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7 be stored, searched, browsed, replayed, annotated, visualized, restructured, and re-contextualized (ibid). Digital socialization systems need, however, to carefully balance visibility with privacy since excessive visibility can put users off (Erickson and Kellogg 2000). Reputation Digital reputation systems hold information about individuals and their actions, and make it available to the members of an online community. These systems are motivated by the reluctance of users to cooperate and interact unless they have information about how others have behaved (Connel and Mendelsohn 2001, Girgensohn and Lee 2002). Jensen et al. (2002) describe five types of reputation systems: (1) ranking, (2) rating, (3) collaborative filtering, (4) explicit peer- based, and (5) implicit peer-based. The first two are self-explanatory. Collaborative filtering systems match reviewers to the users based on the similarity of past ratings and users’ likes and dislikes. In an explicit peer-based system, users choose to interact with other people according to the similarity of information and ratings given by friends. In an implicit peer-based system, users value information about whom their friends interacted with (Jensen et al. 2002).
Social awareness means understanding how others’ activities provide a context to one’s own activity (Dourish and Bellotti 1992, Tollmar et al. 1996). It can include cues about availability (whether an individual is actively involved in a discussion), situation (whether an individual is busy, away, or at lunch), and knowledge (whether an individual has or knows someone with specific knowledge). Social awareness cues can be conveyed using sound and graphics, or a mixture of both (Gaver 1992, Isaacs et al. 2002, Tollmar et al. 1996). Passive cues can be pulled by the user when s/he searches for those cues, whereas active cues automatically notify the user of certain awareness cues that the user has opted to receive (Tollmar et al. 1996). Erickson and
8 Kellogg (2000) suggest three approaches for developing social awareness: (1) Realist: projecting social information from the physical domain straight into or through the digital system (e.g., teleconferencing); (2) Mimetic: re-representing social cues from the physical world, as literally as possible, into the digital world (e.g., virtual reality); and (3) Abstract: using graphic-based social proxies to portray salient aspects of social information. Social proxies have four basic characteristics (Erickson and Kellogg 2000): (1) Figure-ground: the context is represented by large geometric shapes in which smaller representations of users are embedded; (2) Relative movement: the location and movement of the smaller representations relative to the large context reflects cues like presence and activity through time; (3) Public not personal: everyone who looks at the same proxy sees the same representation, and users cannot customize their own view of the proxy; and (4) Third-person perspective: everyone looking at the proxy sees herself represented as other people would see her.
Synchronous media (chat, video-audio links) are capable of delivering immediate feedback, whereas asynchronous media (e-mail, bulletin boards) can deliver delayed feedback (Daft and Lengel 1986). Synchronous systems facilitate the creation of ‘common grounding’ because users can clarify misunderstandings and the misinterpretation of ideas in real-time (Clark and Schaefer 1989). Asynchronous systems provide history and represent contexts (Hollan and Stornetta 1992). Semi-synchronous systems appear to encourage a greater range of responses than synchronous or asynchronous mechanisms (Hollan and Stornetta 1992). Asynchronous and semi-synchronous systems provide persistence. Persistence means that social systems exist beyond the immediate here and now, which allows users to construct and develop interdependence relationships beyond the immediate interaction (Karsten 2003).
9 We still know little of how CSCW systems can support the work of virtual engineering design teams, except for applications to software development (e.g., Zaychik and Regli 2003). It is plausible to assume, however, that the use of digital media will grow across most engineering design sectors. On the one hand, young blood entering engineering professions are ‘digitally- native.’ On the other, commercial competition and resource scarcity are forcing design consultants to outsource work to countries where qualified labor is available and cheap. Faced with high travel costs (and times), virtual teams need to be able to resort to digital communication. This premise informs the work presented next.
The cross-fertilization of empirical findings from an exploratory case study on exchanges of tacit knowledge across architecture-engineering-construction (AEC) teams (El-Tayeh and Gil 2007) and CSCW literature generated a set of specifications for developing a digital socialization system. We next summarize key insights. First, we observed extensive use of e-mail to support knowledge exchange despite its inadequacy to promote rapid responses and inform the sender about the receivers’ availability. This insight led us to specifying a system that supported synchronous communication and visibility. Second, practitioners experienced the inadequacy of ‘yellow pages’-type digital interfaces to help individuals search for subject-matter experts. This insight led us to specifying a system that provided a more intuitive graphical representation of individuals’ profiles. Third, practitioners noted the inadequacy of synchronous communication (meetings, phone calls) to disseminate know-how outside the conversation loop. This insight led us to specifying a system that could code and save dialogues into a searchable database.
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