9:00-10:30 Session 1
(10 minutes) welcome, topic
(20) introductions
(30) Judy and Gary Olson et al: Virtual Radical Collocation: A proposal to
reap the benefit of radical collocation for distributed software
development teams
(15) Disccusant: Walt Scacchi
(15) open discussion
10:30-11:00 break
11:00-12:30 Session 2
(30) Anita Sarma et al: Exploring Interrelationships among Project Entities
to Support Coordination in Distributed Teams
(15) Discussant: Tom Finholt
(15) open discussion
(30) 10 short talks (3 minutes each)
12:30 - 14:30 Lunch
14:30-16:00 Session 3
(30) Wendy Kellogg et al: Games for Virtual Team Building
(15) Discussant: Jeremy Birnholtz
(15) open discussion
(30) 10 short talks (3 minutes each)
16:00-16:30 break
16:30-18:00 Session 4
(60) mini poster session
(30) wrap-up
Thomas Finholt - University of Michigan
James Herbsleb - Carnegie Mellon University
Gary Olson - University of California, Irvine
Judy Olson - University of California, Irvine
Anita Sarma - Carnegie Mellon University
Bhargav Sriprakash - University of Michigan
Gina Venolia - Microsoft Research
Patrick Wagstrom - Carnegie Mellon University
Everywhere one looks, more and more teams are becoming virtual. A complex software development project may have teams of engineers in Silicon Valley, Budapest, and Bangalore while the product manager is in New York and the client is in Boston. A major task of the project manager is to gather appropriate team resources and developers together to accomplish the project with a satisfactory result. However, assignment of individuals to teams will most likely be done along geographic lines because of communication and coordination constraints.
While software engineering was one of the first industries to experience these issues, almost any type of knowledge-based work faces these same issues. In particular, a variety of spectacular failures in the aerospace industry have dramatically illustrated the damage that such coordination breakdowns cause. For example in 1999 the Mars Climate Orbiter satellite was lost due to Lockheed Martin engineers using English units against the specification from NASA which called for metric units, causing the orbiter to attempt to enter orbit at a distance three times closer than that for which it was designed, resulting in unanticipated forces and the destruction of the craft. This $125 million disaster illustrates how coordination difficulties at high level requirements cascade down with sometime dramatic effects. Were the teams of engineers for NASA and Lockheed Martin collocated, it would be hard to imagine such an error occurring.
It doesn't take much distance before a team feels the negative effects of distribution - the effectiveness of collaboration degrades rapidly with physical distance. People located closer in a building are more likely to collaborate (Kraut, Egido & Galegher 1990). Even at short distances, 3 feet vs. 20 feet, there is an effect (Sensenig & Reed 1972). A distance of 100 feet may be no better than several miles (Allen 1977). A field study of radically collocated software development teams, i.e. where the teammates share a large open-plan room, showed significantly higher productivity and satisfaction than industry benchmarks and past projects within the firm (Teasley et al., 2002). Another field study compared interruptions in paired, radically-collocated and traditional, cube-dwelling software development teams, and found that in the former interruptions were greater in number but shorter in duration and more on-task (Chong and Siino 2006). Close proximity improves productivity in all cases.
Today's computer mediated tools provide significant functionality that strives for a sense of co-presence, such as presence awareness (e.g., Biehl, et al., 2007), change history (Froehlich and Dourish, 2004), and information aggregation (Minto and Murphy, 2007). Despite these advances and the usefulness of these tools, distributed and virtual projects still suffer from slower rates of production in many fields, including: software development (Herbsleb and Mockus, 2003); biomedical research (Lee, Dourish and Mark, 2006); weather forecasting (Lawrence, 2006; Lawrence, Finholt and Kim, 2006); geoscience research (Ribes and Bowker, 2008); environmental engineering (Ribes and Finholt, 2007); high performance computing (Zimmerman and Finholt, 2007); space weather forecasting (Olson, Killeen and Finholt, 2008); structural engineering (Spencer et al., 2008); and information technology research (Cummings and Kiesler, 2007). Clearly there are still issues of coordination and communication that contribute to these failures in virtual teams. We seek to understand the causes of these failures and identify to what extent they can be resolved to create virtual radical collocation.
It has long been a goal of CSCW research that people working over distance can coordinate their work as effectively and effortlessly as people working in a single team room (e.g., Teasley et al., 2002). This could be accomplished by technology that replicates "being there" or that provides new ways of working that go beyond a literal approximation of collocation (Hollan and Stornetta, 1992). Although there exist many situations with virtual teams that can benefit from this research, we focus on teams that are performing non-routine intellectual work such as engineering teams and scientific collaborations, where closely-coupled work is common, and the need to work over distances is unavoidable.
This one-day workshop at CSCW will open with a keynote talk by Gary and Judy Olson on the current limitations on virtual radical collocation, followed by a discussant who will take a critical view of these limitations. After these introductory point/counterpoint presentations, we will have a selection of papers addressing several focus areas including the major challenges of understanding dependencies between individuals, limitations of computer mediated communication in addressing virtual radical collocation, and the major benefits of collocation that virtual organizations have yet to master. In the afternoon we will break into smaller groups for discussion of selected issues, and then report back to the group at large.
Participants will be selected from an open call for papers and through direct solicitations to individuals in the field. We desire a total of 20-30 individuals to attend the workshop to provide for manageable smaller groups discussions in the afternoon.
The overall goals of the workshop are to create a vision of distributed work will be accomplished in the future, to understand the barriers that currently stand in the way of realizing this vision, and to foster a community of researchers who are working toward making this vision a reality.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to
Submission deadline: September 26, 2008.
Both research papers (10 page max) and position papers (4 page max) will be accepted. Submissions will be reviewed by the organizers who will solicit outside reviews as appropriate. To facilitate discussion, all those attending must submit a position paper.
Workshop submissions will be handled by EasyChair. Click on the link, go through a brief registration procedure, and upload.
Presenters have the option of having their entire paper or just the abstract published -- the latter option is available for authors who wish to avoid issues with submission to future publication. Each published position paper will retain the author's copyright.
Thomas Finholt, University of Michigan, USA, finholt@umich.edu
Thomas Finholt is the Associate Dean for Research and Innovation and a Research Professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information. His research focuses on geographically-distributed collaboration, particularly the creation and use of cyberinfrastructure-enabled virtual organizations in scientific and engineering communities. He has served on the PC of several conferences, including CHI and CSCW, and was the conference chair of i-Conference 2006 and of the Third International Conference on e-Social Science.
James Herbsleb, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, jdh@cs.cmu.edu
James Herbsleb is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, whose research interests focus on global software development, open source, and more generally on collaboration and coordination in software projects. He has served on the PC of several conferences, including ICSE and FSE, was co-chair of CSCW 2004, and serves as an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology.
Gary M. Olson, University of California, Irvine, USA gary.olson@uci.edu
Gary Olson is Donald C. Bren Professor of Computer and Information Science at UC Irvine's Bren School of Information and Computer Science. He is a past conference chair or co-chair and past program chair or co-chair of CHI and CSCW. He is a recipient of the CHI lifetime achievement award, a member of the CHI academy, and an ACM Fellow. Prior to joining the Bren School he was the Paul M. Fitts Collegiate Professor of HCI at the University of Michigan's School of Information, where he also served as Research Dean and as Interim Dean.
Judy Olson, University of California, Irvine, USA jsolson@uci.edu
Judy Olson is a Donald C. Bren Professor of Computer and Information Science at UC Irvine's Bren School of Information and Computer Science. She is a past program co-chair of CHI and CSCW. She is a recipient of the CHI lifetime achievement award and is also a member of the CHI academy. Prior to joining the Bren School she was the Richard W. Pew Collegiate Professor in HCI at the University of Michigan's School of Information, where she also served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.
Anita Sarma, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, antz@cs.cmu.edu
Anita Sarma is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her Ph.D from University of California, Irvine. Her research interests includes investigating coordination issues in distributed software development, with emphasis on the role of awareness in facilitating coordination.
Bhargav Sriprakash, CADcorporation, USA, bhargavs@umich.edu
Bhargav Sriprakash is a principal of CADcorporation, an Ann Arbor start-up devoted to the production of large-scale virtual worlds. Their core product is Vmerse, a technology for creating virtual environments based on the physical campuses of universities and colleges. These environments are used in admissions, fund raising, and facility planning. The University of Michigan currently operates a production virtual campus using the Vmerse platform.
Gina Venolia, Microsoft Research, USA, gina.venolia@microsoft.com
Gina Venolia is a senior researcher in the Human Interactions in Programming group at Microsoft Research. Her research interests center on the flow of knowledge within software development teams. She has served on the PCs of several conferences including CHI and CSCW, and organized a well-attended and energetic workshop at CSCW 2006 on large-scale software development.
Patrick Wagstrom, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, pwagstro@andrew.cmu.edu
Patrick Wagstrom is a Ph.D. candidate in the departments of Engineering and Public Policy and Computation, Organizations and Society at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on communication and coordination in software engineering with a special focus open source and distributed software development.
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