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The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. Science-policy organisations are expected to be reflexive of their political influence on research and society. In this long-standing discourse on institutional reflexivity, formal organisations have largely been considered as a whole, and from a structural, or systemic perspective, whereas much less is known about everyday organisational practices; how individual organisational members reflect on and act upon their own as well as their organisation’s limits of knowledge and pre-commitments, if at all. We address this gap through an analysis of qualitative interviews with one national funding institution’s staff overseeing funding for research into information and communication technologies (ICT). We develop a bridging concept between individual and institutional reflexivity, which we call ‘collaborative reflexivity’. Through collaborative reflexive processes, individual employees contribute to the entire organisation’s institutional reflexivity. Our findings help to better understand ‘responsible’ behaviour in funding processes, as part of the growing international movement of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI).

Children and young people make extensive and varied use of digital and online technologies, yet issues about how their personal data may be collected and used by online platforms are rarely discussed. Additionally, despite calls to increase awareness, schools often do not cover these topics, instead focusing on online safety issues, such as being approached by strangers, cyberbullying or access to inappropriate content. This paper presents the results of one of the activities run as part of eleven workshops with 13-18 year olds, using co-designed activities to encourage critical thinking. Sets of 'data cards' were used to stimulate discussion about sharing and selling of personal data by online technology companies. Results highlight the desire and need for increased awareness about the potential uses of personal data amongst this age group, and the paper makes recommendations for embedding this into school curriculums as well as incorporating it into interaction design, to allow young people to make informed decisions about their online lives.

In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of large-scale centers of command and control that bring together a range of personnel from various services responsible for the management of day-to-day incidents and events. These multicenter control rooms stand in marked contrast to what Suchman termed ‘centers of coordination’ (Suchman 1997), which have typically formed the focus of much research within HCI and Computer supported co-operative work (CSCW). In this paper, we explore the practices and technical resources within one of these very large multicenter control rooms. Staff in this control room do collaborate with colleagues who are copresent, but there is little reliance on the subtle interactional practices found in earlier studies. However, one information system is critical for collaboration and managing incidents that arise: the information system that is used to record incidents. Unlike in previous settings where records were made after an incident had taken place, these records are used for the concurrent management of activities. We consider the practices through which staff assemble these records to serve the demands of different individuals, with differing responsibilities in various organizations within the control room. We consider instances of copresent collaboration and suggest that these are often to ameliorate problems with the records rather than supporting real-time colocated activities. Although staff may be copresent in these multicenter control rooms, they have different kinds of technological resources available to them, and a different ‘division of labor.’ This can undermine the integration of these resources within forms of work. We conclude by discussing the implications for our understanding of copresent work and also for the methods and approaches we can draw upon for understanding these contemporary workplaces.

There is growing interest within museums and galleries in enabling visitors to contribute thoughts, reflections and materials and to make these available to the wider public both within the museum space and beyond. It is widely recognised that digital technologies and developments provide unprecedented opportunities to facilitate engagement and provide new and distinctive forms of participation, sociality and creativity. In this paper, we explore how visitors responded to an installation that provided the opportunity to produce and post ‘content’; content that resonated with the principal themes of the museum, and consider how the installation encouraged creativity and certain forms of sociality. In contrast to more traditional ethnographic studies of visitor behaviour, we seek to demonstrate that resources and installations designed to encourage user-generated content, demand a rather different approach to data analysis, an approach that prioritises the practices that inform the concerted product...

Artificial intelligence ( ai ) is bringing radical change to our lives. Fostering trust in this technology requires the technology to be transparent, and one route to transparency is to make the decisions that are reached by ai s explainable to the humans that interact with them. This paper lays out an exploratory approach to developing explainability and trust, describing the specific technologies that we are adopting, the social and organizational context in which we are working, and some of the challenges that we are addressing.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report on empirical work conducted to open up algorithmic interpretability and transparency. In recent years, significant concerns have arisen regarding the increasing pervasiveness of algorithms and the impact of automated decision-making in our lives. Particularly problematic is the lack of transparency surrounding the development of these algorithmic systems and their use. It is often suggested that to make algorithms more fair, they should be made more transparent, but exactly how this can be achieved remains unclear. Design/methodology/approach An empirical study was conducted to begin unpacking issues around algorithmic interpretability and transparency. The study involved discussion-based experiments centred around a limited resource allocation scenario which required participants to select their most and least preferred algorithms in a particular context. In addition to collecting quantitative data about preferences, qualitative data captured participants’ expressed reasoning behind their selections. Findings Even when provided with the same information about the scenario, participants made different algorithm preference selections and rationalised their selections differently. The study results revealed diversity in participant responses but consistency in the emphasis they placed on normative concerns and the importance of context when accounting for their selections. The issues raised by participants as important to their selections resonate closely with values that have come to the fore in current debates over algorithm prevalence. Originality/value This work developed a novel empirical approach that demonstrates the value in pursuing algorithmic interpretability and transparency while also highlighting the complexities surrounding their accomplishment.

The UnBias Youth Juries engage young people in discussion of issues that affect their online lives, especially in relation to algorithms, through the presentation of scenarios and prompts. Results from the first wave of juries, held in February 2017, produced valuable data about the concerns of young people and recommendations for improving their digital environments. Feedback regarding the jury structure suggested a series of interactive tasks to elicit more debate amongst the participants. This paper presents results from a pilot study using these tasks and discusses the plans for a second wave of juries. This includes creation of an advisory group to ensure materials are relevant to the target audience, and an open educational resource that enables other groups to run their own youth juries.1

There is growing debate in contemporary life over the roles played by algorithms when we browse online. In particular, concerns are raised that algorithmic processes to index, filter and personalise content can ‘manipulate’ user behaviours in ways that lead to detrimental outcomes both online and offline. This short paper reports on ongoing work to examine how users interact with algorithms when undertaking browsing tasks online. Drawing on insights from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this video-based approach produces rich and detailed observations of user behaviour and reveals several relevant patterns of interest. Our findings highlight that both user-algorithm interaction and users’ own practical reasoning play key roles in shaping the browsing experience.

This paper explores the challenges around fair information access when the limits of human attention require algorithmic assistance for 'finding the diamond in the coal mountain'. While often demanded by users, the seemingly intuitive concept of fairness has proven to be very difficult to operationalise for implementation in algorithms. Here we present two pilot studies aimed at getting a better understanding of the conceptualisation of algorithmic fairness by users. The first was a multi-stakeholder focus-group discussion, the second a user experiment/questionnaire. Based on our data we arrive at a picture of fairness that is highly dependent on context and informedness of users, and possibly inherently misleading due to the implied projecting of human intentions onto an algorithmic process.

Over the years, healthcare has been an important domain for CSCW research. One significant theme carried through this body of work concerns how hospital workers coordinate their work both spatially and temporally. Much has been made of the coordinative roles played by the natural rhythms present in hospital life, and by webs of mundane artefacts such as whiteboards, post-it notes and medical records. This paper draws upon the coordinating role of rhythms and artefacts to explore the nested rhythms of the Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) protocol conducted to restore the proper heart rhythm in a patient who has suffered a cardiac arrest. We are interested in how the teamsdelivering CPR use various ‘smart’ assistive devices. The devices contain encoded versions of the CPR protocol and are able to sense (in a limited way) the situation in order to give instructions or feedback to the team. Using an approach informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA) we analysed video of trainee nurses using these devices as they delivered CPR in dramatized training scenarios. This analysis helped us to understand concepts such as autonomy and authority as interactional accomplishments, thus filling a gap in CSCW literature, which often glosses over how authority is formed andhow it is exercised in medical teams. It also helps us consider how to respond to devices that are becoming more active in that they are being increasingly imbued with the ability to sense, discriminate and direct activity in medical settings.

Over the past 20 years or so, researchers have, in a number of ways, considered how studies of talk and interaction might inform the design of new technologies. In this article, we discuss a “technical intervention” where studies of visual and material conduct informed by conversation analysis shaped the design and development of a prototype communication system: a “media space.” We conclude by briefly discussing some of the challenges and opportunities that arise when drawing from studies of social interaction to inform the design and assessment of new technologies. Data are in British English.