Working Group Members: Michelle Baldonado, Steve Cousins, Mark Mortensen, Tom Schirmer
The Basic Idea:
We considered a scenario in which a new person comes on board to join a project group. What could we design to help this person understand the project, to gain access to group resources, and to become a contributing group member?
We envisioned building an electronic group history. One form this group history might take is a digital group scrapbook. Imagine a scrapbook in which each page contains information about a different aspect of the project, ranging from snapshots/demos of the artifact under construction at different points in time, information about how to access group resources such as machines, information about people in the group and their roles/relations, meeting notes, group timeline, group publications, etc. The pages would be "active" pages in that they might be interactive applications. Furthermore, each page might have many different "views" depending on how much depth or what perspective was wanted by the user.
Assumptions Made:
Start-up Projects:
A new PhD student might begin by focusing on how we could leverage our existing e-mail practices into the beginnings of a group history. For example, we might redo our e-mail lists so that joining a list requires submitting a list of research interests. We might provide structured ways of sending e-mail or heuristic ways of processing messages so that we could filter out meeting abstracts, talk announcements, etc. to form mini-repositories of e-mail.
Another start-up project might be to use Web technology (CGI, Java, etc.) to build a prototype version of a digital group scrapbook.
Technologies Driven:
Data mining -- one useful idea might be to determine "hot spots" and "trends" in the group's e-mail, software, etc. Rob Barrett at IBM has done some work along these lines for news. For example, it might be useful to know that the group talked about ILU for a long time, then there was a lull, then the group discussed Orbix. As another example, it might be useful to know that any.py was modified rapidly and repeatedly by 3 project members in January.
Document models -- a single, complex view of a document might be too overwhelming to swomeone just joining a project. We envisioned the use of multiple levels (similar to the multivalent approach) and multiple perspectives (a richer SenseMaker) as helping users here. One might start with the simple view of an e-mail archive (a trend summary?) then drill down to see who exchanged messages, then down to the actual messages themselves.
Workflow -- one piece of this project might look at the steps a newcomer needs to take to become a working member of the project (send mail to Marianne, develop a personal profile, checkout the code, etc.)
User interaction -- there are many complex/subtle interaction issues here to be addressed. What of our group history and dynamics gets made explicit and how? It's useful to a newcomer to know what our informal social rules are like, but it's hard to imagine encoding them -- plus, there are probably as many different interpretations of these as there are members of the group. How can we provide the right incentives and cost/benefit tradeoffs to get people to make useful aspects explicit? How can we integrate the writing of our group memory with our day-to-day work? How can we use speech act theory to inform our designs?
User interface -- "joining a group" might be a DLITE workcenter. How do the needs of this task affect the DLITE interface design?
Deliverables:
Two end deliverables came immediately to mind: (1) our own group history/scrapbook so that we can experiment with how it helps newcomers to our groups and our own understanding of the group, and (2) a set of tools for other groups to use to create useful group histories
Physical/Digital Boundary:
Lots of possibilities here. We discussed in many cases how to represent physical things and people in digital form -- how do we decide what to bring over that border line? Physical elements we want to represent include group members, resources (machines, printers), meetings, etc.