TY - JOUR T1 - Sharing Knowledge and Expertise: The CSCW View of Knowledge Management JF - Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Journal Y1 - 2013 A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Juri Dachtera A1 - Pipek, Volkmar A1 - Wulf, Volker KW - collective intelligence KW - cscw KW - expertise finding KW - expertise sharing KW - information access KW - knowledge sharing KW - QA AB -

Knowledge Management (KM) is a diffuse and controversial term, which has been used by a large number of research disciplines. CSCW, over the last 20 years, has taken a critical stance towards most of these approaches, and instead, CSCW shifted the focus towards a practice-based perspective. This paper surveys CSCW researchers’ viewpoints on what has become called ‘knowledge sharing’ and ‘expertise sharing’. These are based in an understanding of the social contexts of knowledge work and practices, as well as in an emphasis on communication among knowledgeable humans. The paper provides a summary and overview of the two strands of knowledge and expertise sharing in CSCW, which, from an analytical standpoint, roughly represent ’generations’ of research: an ’object-centric’ and a ’people-centric’ view. We also survey the challenges and opportunities ahead.

VL - 22 UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - CPOE workarounds, boundary objects, and assemblages T2 - Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’11) Y1 - 2011 A1 - Xiaomu Zhou A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Kai Zheng KW - assemblage KW - boundary object KW - CPOE KW - cscw KW - EHR KW - electronic patient records KW - health informatics KW - health information KW - information access KW - medical informatics KW - medical information KW - medical orders AB -

We conducted an ethnographically based study at a large teaching hospital to examine clinician workarounds engendered by the adoption of a Computerized Prescribe Order Entry (CPOE) system. Specifically, we investigated how adoption of computerized systems may alter medical practice, order management in particular, as manifested through the working-around behavior developed by doctors and nurses to accommodate the changes in their day-to-day work environment. In this paper, we focus on clinicians’ workarounds, including those workarounds that gradually disappeared and those that have become routinized. Further, we extend the CSCW concept of boundary object (to "assemblage") in order to understand the workarounds created with CPOE system use and the changing nature of clinical practices that are increasingly computerized.

JF - Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’11) UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - QuME: A Mechanism to Support Expertise Finding in Online Help-seeking Communities T2 - Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST'07) Y1 - 2007 A1 - Zhang, Jun A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Kevin K. Nam KW - cscw KW - expertise finding KW - expertise location KW - social networks AB -

Help-seeking communities have been playing an increasingly critical role in the way people seek and share information. However, traditional help-seeking mechanisms of these online communities have some limitations. In this paper, we describe an expertise-finding mechanism that attempts to alleviate the limitations caused by not knowing users' expertise levels. As a result of using social network data from the online community, this mechanism can automatically infer expertise level. This allows, for example, a question list to be personalized to the user's expertise level as well as to keyword similarity. We believe this expertise location mechanism will facilitate the development of next generation help-seeking communities.

JF - Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST'07) UR - Complete ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Collaborative support for informal information in collective memory systems JF - Information Systems Frontiers Y1 - 2000 A1 - Ackerman, Mark S A1 - Mcdonald, David W KW - CMC KW - collaborative help KW - community memory KW - computer-mediated communications KW - corporate memory KW - cscw KW - expertise sharing KW - group memory KW - help KW - incremental formalization KW - informal information KW - information access KW - information refining KW - information retrieval KW - information systems KW - knowledge shairng KW - organizational memory KW - system AB -

Informal information, such as the expertise of an organization or the workarounds practiced by a community, is a critical part of organizational or collective memory systems. From a user-centered perspective, a user merely wishes to get his work done, and to do this, he must solve his immediate problems. We have examined how to incorporate this problem solving into a collective memory, as well as how to incorporate the learning that accrues to it or from it. We report here on two systems, the Cafe ConstructionKit and the Collaborative Refinery, as well as an application, Answer Garden 2, built using these two systems. The Cafe ConstructionKit provides toolkit mechanisms for incorporating communication flows among people (as well as agents) into an organizational memory framework, and the Collaborative Refinery system provides mechanisms for distilling and refining the informal information obtained through these communication flows. The Answer Garden 2 application demonstrates the utility of these two underlying systems.

VL - 2 UR - Complete ER - TY - JOUR T1 - The intellectual challenge of CSCW: the gap between social requirements and technical feasibility JF - Human-computer interaction Y1 - 2000 A1 - Ackerman, Mark S KW - computer supported cooperative work KW - cscw KW - CSCW theory KW - social-technical gap KW - socio-technical gap AB -

Over the last 10 years, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has identified a base set of findings. These findings are taken almost as assumptions within the field. In summary, they argue that human activity is highly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized and that computational entities such as information sharing, roles, and social norms need to be similarly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized. However, current systems cannot fully support the social world uncovered by these findings. In this article I argue that there is an inherent gap between the social requirements of CSCW and its technical mechanisms. The social-technical gap is the divide between what we know we must support socially and what we can support technically. Exploring, understanding, and hopefully ameliorating this social-technical gap is the central challenge for CSCW as a field and one of the central problems for human-computer interaction. Indeed, merely attesting the continued centrality of this gap could be one of the important intellectual contributions of CSCW. I also argue that the challenge of the social-technical gap creates an opportunity to refocus CSCW.

VL - 15 UR - Complete ER -