Academic Interviews
We spoke at length with three experts on various dimensions of collaboration:
Jim Herbsleb
Jim Herbsleb is a Professor of Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Before CMU, he researched communication for collaboration at Bellcore.
Jim develop an integrated communication system called ConnectIcon. We spoke about his experience developing that application at length.
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Looking at the domain of software engineering, ConnectIcon tried to solve the problem of (un)availability, often citing "phone tag" as a key example. The ConnectIcon software provides a single application to seamlessly connect to other users by email, IM, phone and wireless. Key Takeaways
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Jim also helped us define the knowledge worker with more precision, pointing out that certain types of work have significantly more dependency than others. The workflow in software engineering, for example, depends more heavily on integration with a whole than automotive engineering.
Wendy Kellogg
Wendy Kellogg leads the Social Computing Group at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center.
The Social Computing Group is well-known for the design of Babble, a communication visualization tool. Their work also covers communication in the workplace.
Our conversation focused mostly on Wendy's "social proxy" work. A social proxy is a representation of different information regarding people. In the workplace, a social proxy might represent, for example, a public space that shows if group members have completed a certain task or not.
The IBM Research social proxy system for the workplace uses a web-based form to capture information. That information captured then becomes visible to all group members. In her example, Wendy used a hexagon to represent an individual. An aggregate representation of a group resembles a honeycomb. The visualization uses color to encode the completion state of a certain task, say to update the virus software on all PC's. Groups could then use the social proxy to get a quick temperature reading as to their fitness towards certain tasks.
Wendy also suggested anonymizing public information about individuals involved in a distributed task to maintain a sense of privacy.
Becky Grinter
Becky Grinter is a social scientist working at Palo Alto Research (formerly Xerox PARC).
Becky came to CMU to deliver a lecture on the use of SMS by teens. She suggested that teen girls value their buddy lists as a form of "social currency," where value and status are gained by overt displays of "who you know." We interviewed Becky to explore dimensions of the People Palette, which was a visualization of project teams.
Becky also does research on how remote collaboration affects the social dynamics in an organization.
