TY - CONF T1 - Social Regulation in an Online Game: Uncovering the Problematics of Code T2 - Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group work (GROUP’10) Y1 - 2010 A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Jack Muramatsu A1 - McDonald, David W. KW - code KW - ethnography KW - games KW - online communities KW - police KW - social computing KW - social control KW - social interaction KW - social life KW - social regulation KW - socio-technical design KW - software infrastructure KW - user study KW - virtual communities AB -

More and more interaction is becoming code-based. Indeed, in online worlds, it is all there is. If software is providing a new basis for social interaction, then changing the infrastructure of interaction may necessarily change social interaction in important ways. As such, it is critical to understand the implications of code - we want to know what the use of code means for socio-technical design. In this paper, based on an ethnographic study of an online game, we examine social regulation in an online game world as a case study of socio-technical design using code. We wanted to know how changing interaction based in code conditioned use in our site. We found that code changed social regulation in three specific ways. First, code made some user actions that were socially unwanted to be immediately visible. Second, code could prevent some actions from occurring or punish users immediately. Finally, software was not able to see all action. Some user actions were too nuanced or subtle for code to catch; others were too ambiguous to place into code. Following Agre, we argue i that a "grammar of action" resulting from the use of code limits the kinds of behaviors that can be seen and dealt with. These findings suggest that there is more than just a gap between the social world and technical capabilities. There are new possibilities, tradeoffs, and limitations that must be considered in socio-technical design, and all come simultaneously.

JF - Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group work (GROUP’10) SN - 978-1-4503-0387-3 UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Expertise Recommender: A Flexible Recommendation System and Architecture T2 - Proceedings of the 2000 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'00) Y1 - 2000 A1 - McDonald, David W. A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - collaborative filtering KW - expert locators KW - expertise finding KW - expertise location KW - expertise sharing KW - information seeking KW - recommendation systems KW - software architecture AB -

Locating the expertise necessary to solve difficult problems is a nuanced social and collaborative problem. In organizations, some people assist others in locating expertise by making referrals. People who make referrals fill key organizational roles that have been identified by CSCW and affiliated research. Expertise locating systems are not designed to replace people who fill these key organizational roles. Instead, expertise locating systems attempt to decrease workload and support people who have no other options. Recommendation systems are collaborative software that can be applied to expertise locating. This work describes a general recommendation architecture that is grounded in a field study of expertise locating. Our expertise recommendation system details the work necessary to fit expertise recommendation to a work setting. The architecture and implementation begin to tease apart the technical aspects of providing good recommendations from social and collaborative concerns.

JF - Proceedings of the 2000 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'00) UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Just Talk to Me: A Field Study of Expertise Location T2 - Proceedings of the 1998 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'98) Y1 - 1998 A1 - McDonald, David W. A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - bug reporting KW - CMC KW - computer mediated communications KW - expert locators KW - expertise finding KW - expertise location KW - expertise networks KW - expertise sharing KW - information seeking KW - knowledge networks KW - knowledge sharing AB -

Everyday, people in organizations must solve their problems to get their work accomplished. To do so, they often must find others with knowledge and information. Systems that assist users with finding such expertise are increasingly interesting to organizations and scientific communities. But, as we begin to design and construct such systems, it is important to determine what we are attempting to augment. Accordingly, we conducted a five-month field study of a medium-sized software firm. We found the participants use complex, iterative behaviors to minimize the number of possible expertise sources, while at the same time, provide a high possibility of garnering the necessary expertise. We briefly consider the design implications of the identification, selection, and escalation behaviors found during our field study.

JF - Proceedings of the 1998 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'98) UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Answer Garden 2: Merging Organizational Memory with Collaborative Help T2 - Proceedings of the 1996 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'96) Y1 - 1996 A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - McDonald, David W. KW - CMC KW - collaborative help KW - community memory KW - computer-mediated communications KW - corporate memory KW - expertise sharing KW - group memory KW - help KW - information access KW - information refining KW - information retrieval KW - information systems KW - knowledge sharing KW - organizational memory AB -

This research examines a collaborative solution to a common problem, that of providing help to distributed users. The Answer Garden 2 system provides a secondgeneration architecture for organizational and community memory applications. After describing the need for Answer Garden 2’s functionality, we describe the architecture of the system and two underlying systems, the Cafe ConstructionKit and Collaborative Refinery. We also present detailed descriptions of the collaborative help and collaborative refining facilities in the Answer Garden 2 system

JF - Proceedings of the 1996 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'96) UR - Complete ER -