The World Wide Web is growing quickly and being applied to many new types of communications. As a basis for studying organizational communications, Yates and Orlikowski (1992; Orlikowski & Yates, 1994) proposed using genres. They de � ned genres as “typi� ed communicative actions characterized by similar substance and form and taken in response to recurrent situations ” (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992, p. 299). They further suggested that communications in a new media would show both reproduction and adaptation of existing communicative genres as well as the emergence of new genres. We studied these phenomena on the World Wide Web by examining 1000 randomly selected Web pages and categorizing the type of genre represented. Although many pages recreated genres familiar from traditional media, we also saw examples of genres being adapted to take advantage of the linking and interactivity of the new medium and novel genres emerging to � t the unique communicative needs of the audience. We suggest that Web-site designers consider the genres that are appropriate for their situation and attempt to reproduce or adapt familiar genres.

he list. They have no principal objections against offering r elevant parts of it to the GPs. The NMD, however , who is r esponsible for the dr ug item list, has not yet decided what to do. NMD is not r epresented in the pr oject and will pr obably not offer the list fr ee of charge. The pharmacies ar e not willing to let the GPs have access to the dr ug item list as it is at the pr esent, because the list also contains information which the pharmacies want to keep for themselves (for instance about pr ofit margins on pharmaceutical pr oducts). The list thus has to be tailor ed to the needs of the GPs. The dr ug item list is updated every month, each time the version used by GPs has to be pr oduced. The vendors of the GPs' medical r ecord system need to be adapted to make use of the list. The lists can be distributed to GPs dir ectly from NMD or through the vendors of the GPs' systems. The GPs also have available a paper based catalogue, called the Common Catalogue, containing informat

This paper uses the growing volume of scholarly work on ‘water and politics ’ to conceptually and methodologically frame an approach to the social analysis of water resources management. This paper sets out the thrust and focus of such a ‘political sociology of water resources management’. The framing draws theoretical insights from sociology, development studies, and, obviously, water resources studies. The main theoretical inputs are: a) critical realism as the general ontological and epistemological foundation (Bhaskar, 1989; Sayer, 1984); b) sociological theory on structure-agency dynamics (Giddens, 1984; Archer, 1995) and the notion of public sociology (Burawoy, 2005a); development studies ’ understanding of the different meanings of ‘development ’ (Thomas, 2000); d) theory on politics and social power (Kerkvliet, 1990; Lukes, 2005); and e) my own reading of the water resources literature through the lens of the boundary concept of ‘water control’. The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 1 explains where the attempt at defining a field of water resources management studies in this particular way comes from. The section situates the field in relation to development sociology as the intersection of sociology and development studies; discusses how the notions of discipline and scientific community help to understand the field’s characteristics; and briefly presents my own intellectual trajectory as part of this account. Section 2 discusses the object of a political sociology of water resources management. That discussion has four

Medical care involves intense collaboration amongst a number of practitioners including physicians, nurses, and pharmacists Their work is concentrated on a single patient, and yet their activities, motivations, and concerns are very different We explore the use of a shared information system in helping these individuals coordinate their work In particular, we use the idea of a common information space to explore how the shared information is incorporated into the diverse work practices of an intensive care unit In addition to physical co-location, we found that providing information in many specialised representations is critical to managing their coordination. Unlike paper records, computer systems offer the ability to decouple information from its representations. This decoupling opens up a rich design space for systems that allow people with different interests, concerns and work practices to work together effectively.

Modern commercial organisations are facing pressures which have caused them to lose personnel. When they lose people, they also lose their knowledge. Organisations also have to cope with the internationalisation of business forcing collaboration and knowledge sharing across time and distance. Knowledge Management (KM) claims to tackle these issues. This paper looks at an area where KM does not offer sufficient support, that is, the sharing of knowledge that is not easy to articulate.

Abstract: Conventions are an important part of articulation work. They are a means to merge the various perspectives and workstyles that are involved in handling shared objects in CSCW. We report on convention use with a groupware system used in a government ministry. Our findings suggest that defining, establishing, and following conventions is aided by the visibility of other people's activities using the system. We describe a prototype that supports users in maintaining conventions by providing awareness facilities and an overview for shared objects.

We report on our ongoing study of using the genre of Web pages to facilitate information exploration. By genre, we mean socially recognized regularities of form and purpose in documents (e.g., a letter, a memo, a research paper). Our study had three phases. First, through a user study, we identified genres which most/least frequently meet searchers ' information needs. We found that certain genres are better suited for certain types of needs. We identified five (5) major groups of document genres that might be used in an interactive search tool that would allow genrebased navigation. We tried to balance the following dual objectives: 1) each group should be recognizable by a computer algorithm as easily as possible 2) each group has a better chance of satisfying particular types of information needs. Finally, we developed a novel user interface for a web searching that allows genre-based navigation through three major functionalities: 1) limiting search to specified genres 2) visualizing the hierarchy of genres discovered in the search results and 3) accepting user feedback on the relevancy of the specified genres.

Knowledge communities of all kinds have social and material practices for deciding what is known and who is to be trusted. In this paper, we address a specific kind of knowledge work, environmental planning, and a particular form of collaboration, the sharing of measurement data sets. We are interested in how trust is created; how trustability is assessed in the arm=s-length collaboration of sharing data sets; and how changes in technology interact with those practices of trust. We look at several elements of scientific practice that facilitate this sharing-- the publication system, communities of practice, boundary objects, and assemblages-- and discuss how a Web-based Digital Library might affect these elements and the knowledge work that they support.

Abstract. As current digital libraries are becoming more complex, the facilities provided by them will increase and the difficulty of learning associated with the complexity of using these facilities will also increase. In order to produce usable and useful interactive systems, designers need to ensure that good design features are incorporated into the systems, taking into consideration end-users' needs and cultural backgrounds. We carried out a study to investigate useful design features digital libraries should have. The study provides insights on the usability impact of digital libraries for task completion and end-users ' perceived impressions on the effectiveness of the digital libraries. The results also suggest that there is little provision on the interface to cater to end-users ' browsing and inter-cultural needs. Hence, this paper also discusses design guidelines for the design of user-centred digital libraries. 1

CSCW researchers have increasingly come to realize that the material work settings and the artifacts that populate them play a crucial role in the seamless and effective coordination and alignment of cooperative work. However, while the central role of artifacts in cooperative work has been recognized and applauded, the concept of artifact as used in CSCW is highly problematic as it often presumes mentalist notions of artifacts as simple vehicles of `information'. This paper is an attempt to depart from these notions. Based upon ethnographic studies of architectural work, we attempt to develop an understanding of the coordinative roles of artifacts which accounts for the multiplicity of artifacts and the complex interplay of particular practices and the specific material forms of artifacts.