Libby Hemphill research and posts on social media, collaboration, and related technologies

28Mar/100

Post Doc survey now open

Dr. Libby Hemphill and Dr. Stephanie Teasley of the University of Michigan, School of Information invite you to be a part of a research study that examines the experiences and preferences of post doctoral researchers (postdocs). The purpose of the study is to understand the kinds of experiences postdocs have and to design better support and training programs for postdocs and their advisors. We are asking you to participate because you are currently a postdoc.

If you agree to be part of the research study, you will be asked to complete a web-based survey about your experiences as a postdoc.  We expect this survey to take 15 to 20 minutes to complete.

At the end of the survey, you will have the opportunity to enter a drawing for one of three $50 Amazon gift certificates. Researchers will not be able to link your survey responses to you, but you will be asked to enter your name and email if you wish to be included in the drawing for Amazon gift certificates. The survey software keeps your identifying information separate from the answers you provide to the survey.

We plan to publish the results of this study but will not include any information that would identify you. We will share anonymous, aggregated data with colleagues at the Arizona State University School of Public Affairs (ASU); Dr. Erik Johnston at ASU will use the aggregated data to inform agent-based models of research labs. These models will also help us understand and improve postdoc experiences.

Participating in this study is completely voluntary. Even if you decide to participate now, you may change your mind and stop at any time. You may choose to not answer an individual question or you may skip any section of the survey.  Simply click “Next” at the bottom of the survey page to move to the next set of questions.

If you have questions about this research study, you can contact Libby Hemphill, Ph.D., University of Michigan, School of Information, 1075 Beal Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109, (734) 678-9748,libbyh@umich.edu.

If you have questions about your rights as a research participant, please contact the University of Michigan Institutional Review Board Health Sciences and Behavioral Sciences, 540 E. Liberty, Ste. 202, Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2210, (866) 936-0933 (toll-free), irbhsbs@umich.edu.

By clicking on the link below, you are consenting to participate in this research survey.

Take me to the survey

If you do not wish to participate, click the “x" in the top corner of your browser to exit.

16Sep/090

Building Bridges: A Study of Coordination in Projects

On August 13, I successfully defended my dissertation. Today, I submitted my final, approved version to University of Michigan's institutional repository. That version won't be available until after I receive my degree in December, but you're welcome to read a nearly identical version of my complete dissertation.

Dissertation Abstract
In our efforts to understand how collaborative work can be accomplished, we often turn to discussions of “coordination” for help. However, the concept of coordination is inadequate for explaining the many interdependent processes at work within successful collaborations. In this dissertation, I examined a collaborative construction project – the Woods Avenue Bridge (WAB) Project – with many coordination demands. I used data from this project to develop the concept of adaptive capacity – the set of capabilities a team develops that enable them to adjust to internal and external stresses.

Through analyzing meeting minutes, interview transcripts, and documents the project team developed, I was able to identify behaviors and approaches the team took that may have enabled them to better respond to changes in their environment. I use a specific example of a time when the team successfully redesigned the structure they were building in the field to illustrate the kind of coordination work adaptive capacity enables.

From data about the WAB Project, I identified components of adaptive capacity including perspective taking, multimembership, affect, and social capital. Understanding these components and the adaptive capacity they can develop helps us understand what about a team enables them to accomplish coordination work. Without adaptive capacity, we lack an integrated explanation of the ways in which different components interact and how those components address coordination.

This dissertation contributes to our understanding of how collaborative teams accomplish coordination by refining the concept of adaptive capacity and integrating earlier literatures on coordination, collaboration, and adaptation. The concept of adaptive capacity helps us understand the resources collaborative teams develop that make it possible for them to find flexible and creative solutions to their coordination problems.

1Sep/090

Current Research: Joining Virtual Organizations

People keep asking me what I'm working on now that I've defended my dissertation and moved to Arizona State. The answer is, "research!" More specifically, I'm working on a research project to understand and improve the experience of joining a virtual organization. My colleagues, Erik Johnston and Stephanie Teasley, and I are studying post doctoral researchers who joined (or are joining) virtual science research organizations. I've made a diagram of our research process to make this more clear (click the image for a larger version):
Joining Virtual Organizations Research Project Process

The red parts represent the inductive, qualitative portion of our study. I am primarily responsible for those stages of the project. I am currently collecting data, and that's why that piece looks different. Erik is primarily responsible for the deductive portions, those in blue. This diagram was inspired by process diagrams of grounded theory and deduction from

Gasson, S. (2003) Rigor in Grounded Theory Research: An Interpretive Perspective on Generating Theory from Qualitative Research. In Whitman, M.E. and Woszczynski, A.B., eds. The handbook of information systems research. Hershey, PA: Idea Group.

Gill, J. and Johnson, P. (1997) Research Methods for Managers, 2nd Ed., London: Paul Chapman Publishing.

27Mar/090

The Wrongheadedness of Best Practice Thinking

I’ve come across a gem of a book introduction, and I’m writing to recommend that you read it. Yes, all of you. The introduction is from the book Strategic Procurement in Construction by Andrew Cox and Mike Townsend, published in 1998. The shelves of bookstores are crowded with advice for practitioners and business owners about the latest “best practices” for their business or for business in general. I have contributed to the best practice literature myself, trying to make my onboarding research findings accessible and interesting. I’ve been troubled by the literature before; something about the idea of a “best practice” made me wary, much like a “Truth” did when I spent more time with philosophy. I noticed this frustration most acutely when teaching master’s students in a professional degree program. So many students demanded that I teach them best practices, that I tell them what to do in their next job. I tried to explain to students that I was helping them acquire new tools for meeting the challenges information professionals face, not giving them step-by-step instructions for how to do their eventual jobs.

Cox and Townsend argue in their introduction, and throughout the book, that best practice thinking is wrong-headed and leaves us playing catch up. One of my favorite bits of the introduction reads:

They will be searching for the ‘Holy Grail’ of best practice. By this one means practitioners are looking for the answer that provides the solution to all of the problems which they face managerially. Unfortunately, this desire to discover the single solution (best practice), that will allow the practitioner to avoid the need for thought and risk taking, is an illusion.

They go on to discuss concepts such as appropriateness and leverage and recognize that many practitioners would call their discussions “common sense.” Their response?

Some of the practitioners who read these pages may accept what has been said, and argue that this is just common sense (which it is), and that they already know this. If that is the case then this book may have little to teach them, however, because experience leads the authors to conclude that such a form of sense (in a business context) does not appear to be all that common.

I wish I’d written something like that in the paper Andy and I submitted recently that was rejected for having results that were not surprising enough. The results we found in our onboarding study were surprising because we found them and not necessarily in their content. For instance, it’s surprising that teams still behave as though new employees will be immediately productive even though the sense that onboarding takes time is apparently common. Much like Cox and Townsend find that strategic procurement is not all that common, neither are teams who smoothly onboard their new members.

My questions as I continue to read Cox and Townsend’s book are really about how one encourages strategic, reflective thinking over best practice thinking and how one should present research results that show just how uncommon common sense can be. See, one can learn things by studying construction projects. This message brought to you by my dissertation, a work in progress.

31Aug/081

A Productive Summer

Andrew Begel and I had a very productive summer. We conducted 95 interviews with 26 people, and spent 7 days onsite observing new remote employees. We'll be presenting a poster titled, "How will you see my greatness if you can't see me?" at CSCW in November. The poster session is Monday night, Nov. 11. Come by to hear more about our study, especially our findings about how excellent work is and is not observable from a distance. Stay tuned; we're submitting longer papers to two other conferences, and I'll post here when they get accepted.

Related links:
Human Interactions in Programming Group at Microsoft Research
ACM's Computer Supported Cooperative Work Conference (CSCW08)

11Jun/080

A new vocabulary

I'm lucky to be the kind of researcher I am.  I get to observe and interview people who do really cool work and to learn about what they do.  A couple years ago I learned how vaccines for Black Plague get made.  My dissertation lets me learn about how bridges (real ones, not just metaphorical ones) get built.  Now, at Microsoft, I learn how software is built.  Over the last couple of weeks I've been interviewing managers of developers and testers at Microsoft in an effort to recruit them for my study on remote onboarding and to learn about what they do.

Years ago, before I came back to grad school, I had the illustrious title "Developer" at a web start up in Chicago with about 100 employees.  A "software team" there was a project manager, a developer, an architect, and a designer.  We built websites.  My job was to write ASP code that made the designers and project managers happy.  Towards the end of my career, I wrote ASP.NET code.  Somewhat more complicated, still produced a website.  "Developer" at Microsoft means something a bit different.  Developers at Microsoft build stuff that matters - Windows, for example.  They do it in teams using tools such as Source Depot, Razzle, test harnesses, RSOPs, WTT, and TFS.  They meet in scrums, war rooms, Live Meetings, Office Communicator, one-on-ones, and code reviews.  Those 12 phrases and acronyms are new to me. Not one of them had I ever heard before.  I now know what 5 of them mean.  I'll leave you to guess which 5 I know.

Learning the vocabulary of my subjects is just one part of my research, but it's been a while since I had so much specialized vocabulary to learn.  The phrases and acronyms the engineers I study use seem a bit more intuitive to me, things like "pancake test" and "aggregate" are nearly self-explanatory.  Granted, "code review" means about what you think it does but "scrum"?  No, developers are not playing rugby.

Being a new employee while studying new employees is so meta I can hardly handle it.  Perhaps next week when I meet my first new employee subjects I'll start to feel like I have a better handle on the situation.  For now, while I'm meeting with managers, I'll just keep typing as fast as I can and hope that I'll know when to ask for help.

15Feb/080

Stovepipes and how mine is better than yours

Ok, so now I've done some reading, and I have dusted some of the luster off the academia-business divide.  (It's Friday; I wrote another proposal draft yesterday; I'll be unpredictable today.)

I'm reading Gartner's "Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software, 2007" report.  I got it from Socialtext, but I'm not sure how.  In fact, there were a few PHP errors when I submitted the form to get the document, so my path was broken anyway.  So, the ridiculous title aside, I thought maybe this document would be interesting and enlightening.  The summary at the beginning is nice - tells me social software is a priority in 2008, explains that the paper is going to talk about social software market players.  Fair enough.  I'll leave the fuzzy definition of "social software" aside and read on.

The paper tries to describe products available in the market and lists strengths and weaknesses for each. No where in the whole thing does it say where Mr. Nikos Drakos (again, Gartner, with the boys' club) got any of his information or whether he ever spoke to a person who uses any of these products.  I'm apparently supposed to assume that Mr. Drakos knows more than I do and that this oracle is authoritative and accurate.  Yeah, not so much.  If nothing else, I've learned to doubt in my 22 years of schooling.  I think I'm fired up because some of the products he mentions such as Twiki are miserable failures for users.  Those of us who do user-centered research involving social software found that out by, gasp!, watching users try to use them, analyzing log data about use and content, and trying other products.

I don't know that I meant for this post to become quite so rant-y, but there you have it.  I see the difference in rigor that distinguishes academic research from at least some forms of business research.  I like rigor.  I wish I had more time to develop my own social software based on what academic research has shown (maybe I could even make money), but I have to write that pesky dissertation.  I wish I could find more organizations interested in studying the use and effectiveness of the social software tools they employ.  I wish we could afford to experiment a bit more with the tools we build and use.  That said, Gartner's report is clearly more clearly written and probably more immediately useful than my work, so they get points for that.  But Twiki?  Seriously?  Come on.

9Feb/080

Faculty, staff, PhD students band together for ASB

SI has a rockin' alternative spring break program for MSI students. One way money gets raised for ASB is through an all-school Penny War in early February. This year, the Faculty, Staff, and Doctoral Students team came on strong in the last two days to completely dominate the Penny War. We were a dismal last place last year. Someone from the student affairs staff sends out nightly updates about the Penny War, and we came on strong in the final days after some goading from the Dean and strategy help from Jeff Mackie-Mason. The Penny War doesn't recognize individual performance, but all of SI can be proud of ourselves for raising $2086.91 this year. Nicely done. I hope ASB is as rewarding for this year's group as it has been in the past.

4Feb/080

Not my dissertation but close to my heart

Here's a summary of the other research I do (or want to do) that's not my dissertation. This was originally a 2-page research statement submitted to some people with money to burn.

Research Summary - Communities and Technologies

At the broadest level, my research is about communities and technology. My research enriches our understanding of the roles social media play in supporting offline communities. My approach differs from much of current social media research, because I focus on teams and organizations in which people know each other and use technologies to support their activities (e.g. Upcoming!, workplace wikis) rather than on online communities of people who do not know one another offline (e.g. SlashDot, Yahoo! Answers) (see Beenen et al., 2004; Lampe & Resnick, 2004; Preece, 2000; and Smith & Kollock, 1999). My work necessarily encompasses studying offline behavior as well online behavior; in order to understand social media use by groups, it helps to understand the nature of a community. My research highlights the situated nature of social media use by offline communities and focuses on how social and technical processes impact community behavior both online and off. A better understanding of behavior in communities using social media enables us to design social media more effectively and to recommend behaviors and tools to make communities more successful.

My most recent work asks, how do faculty and students in a graduate school use a wiki to share information about their community with each other and with the public? What does their use tell us about what it might be important for new community members to learn? How can we use their wiki use behavior to understand how people make decisions about what information to share and what to keep to themselves? Understanding the community provides insights into the way members of those communities interact with one another via social media. My goal is to leverage human and computing resources so that a sociotechnical system can use the skills of humans and benefits of computation to improve collaboration and its supporting technologies. The remainder of this document briefly describes projects in which I have been involved with and ends with an overview of my continuing work.

Sharing and Storing Community Knowledge

In an era when more than half of all doctoral students leave before finishing their degrees and students must compete for increasingly scarce human and financial resources, it's no surprise that students welcome help completing their degree requirements. What is surprising in this instance is that students are not just the primary consumers of the information but are also the primary producers. They share human subjects review applications, books that help them write dissertation proposals, interview protocols, even advice about how to set up an experiment using existing technical resources. We might expect students competing for the same pool of resources to hoard, but in this instance, students are much more collaborative than competitive. Their behavior on the wiki demonstrates this difference, but only by studying the offline community can we really understand why. In this case, it's likely that the collaborative ethic of the school itself permeates the doctoral students. Faculty and students at the school, regardless of whether they use the wiki, recognize and enjoy the collegial atmosphere of the school. Students are well-funded by research and teaching positions and are encouraged by their faculty's examples and instructions to work together to do better research. The wiki is not the reason students share, but it is the social media tool they use to do so.

Another aspect of the wiki example that I find interesting is the near-mashup nature of content created and the potential such behavior indicates. On the wiki, users include data available elsewhere but combine that data in community-specific ways. For instance, one wiki page serves as a marketplace for used textbooks required by courses within the school. That page includes data from the course syllabi, email lists, booksellers, and individual users. Such pages indicate community information needs - in this case, students need to sell their extra books to a small potential market while students in that buying market seek good deals on books and some advance warning of what textbooks they'll need. Such pages also indicate what potentially useful mashups might appear were users able to construct them. New social media that offer and use open APIs such as Yahoo! Pipes, Yahoo! Maps, and Upcoming! make asking such questions - what data sources might users combine for their communities if they could do it themselves? - possible.

Facilitating Ad Hoc Ridesharing

I was part of the original RideNow team at the University of Michigan. Our goal was to facilitate ad hoc ridesharing in Ann Arbor and to develop technologies that could be used to do the same in other communities. Cars in the U.S. can comfortably seat four or five people but rarely carry more than one (Transportation Statistics, 2004). Filling some of those seats would create tremendous benefits for both individuals and society as a whole. Riders and drivers would have convenient travel and the possibility of pleasant conversation. Society would benefit from reduced emissions and road congestion. However, barriers to ridesharing include 1) coordination problems, 2) risks of riding with strangers, and 3) mismatch in cost and benefit for riders and drivers.

We designed a service, called RideNow, that approached the problem of ridesharing by capitalizing on the benefits of incremental and localized design. Our system avoids the costs of overengineering by allowing incremental changes to occur. For example, the first instance of the system was rather bare bones - it offered free text fields that allowed users to decide how to specify ride information. Later versions of the system offered structured fields based on the behavior users exhibited in the first system. For example, the second generation of RideNow can parse dates such as "next Friday" rather than requiring a user to enter a specific date. The system also capitalizes on the benefits of nuance and ambiguity afforded by localized design. For example, RideNow's data fields allow users to enter information such as "after the faculty meeting." Our goal with RideNow was to design a system that allowed a well-established community to use personalized, situated software (Shirky, 2004) and that remained flexible enough to be adopted by other communities.

Continuing Research

My future work will extend my interest in studying communities and designing/building software to facilitate their collaborative activities. It is important to me to have a close connection between field research and system design. As social computing tools become more prevalent and the distance between developer and user diminishes, opportunities to improve both development and use abound. I look forward to asking question such as, how can we make powerful mashup tools such as Yahoo! Pipes usable by non-developers? What would users do with such technologies if they could use them? How would users tailor the content of their mashups and contributions to specific community audiences? I have seen users embrace flexible, situated technologies such as ridesharing systems and wikis, and I believe there is great promise for end-user development of social computing technologies. Issues such as community building and information sharing generalize regardless of the community being studied, and I look forward to the opportunity to study social computing and larger, distributed offline communities such as political movements and distributed work teams.

References

(2004). Omnibus survey household survey results. U.S. Department of Transportation Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

Beenen, G., Ling, K., Wang, X., Chang, K., Frankowski, D., Resnick, P. & Kraut, R. (2004). Using social
psychology to motivate contributions to online communities. In Proceedings of the Conference on
Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2004
.

Lampe, C. & Resnick, P. (2004). Slash(dot) and burn: Distributed moderation in a large online conversation space. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2004 (pp. 542–550). Vienna, Austria: ACM Press.

Preece, J. (2000). Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbility. New York: Wiley.

Shirky, C. (2004). Situated software.

Smith, M. & Kollock, P. (Eds.). (1999). Communities in Cyberspace. Routledge.