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Various industries are developing information infrastructures to improve the efficiency and quality of work. Little research attention has been paid to how workers might resist the development of a new infrastructure beyond the point of technology use. In industries in which government agencies have taken a top-down, policy-driven approach to developing infrastructures, though, coordinated, distributed resistance—or organized resistance—is likely to play a role in implementation outcomes because policies limit the flexibility of organizations and workers in adopting and using infrastructure technologies. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study of the United States government's multi-billion dollar electronic medical record (EMR) infrastructure program aimed to support data collection and sharing within and between healthcare organizations. It describes how healthcare professionals manifested their resistance through professional organizations at the political level via organized resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates some of the issues which will determine the viability of the World Wide Web as an infrastructure for cooperative work. In fact, taking a weak definition of collaboration, the Web is already a very successful collaborative environment. In addition, it is already being used as the basis for experimental and commercial groupware. The paper takes this as a starting point and uses analytic methods developed in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work to investigate the reasons for the Web‘s present success, its strengths and weaknesses as a platform for CSCW, and prospects for future development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the collaborative development of information infrastructure for supporting data-rich scientific collaboration. Studying infrastructure development empirically not only in terms of spatial issues but also, and equally importantly, temporal ones, we illustrate how the long-term matters. Our case is about the collaborative development of a metadata standard for an ecological research domain. It is a complex example where standards are recognized as one element of infrastructure and standard-making efforts include integration of semantic work and software tools development. With a focus on the temporal scales of short-term and long-term, we analyze the practices and views of the main parties involved in the development of the standard. Our contributions are three-fold: 1) extension of the notion of infrastructure to more explicitly include the temporal dimension; 2) identification of two distinct temporal orientations in information infrastructure development work, namely 'project time' and 'infrastructure time', and 3) association of related development orientations, particularly 'continuing design' as a development orientation that recognizes 'infrastructure time'. We conclude by highlighting the need to enrich understandings of temporality in CSCW, particularly towards longer time scales and more diversified temporal hybrids in collaborative infrastructure development. This work draws attention to the manifold ramifications that 'infrastructure time', as an example of more extended temporal scales, suggests for CSCW and e-Research infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to enrich the current understanding of data curation prevalent in e-Science by drawing on an ethnographic study of one of the longest-running efforts at long-term consistent data collection with open data sharing in an environment of interdisciplinary collaboration. In such a context we identify a set of salient characteristics of ecological research and data that shape the data stewardship approach of the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network. We describe the actual practices through which LTER information managers attend to the extended temporal scale of long-term research and data sets both through data care work and information infrastructure development. We discuss the issues of long-term and continuity that represent central challenges for data curation and stewardship. We argue for more efforts to be directed to understanding what is at stake with a long-term perspective and differing temporal scales as well as to studying actual practices of data curation and stewardship in order to provide more coherent understandings of e-Science solutions and technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examinesWiInf-Central, the ‘virtual homeplace’ of a student community (on Information Systems) at the University of Hamburg, and focuses on processes of social identity and community-building. Drawing on social-identity theory and communities of practice as our theoretical basis, we illustrate that the processes of identity-building and positive in-group evaluation triggered byWiInf-Centralserve as a means for students of Information Systems to assert themselves against faculty members and students of other disciplines. While our study reveals strong mechanisms of social exclusion, inclusion mechanisms have to be assessed in a more differentiated way. In particular, our study shows the emergence of several ‘subgroups’, which appear largely closed to other community members. We ascribe this to both the self-organized and the hybrid - half virtual, half real - nature of the community based onWiInf-Central. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative systems include both general infrastructures and specific applications for supporting collaboration. Because of the relative newness and complexity of these systems, it has been unclear what approach should be used to design and evaluate them. Based on the lessons learned from our work and that of others on collaborative systems, we have derived an integrated approach to researching collaborative applications and infrastructures. The approach can be described as a sequence of steps: We decompose the functionality of collaboration systems into smaller functions that can be researched more-or-less independently. For each of these functions, we adopt general (system-independent) principles regarding the design and implementation of the function, identify collaboration scenarios at multiple levels of abstraction, identify requirements based on the scenarios, adopt an interaction model to meet the requirements, realize the interaction model as a concrete user interface, develop a logical architecture of the system, identify a physical architecture for placing the logical components in a distributed system, develop infrastructure abstractions, use the abstractions to implement applications, and perform lab studies, field experiments, and simulations to evaluate the infrastructure and applications. As in other models with multiple phases, feedback from subsequent phases is used to modify the results from the previous phases. In this paper, we describe, illustrate and motivate this research plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tailoring groupware has to deal with adapting properties of a shared information space as well as with adapting properties of the cooperation support to the group's needs. In this paper, an approach for tailoring both aspects of groupware in an integrated fashion is proposed. This approach uses cooperative hypermedia as a unifying representation of shared information structures, functionality, and the coordination medium of a shared application. It enables cooperative definition of shared information structures, shared process models and their access models not only before collaboration starts, but also on the fly, when emergent processes evolve. The proposed approach addresses tailoring at all stages of the development and use of a groupware application. A prototype system called CHIPS is presented and different possibilities of tailoring in CHIPS are discussed. Examples of CHIPS demonstrate that the cooperative hypermedia approach to tailoring groupware can support the adaptation to different evolving tasks and processes performed by changing teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Virtual Society (VS) project is a long term research initiative that is investigating the evolution of the future electronic society. Our vision for this electronic society is a shared 3D virtual world where users, from homes and offices, can explore, interact and work. Our first implementation of an infrastructure to support our investigation is known as CommunityPlace and has been developed to support large-scale shared 3D spaces on the Internet using the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). Obviously, such an ambitious project cuts across many different domains. In this paper we outline the goals of the Virtual Society project, discuss the architecture and implementation of CommunityPlace with particular emphasis on Internet related technologies such as VRML and present our views on the role of VRML and the Internet to support large-scale shared 3D spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although e-Research has received much attention and acclaim in recent years, the realities of distributed collaboration still challenge even the most well-planned endeavors. This case study of an e-Research project examines the ‚balancing acts’ associated with multidisciplinary, geographically distributed, large-scale research and development work. After briefly describing the history and organizational design of this information technology and atmospheric science research project, I identify five paradoxical challenges that cannot be resolved: research versus development, harmony versus conflict, consensus versus top-down decision making, frequency and modes of communication, and fast versus slow pacing. Although collaboration and communication technologies supported the project’s management and organization, most of the complexities faced by the team were not technological in nature. From the five paradoxical challenges associated with the project, I distill three cross-cutting issues that could be relevant to other e-Research projects of this magnitude: satisfying the multiple needs of a multidisciplinary project, managing information, and engaging all participants. I identify the practical implications of these challenges and issues, specifically that organizational and low-tech solutions – not the introduction of more sophisticated technology tools – are needed to solve these challenges and to better streamline coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design of software toolkits embodies a fundamental tension. On the one hand, it aims to reduce programmer effort by providing prefabricated, reusable software modules encapsulating common application behaviours. On the other, it seeks to support a range of applications, which necessitates avoiding an overly-restrictive commitment to particular styles of application behaviour. We explore this tension in the domain of collaborative applications, which we believe are particularly subject to problems arising from this tension. Based on an analysis of the basic issues of flexibility in toolkit design, we explore opportunities for the design of toolkits which avoid application style commitments, with illustrations from two toolkits which we have developed. A comparative analysis of these two approaches provides insight into the underlying questions and suggests new design opportunities for toolkits that provide a framework for application enhancement and extension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alliance is a structured cooperative authoring application that allows people spread out across different locations to work together on document production and maintenance. It uses the World Wide Web as an infrastructure to accomplish distributed document management, asynchronous group awareness, and communication and cooperation among distributed authors. A particular feature of Alliance is that it can handle temporary disconnections from the network without disrupting the cooperative editing. In this article we report our experience in designing and implementing Alliance, focusing on the mechanisms that needed to be developed in order to support cooperative authoring using the Web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]