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Over The Last decade, new software processes have appeared that emphasize collaboration among people involved in creating successful software. For example, agile methods stress collaboration between development teams and business clients, 1 and DevOps emphasizes better collaboration between development teams and deployment teams.

Buber's concepts of I-It and I-Thou are well known, yet his understandings of a dialogical process and dialogical knowing are less evident in the literature. This article briefly details a unique Buberian dialogical research methodology, devised for research into psychological and emotional abuse in families. Informed by Buber's premise that dialogue is the source of knowing, this methodology privileges the intersubjectivity between participant and researcher. It is operationalized in methods that highlight the dialogical process within the research interview, from which dialogical knowing may emerge. Analysis of the intersubjective process is based on the conceptualization of five poetic images that recur in Buber's work, as illustrated in the micro-analysis contained in this article. It suggests that a Buberian methodology offers deeper and more nuanced understandings of the subjective experiences of vulnerable participants and of theoretical knowledge about a sensitive topic. Practitioner points Buber's scholarship highlights the ideas of dialogical process and dialogical knowing A Buberian research methodology requires intersubjectivity to be privileged in analysis, before the consideration of subjective experience or theoretical knowledge Intersubjective analysis may be operationalized by a conceptualization of Buber's poetic images Dialogical moments may occur within the research interview, from which dialogical knowing may emerge

Open Dialogue is an approach to working with people and their families experiencing psychosocial distress. Interest in Open Dialogue in Australia has been growing recently, raising questions about its adaption and implementation to local contexts. This article is an attempt to answer some of the frequently asked questions we have encountered in training and discussions about Open Dialogue. We attempt to provide responses to questions of how Open Dialogue is different to what is done already, how it fits with current approaches, how you know if you are doing it, whether it is passive or just about doing reflections, issues about including the social network, and concerns about the evidence base. This article aims to present a variety of viewpoints in relation to these questions and to hopefully further discussions on how Open Dialogue can be implemented and adapted to Australian health care and social care contexts.

The philosophy of Martin Buber, the author of the seminal text I and Thou, offers profound insights into the dialogical approach to family therapy and research, in particular the understanding of the moment-to-moment relational encounters between therapist and client, or researcher and participant. This paper provides an introduction to Buber's dialogical philosophy of relation as based on his extensive writing. It opens Buber's scholarship beyond the ideas of the I-It and I-Thou relationships, to explore a relational process involving an ongoing movement between I-It and I-Thou. The author's conceptualisation suggests that Buber's poetic terms reveal different layers of this dialogical process that may lead to intersubjective moments, those which offer dialogical knowing and the possibility of transformation. The author proposes that such an understanding may increase the therapist's and researcher's awareness, sensitivity and attunement to this dialogical process and to moments of dialogical knowing.

This paper focuses on the clinical practice of open dialogues in Finland and articulates some challenges and resonances for clinicians of this way of working. It is a collaborative paper based on a series of reflecting conversations in a North–South dialogue between four Finnish family therapists and an Australian family therapist. The paper begins with an overview of the context of open dialogues in Finland. It then introduces each individual Finnish therapist, followed by dyadic reflecting conversations about the work, before moving to a joint North–South dialogue where all voices join together in responding to each other's contributions. The clinical practice of open dialogues is revealed as ways of thinking, doing and being in relation to self, client, family, networks, and colleagues. Mutual understanding between all involved in the work emerges as a core theme. The paper offers the clinical wisdom of the Finnish therapists to those interested in adapting this way of working to the Australian and New Zealand context.

Agile software development is characterized by very intensive communication and collaboration among members of the software development team and external stakeholders. In this context, we look specifically at cardwalls, noting that despite the wide availability of digital cardwalls, most Agile teams still use physical cardwalls to support their collaborative events. This is true even though a physical cardwall hinders efficient distributed software development and causes extra effort to capture story artefacts into digital tools to meet traceability and persistence requirements. We conducted two empirical studies in industry to understand the use of existing digital Agile cardwalls and to find out the needs for an ideal digital Agile cardwall. The first study was with eight Agile teams of committed digital cardwall users. The study showed the reasons why some teams use projected digital cardwalls and their detailed experiences with them. The study showed that most digital cardwalls seem not be sufficient for the highly interactive and collaborative Agile workstyle. The second study was with eleven Agile companies. The study comprised of the development of aWall, a software prototype of a large interactive high-resolution multi-touch display that supports varied Agile meetings where cardwalls are used. The results of the study emerged with design considerations for digital Agile cardwalls from the evaluation of aWall in a user workshop. Both studies, which were conducted concurrently, began with an interest in new large interactive surface technologies which might have the potential to provide not only the required interaction possibilities to support intensive collaboration, but also the required large display format necessary for a collaborative space. The results of the studies collectively seem to confirm our assumption, that large interactive surface technologies could bring the support for the collaboration of Agile teams to a new level, potentially making the teams more productive.

This chapter relates to human factors in computer security, and how surface technology might support security analysis. This specific domain allowed us to investigate surface application design and development in an established context, and thus learn how the real needs of the domain might best be supported. Throughout, we were fortunate to have partners in industry and government working in the domain who were able to give us advice and feedback. A number of projects were conducted over the span of our research program, each one offering findings that informed later projects. In this chapter, we provide an outline of our work, summarizing each of the main projects and their findings. We cover: (1) a literature review. (2) Ethnographic studies of firstly operators and technicians in seven operations centres, and secondly a team of ten professional analysts working in the security domain; (3) ACH Walkthrough, a collaborative web-based decision-making tool; (4) Ra, a tool that supports rollback, playback and other explorative actions when using web applications like ACH Walkthrough; and (5) Strata, a tool that allows for the annotation of web applications, enabling the work of collaborative teams.

Surface computing encourages exploratory interaction, and many applications are designed to work this way. In essence, the fluid interaction causes the user to ask “What if?” We suggest this requires support for recording the history of such explorations and allowing reversion to earlier states. There are currently a variety of related mechanisms, but they are either underpowered for the sort of interaction history management we suggest is needed, or are restricted to very specific domains. We present a prototype implementation of an interaction history manager: Ra is a JavaScript library for supporting this exploration and version tracking in web applications. We illustrate the interface for end users seen in augmenting simple web applications; we describe the underlying technical architecture, which uses ES6 Proxy objects to maintain access to the application’s model; and we present the API, which allows an existing application to include Ra with minimal code change.

In Agile software development, key artefacts used to support the process are the User Story (usually recorded on a Storycard) and Story Cardwall (usually a dedicated portion of a wall). These low-fidelity tools work together to help teams stay focused and self-manage their projects. The need to support distributed teams and team members makes the physical Cardwall impractical and teams are therefore migrating towards digital story management tools. We conducted field studies of 8 Agile teams using digital Cardwalls, and performed qualitative data analysis to understand patterns of usages and user needs. We identify issues to address in the design of digital Cardwalls.