features too, like events, tags, loved tracks, radio stations and other information on artists pages, but those features I listed earlier are the ones I use most. In general, Last.fm has offered for me what I have been looking for. I have used it during some years, and with that I have found a lot of new interesting artists and tracks similar to my music taste.

http://www.last.fm/

Group identity in MMO's

During the lecture there was some discussion about MMO-games and communities in online spaces. How does one's group identity form in these online societies and how it can be developed?

Yusuf Pisan studied the formation of group identity in guilds (social communities inside an MMO), in World Of Warcraft MMO. He based his research on group-identity theory, which consists of three components:
- Cognitive component, which represents person response to his own identity and how he categorizes himself as a part of a group.
- Affective component, which represents the group's attractiveness from the person's viewpoint and the group's ability to help the person to reach his goals.
- Behavioral component, which represents the group's dependancy on each other and it's ability to coordinate activities towards common goal.

Pisan's research showed that of these three the most important in the formation of a guild's group identity was the affective component, in other words, how much the members of a guild liked each other's company. It should be noted though that all three components were highly dependant on one another, so there wouldn't be a case were affective component was very low but cognitive component was very high, meaning that people wouldn't like each other but still wanted to feel part of the same group.

The importance of the affective component strengthens the idea that virtual worlds act as social spaces in which people socialize with each other just as they would in a coffee shop or a bar. Dmitri Williams, Scott Caplan and Li Xiong found in their research that the use of voice in communication in online spaces had highly positive effects on people's relationships. The relationships grew a lot deeper and the trust between people increased when they moved from text-only communication to voice communication using VoIP-services.

This leads us to the conclusion the online spaces which allow people to use voice communication as a part of everyday communication, would be the ones which also develop the greatest feeling of group identity in the communities.


References:

[Pisan, 2007] Yusuf Pisan, My guild, my people: role of guilds in massively multiplayer
online games. Proceedings of the 4th Australasian conference on Interactive
entertainment, RMIT University, 2007, Article No. 20.

[Williams et al., 2007] Dmitri Williams, Scott Caplan, Li Xiong, Can you her me
now? The impact of voice in an online gaming community. Human Communication
research (Volume 33, Issue 4), International communication association,
2007, 427-449.

Thoughts about GSS

In the last lecture there was talk about Group Support systems and how some of them even need separate facilitators, who before meeting plan the meeting and what tools to use and during the meeting uses the tools. This whole facilitator-idea made me wonder whether all the fancy GSS really help the meeting. I mean, if you need a special trained professional just to run them, wouldn't it just be easier to hold the meeting in a old fashioned way?

Of course, I can see the benefits of - for example - computer counting votes or other manual things that would take plenty of time if conducted manually. But if I imagine a system that would do that or other similar simple tasks, it hardly seems like a system that would need a facilitator to run it. Of course, this is all just thoughts based on how I imagine GSS's work. I don't have any personal experience with GSS's, and I don't really know what kind of tools they provide or how hard they are to use.

Other thing that raised a thought was study by De Vreede et al.[1] where they studied causes for GSS meeting failures. Most of the failures had something to do with problems with goals and far less common were the ones with problems with technology. So most of the problems seem originate from the participants, not the tools. Just like in Jami's post here, it seems that it all comes to the people using the tools.

References:
[1] G.-J. De Vreede, R.M. Davison & R.O. Brigss, How a silver bullet may lose its shine. Comm. ACM 46:8, August 2003, 96-101. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/859670.859676

Camping at meeting room, experimenting collaborative project work

This week we decided to try something different at office. We had to design company department's web site. The project was not considered extremely critical, and it had long history of postponing and delays. We decided that it was time to get it done.

We decided to arrange something called "meeting room camp". The goal was to finish the project by informally working together. We agreed to gather at meeting room after official work hours and bring our laptops. Some snacks and refreshments were also reserved. Everyone was given the task to design or write the content for some of the pages. The camp started with everyone staring focused on their screen and starting to type.

After couple hours we decided to check the outcome. Everyone had done really nice job, but we found out that the result was far being optimal and lacking coherency.

How this happened! We were not short of collaborative tools or technologies. We had cloud based design tools and shared databases. Remember that we were also sitting at the same room, so we could use all f2f back channels and body language with all their full bandwidth.

It turned out that everyone were so focused with their indvidual tasks that the communication was at least partially forgotten.

After the camp we had little mixed feeling. We did very good progress but the goal was not reached. I'm thinking we hit something fundamental. The collaboration is not always optimal even with optimal tools and environments at hand. My opinion is actually more in people and the habits of doing work than technology.

However, the experience was interesting and now we have the knowledge how to improve the second camp.

DiamondTouch

DiamondTouch is a table-like display screen which uses multi-user touch technology to support small group collaboration. It allows multiple persons interact with the same thing simultaneously, also identifying which person is touching where.[1]

In the following video, three persons are doing group work together; using paper and pen, whiteboard or single screen for working.



However there is described shortly what kinds of problems normally occur in these “traditional” group work situations.

- With single paper: team members are waiting to get their turns and need to cue their ideas.
- With whiteboard: it can be difficult for others to participate when one person is in control. Also person writing on the whiteboard hides information from persons observing.
- With single screen: even if it is quite easy to observe, it is difficult to change the control from one user to another because there is only one mouse.

It is also said that because all group members can’t participate in group work, they get frustrated. In my opinion the good visibility of the screen for all group members is more important than possibility to participate in work exactly same way. I’m not even sure for what kind of group activities the multi-user touch screens could be suitable best. I found also an interesting link http://www.gizmowatch.com/entry/top-15-interactive-display-technologies/ of different interactive display technologies, although many of them are not for group work purposes.

References:
[1] http://www.circletwelve.com/

415.000.000 findings!! “Group Writing”

Group writing sound somehow tempting like Group Trip.

I became curious and put the text “Group Writing” in Google.

The popularity of Group Writing was amazing.

415.000.000 findings!!

Top five “random”

1. The following are samples of group writing activities offered by the Center
for Instruction Development and Research at University of Washington at Seattle.

2. Sean Banville's Blog Paired and Group Writing Activity:
20 benefits of paired group writing.

3. British Council BBC / TRY activities /
Written by Nicola Crowley, EFL teacher, Israel

4. eHow: How to Start a Writing Group
5. ProBlogger: Group Writing Project;


What to say?

It seems that there are in the internet discussion platforms: just for fun, teaching, school education, for business and may other reasons like scientific discussions.

The blogging is tool for getting something new happen or what.

Look this:
http://www.creativity-portal.com/howto/writing/collaborations.critiques.html

Right way you find yourself on the market place! Let shoppaile City Deals or improve your Brain!

Of cause you can find good blogging platforms.

This is the End
This time
Erkki

Can distance be a blessing?

In the design, implementation and use of groupware the greatest challenge is often referred to be the absence of "group". The tools are considered gawky and inefficient, because asynchronous communication and virtual environments fail to create the sense and atmosphere of "real teamwork". Many of the latest tools aim in better engagement and interaction of users. I am asking, is unprofound communication necessarily a bad thing?

People are various, and so are teams. The process of teamwork is usually far from ideal. Work groups are not social groups in the same sense than families or lads. Relationships are superficial, motivation varies and different people may have different goals. Teamwork can be a wearing experience.

My writing has two different points: Firstly, could the use of groupware and separated spatiality work better in some situations just because it gives us more personal space? Secondly, is the research and development of groupware too biased towards "the ideal" group-work instead of "the real" group-work?

Does social media help people being in contact with each other?

I've often heard poeple saying how the use of social media help them to stay in touch with their friends. Sharing your thoughts and commenting on other's pictures etc. might sound like you're actually in contact with them. But I think there are different sides to this.

On one hand it is definately useful to stay in touch with people far away, say for a brother staying abroad or something similar. It's always nice to hear and see what they're doing there. And since it might not be convenient to for example call when one is several time zones away, just leaving a message is easy and will most often be received quite quickly.

On the other hand, just leaving a "hi, how u doin?" message on one's wall, is a cheap way to actually avoid contact with someone. Why bother calling someone or setting up a date, when you can just say "I poked you facebook". This kind of behaviour is quite normal, or at least in my experience it is. It might seem as the interaction between certain people might be on increase, but in reality, it's just random messages once a day. I wouldn't call that interaction, since it's quite rare to actually even have a conversation like this.

The actual time that people spend together doing something decreases exponentially when everyone can just poke each other on facebook. One could say that if people don't bother to actually meet with someone in person, they haven't had any intrest doing so in the first place, but I think this is not the case. People just find the way of least resistance and be happy with it, even though they might enjoy some other ways of interaction even more.

How could we improve the ways how people actually get together to do stuff, while at the same time putting our effort into making it as easy as possible to stay away from everyone else? People don't really know what they want, they just take what they're offered.

Common ground in IRC

Monk talked in his paper[1] about common ground and defined it as:

"a proposition p is only common ground if all the people conversing know p and they all knowthat they all know p."

How could this be applied to IRC conversations?

I and most of my friend run our IRC-clients in a screen, so much of the conversation takes place when we're not actually there following it. So let's say someone talks about thing A and I'm not there at the time to read it. When I later come back online, is thing A common ground to me? Of course, with screen, I could read all the backlog, and know about thing A, but having almost twenty different channels open all the time, I rarely read all the backlog. On the other hand, my friends probably know that I don't necessarily read everything discussed while I was away, but how can you know when something is common ground and when it isn't? Usually you don't even know who is really there, who isn't and who's just following conversation quietly. Interesting things to ponder.

References:
[1]Monk, A. (2009) Common ground in electronically mediated conversation. Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics #1. Morgan & Claypool publishers.

Location awareness in instant messaging, how important it is?

I was thinking about the location information or awareness in instant messaging. By location awareness i mean the information about physical location of chatting partners. Is it important or beneficial to know where people are during chatting, how it affects to communication?

Instant messaging client i'm familiar with has some functionality to indicate users location. This is naturally possible by setting status message, but has also automatic functionality to track different locations. For example when logging in to university network, chat client notices change in network and asks to label the current location. Labels can be like "office", "home", "university"
and so on. When logging again to university, given label "At university" can appear automatically to status information.

But is it meaningful to know the location of chat participants? I have noticed for example that when working at home, there is actually less chat messages from colleagues if location is visible. It seems that in this particular case people actually hesitates a bit contacting compared to "Office" -location. Difference is not huge, but clearly noticeable.

In previous case it would actually be better not to publish location to encourage more communication. (or vice versa, "home" -location seems good way to have less interruptions without need to block all messages)

"at Office" -label beside people name communicates that it's actually ok to send message or give a call. If location is set to something else, the first question arising seems to be if it ok to start chat then? "In the train" may give some context for communication, or reason why the answers are taking so long due poor reception. On the other hand when status isset to "busy" it's clear signal that it's not good time for chatting.

So .. My opinion is that in typical work related one to one chat taking place in single time zone visibility of location information is not so hugely important. Location may give some context for communication, but may be also the source for slight confusion.

Do you know IM communication scenarios where it's absolutely good to know the location of chat partner?

Some problems with text chats

Even if chat and instant messaging programs are popular, there are some issues that limit their utility especially if they are used for group meetings or complex discussions. Smith, Cadiz & Burkhalter introduce in their paper five main problems with text chat.

1) Lack of links between people and what they say
It can be hard to differentiate persons and their messages particularly if there are many speakers in same chat room. It has been tried to solve this problem for example by using different color or font for each participant.

2) No visibility of listening-in-progress
It is not possible to know if other participant is listening in text chat or when that is exactly happening. Even though I think that for example the states available/away could tell something if somebody is listening or not, but in reality that doesn’t tell anything about that. Somebody can be available and same time away from the computer and the other participants can’t know that.

3) Lack of visibility of turns-in-progress
In chats, it is not always visible who is writing currently a message. The turns are transmitted when user has pressed enter-key. I think it is very important to have some visual cue of someone’s writing process for helping to take turns at right moment. Smith, Cadiz & Burkhalter mention that “[name] is typing a message” at the bottom of the window of Messenger doesn’t solve the problem, because other users can’t see exactly what others are writing until the enter-key is pressed. In group meetings that could be useful to see what someone else is writing, or at least to know if someone is writing anything. But on the other hand I think it is enough information to know “[name] is typing a message”, because one good side of text chats is that there is time to think and edit the answer if user wants that.

4) Lack of control over turn positioning
If there are many participants in same chat room, the links between turns and replies are easily mixed. This problem comes even bigger, if there is lack of visibility of turns-in-progress. In my opinion this is one of the biggest problems when using chats for group meeting purposes and it is difficult to follow conversation if others are speaking same time about one subject and others about something else.

5) Lack of useful recordings and social context
Smith, Cadiz & Burkhalter describe in their paper that in many chat rooms their content and discussions are not recorded. There is no history about conversations; also if there are history logs used, they are missing many times timing cues. I think it is very important that chat has a log and it is possible to return to that information later.

References:
[Smith, Cadiz & Burkhalter, 2000] Marc Smith, J.J. Cadiz and Byron Burkhalter, Conversation trees and threaded chats. Proc. CSCW 2000, 97-105.

Gmail Filtering / Group filtering ??!

Hello all,


I was interested in the e-mail filtering in Gmail and find out that it fits to purposes very well.

It is use full to test and then see how effective the e-mail filtering is ;).

Filters are one of the coolest and my favorite feature that Gmail has to offer. If you setup Filters properly, they can provide real ease in email management.

Filters help you saving time and space when it comes to unwanted emails in your inbox, and introduce you to multi-functionality of Gmail.

As per my understanding no other email service provides feature like Filters.

Filter has two parts in first one you setup a query and in second part you decide what to do with mails that showed up as a result or even in future.

Filters can be little frustrating if you don’t know how to make them work properly. In this article I will try to explain Filters, and how they can make your life easier by cutting many jobs to be done manually. And the multiple address filtering is impossible.

How to test!

Click on Settings Link on top right corner of your Gmail account.
Click on Filters tab to open it, if you don’t setup any filters yet then it’s going to be a blank page.
Find yourself create a new filter link; click it to create a new filter.
You will be taken to next page; here you can see five input boxes labeled as From, To, Subject, Has the Words, Doesn’t have, one check box labeled as Has Attachment and three buttons labeled as Cancel, Test Search and Next Step.
This is it; now you have to build some query and test it to ensure its working properly.

From Field:

The From Field is to deal with mails you getting from one or more source. For instance if you are getting lots of forwarded mails from different email id(s), you can put those email id(s) in From Field and do whatever you want to do with them. You can assign Label, Archive or even delete without even looking at them.
To Field:
This field can be used for both incoming and outgoing mails. If you want to create a filter for mail addressing, this is a field where you have to add your id. If you want to handle outgoing mails to one or more ids you have to add that particular id here. When this step is done you can Label, Archive, Forward oreven delete it.
Subject Field:
This field works as a search box, you can add word(s) or phrase and Gmail will keep a check on all mails.
Has the words and Doesn’t have Field:
You can add word(s) or phrase in this field and Gmail will search for given query in all mails.

Has Attachment Check box:
Click and you will be able to see only mails that have attachments with them.
When you have your query built simply click Test Search to see they are working right or not. When you are done click Next Step button to proceed. Now you need to indicate an action to be implemented on the results. Gmail offers you seven different actions that you can apply. Since these are checkboxes, you can have one or more actions applied to the searched results. Furthermore, the actions are executed not only on new incoming messages but also on older ones residing in your inbox.

Actions to be chosen for Gmail filters
* Skip the Inbox: archive the email message
* Mark as read: marks the email message as read - does not appear in bold in your Inbox
* Star it
* Apply the label: Select and apply a label to the email message
* Forward it to: forwards the email message to another account that you specify
* Delete it: deletes the email message
* Never send it to Spam


Final Words
If you are subscriber of any mailing list you can make filter of it in just one click. This is what you have to do, open that message, click on show detail button, their you can see option of mailing list. In front of it you can see a link Filter messages from this mailing list, click and you will directed to filter page, here you can test search and then you are done with it. Do remember you can create Labels for newly created filter right there.

Erkki

Debating about the evaluation of groupware applications

Since my post last week raised some questions about the difficulty of evaluating groupware applications, I thought I'd continue on that and try to explain my views on the matter.

Saila said... 

"I also disagree with your opinion about the Difficulty of evaluation challenge. The reason of why it has been a challenge is not in the lengthy evaluation process itself but the challenges of collecting data in the field from "real users". When software is still under construction, it can be tried out easily e.g. in the lab and that is enough "evaluation" for single user software. When the software is meant for groups, you need to collect field data from the actual experiences with the software since usually it is impossible to simulate the real world circumstances in the lab. If they did not adopt it, can you explain why they did not use it, and will the bad experiences then result in improvements in the software so that the next field trial will succeed? There are so many contextual factors involved in each case, many of which are not related to the software itself but to the actual processes and ways of working in the group."

 

Let's see what Grudin thought as the main facts that make evaluating groupware applications more difficult.

   - "Scheduling a test is logistical challenge"

   - "Groupware is affected by factors such as group members backgrounds and personalities"

   - "Evaluation takes longer"

   - "Groupware evaluation methods are less precise"

   - "Generalizing from experience is risky"

The way I see it, saying the test takes longer or that it is a logistical challenge, is not relevant. Sure, it might lengthen the development process of the application, but if that is the way tests need to be done, why should we see the extra time taken as a negative matter. At the same time it also gives us better and more precise results and meanwhile gives the rest of the development team a chance to polish the application.

Also, saying that the it is too difficult to take all the different factors affecting the results into account, is not the right way to approach the testing situation. Just because we lack certain skills, doesn't mean it can't be done. Similar tests which take into account different human factors are carried out all the time in different fields. Like Grudin says, we just need to recruit people with skills in social and cognitive psychology, anthropology and human factors engineering. And this is the part in which I've seen the most progress from the nineties. It is no longer considered such a hindrance to need different types of skills available for carrying out something, these different people are just recruited to get best results possible.

People just need to understand that we are not stuck in a lab environment anymore, there are many ways to carry out different tests, and to me saying some of them are inherently too difficult to properly execute because of the different factors that need to be considered, is just a cheap way of saying we don't want to progress. 

In a field that is so quickly evolving, generating and adopting new methods is one of the most important tasks we have. Being left behind by saying something is too difficult to do, is like Henry Ford saying it's too difficult to build a car, we'd better keep on doing horse carriages. Thus I feel that noting the difficulty as one of the main problems developing groupware is not something we should just accept as a fact, but something we should focus to get rid of. Being left behind on this matter is not an option in a world where we get new groupware applications every day.

I feel that we've gained loads of new information, adopted new techniques, recruited people from different fields of knowledge and improved our methods of evaluating groupware since the nineties. That's why saying that the challenge we currently face in this field is not as large as it used to be earlier is not incorrect.

 

References:
[Grudin, 1994] Jonathan Grudin, Groupware and social dynamics: eight challenges for developers. Comm. ACM 37, 1 (Jan. 1994), 92-105.  

Blog post on Sunday 23th of January, "Are Grudin's Challenges up to date"

Posted by Santeri

Feverish ramblings about email

I've had fever/flu since Thursday, so I completely forgot my blogging turn yesterday. Anyway, I'll just post this now and hopefully the fever is gone next saturday.

In the lecture and materials there was much talk about email and how people use it. This got me to think about when I first started using email. I remember that in elementary school we all had to create our own email address to some finnish service that provided free email addresses at that time. We didn't really have any use to them and I remember sending maybe three emails across the room to some friends.

Later I remember using luukku.com, mostly to order something from the internet. When GMail came, I started using it and it soon replaced luukku as my main email. Luukku still remained as secondary email for suspicious sites I had to give my email address to, but nowdays I don't even remember the password anymore. In the university I of course got uta-email.

Interesting thing I realized when I thought about my email usage, is that I don't remember ever using it to any kind of personal communication. Emails I send are always related to studies or other official things. If I have something to say to a friend, I give them a call or send sms, never email.

One (more) reason to go to China!

The 23rd ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is held this year in Hangzhou, China from March 19-23. As the title suggests, the conference is presenting views to the latest research in the design and use of groupware. Around 200 researchers will be presenting their work. Keynote speakers are CEO Jack Ma from Alibaba Group (Chinese cluster of Internet services) and Genevieve Bell from Intel Labs. The co-chairs are from Stanford University (Pamela Hinds), Microsoft Research (John C. Tang) and Alibaba Group (Jian Wang).

Glancing the topics of the conference will hint us where the interests are in this field. What makes these kind of like gatherings particularly interesting is their overwhelming multiculturalism: They enforce you to take a broader view on the design of groupware. For example, what features would a CSCW tool need to support working across different timezones (Tang & al., Your Time Zone or Mine? A Study of Globally Time Zone-Shifted Collaboration)? What sort of issues need to be considered when the group is multi-cultural (Alsheikh & al. (Whose) Value-Sensitive Design? A Study of Long-Distance Relationships in an Arabic Cultural Context)? How does socio-economic background effect on the use of groupware and technology in overall (Ames & al. Understanding Technology Choices and Values through Social Class)?

The broad and long enlistment of research topics and the presence of corporate big shots tells that the future of CSCW looks big and busy. It is highly visible already, that companies and work communities are distributed across the globe: I believe that in the future many of us are using these type of tools, whether we like it or not.

Using communication tools side by side at work

After reading slides of second lecture i started to think about my communication needs, habits and tools used during typical work day.

I think email is without doubt the most important communication tool for me. That's first option communicating with clients. It is advantage that it can be accessible with mobile phone. i'm trying to limit checking the email to couple times a day, but tend to look it always when message arrives. I usually avoid telling negative things or something not negotiable with email. In These cases i prefer old fashioned phone conversation.

Instant messaging has quite much replaced email in communication between colleagues. However, everybody are not reachable with IM, and sometimes sessions tend to turn longer than excepted and switch to phone conversation is needed. For some reason i prefer email for file exchanges, even if it is highly inefficient way to share files and it's also possible with IM.

Our Team is placed at same location, except one person. The solution for Weekly meeting is cell phone placed on the table of the meeting room and set to speaker mode. Simple and efficient.

Occasional need is to arrange group calls with multiple participant in several location. It seems that for this purpose it is usually easiest to use the Skype than struggle with settings of varying phone systems. However struggling with call codes and password is sometimes unavoidable.

The situation gets more problematic when conference with multiple participant and shared screen is required. There is quite functional tools to share screen, but i don't know any which could support simultaneus audio reasonably well. Solution is to share screen and use Skype or other phone confrerencing side by side. Works, but it's bit hassle.

There is also bunch of highly useful tools i have used used in studies and free time like Google docs, Google Code and some interesting microblog based communication tools like flowdock and presently, However, for me these are not option at work. The reason is that it is not allowed to save confidential data or documents to public services. i think occasional Skype phoning is only exception, as also im is encrypted and works inside company network.

What else.. i remember that i have once sent a fax with dedicated fax machine...

Handling email from my point of view

In the second lecture there was a topic how one is using and organizing her or his email. I could roughly divide my handling with email into two categories which differ from each others in that how I use them: an email account mostly for studying purposes and other email accounts for different purposes.

I check my email account for studying normally many times per day. Other email accounts I do not open maybe even daily, unless I am not waiting some email especially.

At this moment I have in the inbox of my email for studying many hundreds if not thousands of messages, I think I have never cleaned the inbox very well during these years what I have spent at university. Sometimes I try to empty it, but it is very time-taking. So I keep myself organizing email somewhere between the strategies no filers - spring cleaners. The inboxes of my other emails are maybe better organized; at least there are not even hundreds of messages.

I think the more there are emails in the inbox, the more important are the tools for organizing emails. Especially if there start to be hundreds of emails in the inbox, it is very useful to have a possibility to search some specific email by sender or content. Other tools what I am using for handling emails is marking them important or some other way that I can find them more easily for later use. What comes to archiving or deleting emails, usually I keep all the emails in the inbox what I think I could need someway maybe later. If I see that some email is surely needless for anything later, only in that case I destroy it at same moment.

After writing this post, I saw Taina L’s post "My e-mail handling strategy" in the blog Get connected! [1]. I think there are a lot of connections with her how I organize or not organize my email.

[1] http://coordin8.blogspot.com/2011/01/my-e-mail-handling-strategy.html

First experience in Google Group

First experience in Google Group

I took the first look at the Google group for project purposes.

At first, the program looks confusing and difficult to work with. After pilot use of the software, I can say, that it is useful platform. The learning of the program takes its time but it is worth, if you really need group tool for big project among larger group.

These features, which I like in it are follows.

At first it looks safety.  The Google group works like intranet and for a closed group. The Gg space is managed by coordinator, which looks, that only the project member can be members. The registration process looks safety and good.

What you can do there?

You can store and handle all project documents there. All document history with version is easy to see and managed. Google group seems not to be a project management tool anyway. It looks more project communication and discussion place.

You can use the e-mail system inside the group easily. I you have international project group the time difference are not problem. The discussion forum is always in order.

What I see as well is that the contact information of members spaced so, that they are easy to handle. In the case you need post addressees for delivering official post. For example to send documents to under write.

This discussion form is easy to use and good tool for meeting arrangements and for coordinating common things in a project or a process.

My work to know better the Google group continues. I like me it as platform for future projects.   

Erkki

New rights for rail passengers

New rights for rail

passengers

The EU regulation on rail passengers' rights and obligations, which expanded the rights of those travelling by train, entered into force in December 2009.

Passengers can now claim indemnification if a long-distance service is delayed by at least one hour. There are also improvements in the services for the disabled at stations and on board the trains.
Regulation on railways' responsibilities »

This is from VR,fi home page.

I am many many times missed meetings and lesion because of the delays on railroads.

But I fell, that the one hour regulation is nothing.

The trains, in which I have made reservation, has been 1 and half hours delays That’s usually means that the next train, which as well are delayed comes within one hour.

I want, that all travelers have to make WebGroup-VR to demonstrate the Russian style managements of trafficking.