Task dependencies drive the need to coordinate work activities. We describe a technique for using automatically generated archival data to compute coordination requirements, i.e., who must coordinate with whom to get the work done. Analysis of data from a large software development project revealed that coordination requirements were highly volatile, and frequently extended beyond team boundaries. Congruence between coordination requirements and coordination activities shortened development time. Developers, particularly the most productive ones, changed their use of electronic communication media over time, achieving higher congruence. We discuss practical implications of our technique for the design of collaborative and awareness tools. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Groups and Organization Interfaces – collaborative computing, computersupported

There are a variety of digital tools for enabling people who are physically separated by time and space to communicate and collaborate. Widespread use of some of these tools, such as instant messaging and group chat, coupled with the increasingly availability of wireless Internet access, have created new opportunities for using these collaboration tools by people sharing physical spaces in real time. Such ‘digital backchannels ’ affect interactions and experiences in a variety of ways, depending on the spaces, the participants, and the relationships among them. We focus on the space of an academic conference, a physical space designed for voluntary participation by people with shared interests, seeking to share knowledge and connect with others. We present and analyze system logs and interview data from a recent conference, highlight some of the advantages and disadvantages experienced both by those who used the tools and by those who did not, and discuss implications and considerations for future use and research.

How much history of the dialogue should a chat client include? Some chat clients have minimized the dialogue history to deploy the space for other purposes. A theory of conversational coordination suggests that stripping away history raises the cost of conversational grounding, creating problems for both writers and readers. To test this proposition and inform design, we conducted an experiment in which one person instructed another on how to solve a simple puzzle. Participants had chat clients that showed either a single conversational turn or six of them. Having the dialogue history helped collaborators communicate efficiently and led to faster and better task performance. The dialogue history was most useful when the puzzles were more linguistically complex and when instructors could not see the work area. We present evidence of participants adapting their discourse to partially compensate for deficits in the communication media. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.5.3 [Information

This paper reports on the emergent use of lightweight text chat to provide important grounding and facilitation information in a large, distributed, ad-hoc group of researchers participating in a live experiment. The success of chat in this setting suggests a critical re-examination and extension of Clark and Brennan’s work on grounding in communication. Specifically, it is argued that there are some settings characterized by reduced information and clarification needs, where the use of extremely lightweight tools (such as basic text chat) can be sufficient for achieving common ground – even when conversational participants are unknown to each other. Theoretical and design implications are then presented. ACM Classification H5.3. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):

We provide a survey on security features and threats to existing Instant Messaging (IM) networks and discuss how currently available systems fail to provide adequate security in light of existing threats. Our discussion and analysis provide a starting point from which to advance academic research in the area of secure IM systems, enabling security improvement in the longer term.

We present a study of the effects of instant messaging (IM) on individuals ’ management of work across multiple collaborative projects. Groups of four participants completed four web design tasks. Each participant worked on two tasks, each task with a different partner who was either co-located or remote, connected via IM. In one condition, each participant had one co-located and one remote partner. In a second condition, both partners were remote. We examined communication, division of labor, and task performance as a function of condition. The results indicated that nearly all participants divided their time unequally between projects, but less unequally in the remote/remote condition. In the co-located/remote condition, participants favored the task with the co-located partner. The results show that the effects of IM differ depending on people’s multiple tasks are distributed across space. We propose a new IM interface that promotes awareness of multiple collaborators on multiple tasks.

One of the limitations in traditional instant messaging platforms is that they predominantly rely on text messages as the primary form of expression. This paper presents FAIM, an instant messaging application that analyzes a person's facial affect in real time and augments the dialogue with an emotive character representing them. Throughout the paper, we identify a number of design challenges that arise from integrating facial affect into instant messaging, and discuss how each of these issues is addressed in the design of FAIM. We also present a use case scenario of how FAIM works.

Abstract: This paper reports on a four-week study of the usage of myTeam, a prototype that provides availability awareness for distributed work groups through the use of sensor data. Automatically detected information such as presence or absence in office, network connection, mouse and keyboard activity is conveyed along with optional user-added information such as “gone for the day”, or “do not disturb”. The information allows visualization of the availability of colleagues, and supports selection of the best mode for communication for the given context. The results of the study are reported to inform the design of future availability awareness systems.

There is a growing interest in applying market mechanisms to tackle everyday communication problems such as communication interruptions and communication overload. Prior analytic proofs have shown that a signaling and screening mechanism can make senders and recipients of messages better off. However, these proofs make certain assumptions that do not hold in real world environments. For example, these prior works assume that there are no transaction costs in a communication market and that monetary incentives are the only motivators in communication between strangers. This research builds upon prior analytic work and empirically tests the validity of the claim that signaling and screening mechanisms will improve communication welfare. Our results show that while these types of markets can indeed improve communication welfare, a simpler, less expressive fixed-price market can lead to higher welfare than a more expressive, variable pricing and screening mechanism. Findings from this study also provide valuable insights for technology designs. For example, these results suggest the need to reduce cognitive overhead in using communication markets. Author Keywords Computer mediated communication, market mechanisms, empirical studies, economics ACM Classification Keywords H5.3. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Group and Organization Interfaces – computer supported cooperative work

Abstract. Internet technology holds significant potential to respond to business, educational, and social needs, but this same technology poses fundamentally new challenges for research ethics. To reason about ethical questions, researchers and ethics review boards typically rely on dichotomies like “public ” versus “private,” “published ” vs. “unpublished, ” and “anonymous ” vs. “identified. ” However, online, these categories are blurred, and the underlying concepts require reinterpretation. How then are we to reason about ethical dilemmas about research on the Internet? To date, most work in this area has been grounded in a combination of theoretical analysis and experience gained by people in the course of conducting Internet research. In these studies, ethical insight was a welcome byproduct of research aimed primarily at exploring other ends. However, little work has used experimental methods for the primary purpose of contributing to our reasoning about the ethics of research online. In this paper, we discuss the role of empirical data in helping us answer questions about Internet research ethics. As an example, we review results of one study in which we gauged participant expectations of privacy in public chatrooms (Hudson & Bruckman, 2004b). Using an