"(...) frequent challenge to theory building from cases concerns case selection. Some readers make the faulty assumption that the cases should be representative of some population, as are data in large-scale hypothesis testing research. In other words, they ask, How can the theory generalize if the cases aren’t representative?(...) clarify that the purpose of the research is to develop theory, not to test it, and so theoretical (not random or stratified) sampling is appropriate. Theoretical sampling simply means that cases are selected because they are particularly suitable for illuminating and extending relationships and logic among constructs. (...) cases sampled for theoretical reasons, such as revelation of an unusual phenomenon, replication of findings from other cases, contrary replication, elimination of alternative explanations, and elaboration of the emergent theory."
"The person figured here is not an autonomous, rational actor but an unfolding, shifting biography of culturally and materially specific experiences, relations, and possibilities inflected by each next encounter (...) in uniquely particular ways." (Lucy Suchman, Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions, 2009, 281)
Jun 26, 2009
case(s) sampling
connecting «distractions» with literature
Jun 11, 2009
weblog as PIM tool
"Using weblogs as a knowledge base, and then as an instrument to support PhD work, creates synergies, as the effort that goes into creating and organising entries [posts] later pays off by providing more ways for retrieval, and a better quality of the material to be reused. In turn, the experience of reuse or unexpected discoveries that older posts bring stimulates putting more effort in creating new entries." (p. 8)
"The connection between the functionalities of weblog technologies and their uses for personal information management needs further examination. The similarity between the roles my weblog plays in supporting my work and those of paper collections in other studies indicate a need to explore the affordances of weblog technologies from PIM perspective and possibilities of learning from blogging when designing other tools, in particularly those that support managing information scraps that do not fit current tools" (p. 9)
Jun 8, 2009
different perceptions of academic spaces
Jun 5, 2009
Jun 4, 2009
desktop research
- instead of the «type of file» icons, richer visual aids are given: book covers, actual display of photos, first pages of documents, groups of working information (including the tools that were used to manipulate that information)
- the integration of a scrapbook were one can lay out documents and make scrapping like anotations: althought I'm convince that it will not substitute the paper scrappings in support for work, it nevertheless helps visualize work-in-progress needs when messing around with ideas. Remember that scrappings have also a social dimension during meetings: they have an important place during brainstorming, think-out-loud, and collaboration gatherings. Also, one of the places for scrappings is very often walls (either by whiteboards, placards), which can be related to the fact that individuals want to be in permament visual contact with that «work-in-progress». But this is just a feeling that needs to be verified
- will it be available regradless of OS used?
- will it require manual adding?
- can the individual use any information format, regardless of previous OS / application / artifact?
- since information is social, is it easy to share with team members, post on the web, transfer to other spaces (like printing on a large paper the scapbooking to hang on a wall) sharing with team members that have different OS or browsers?
Bergman, O., Tucker, S., Beyth-Marom, R., Cutrell, E., and Whittaker, S. (2009). It's not that important: demoting personal information of low subjective importance using GrayArea. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY, pp. 269-278.
Jun 3, 2009
storing artefacts
Begtrup, G. E., Gannett, W., Yuzvinsky, T. D., Crespi, V. H., and Zettl, A. (2009). Nanoscale reversible mass transport for archival memory. Nano Letters, 9(5):1835-1838.
Jun 2, 2009
integrating flows of communication
What is a wave?
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
May 14, 2009
Time costs and disconnectedness in PIM systems
"We also observed that users often do not respect the traditional boundaries of PIM — for example, by mashing contact information into calendar appointments and calling it a to-do. This may be yet another instance of users optimizing for rapid capture: the time cost of interacting with multiple traditional PIM applications is even more substantial than that needed for one. But we believe another issue is in play: that they feel the information is a unit, and do not wish to partition it among multiple disconnected applications, where it will be harder to view and retrieve as a unit. This indicates a significant need for a more flexible data model and user model in PIM systems." (p. 1480)
May 7, 2009
information distillation
PS [Oct 14, 2009] note to self: see Webtrendmap model on «information curators» (via GSiemens Newsletter) and also Mopsos model back in 2004 on blogs (as information elicitation) for CoPs formation (end of post, link to image model).
Apr 24, 2009
paper in knowledge work
"As we write this book, we have paper all around us. On the desks are stacks of articles, rough notes, outlines, and printed e-mail message. On the wall are calendars, Post-it notes, and photographs. On the shelves are journals, books, and magazines. The filling cabinets and the wastebasket are also full of paper. Among all this sit our computers, on which the composition takes place."
"Paper now populates not only the workplace but also the home office and the mobile worker's briefcase."(p. 208)
"Os novos trabalhadores do conhecimento deixarão cada vez mais de usar canetas e papel, passando a autenticar trabalhos e decisões através de assinaturas electrónicas e a trabalhar lado a lado com processos decisórios automatizados por regras e algoritmos computacionais. (...) todos reconhecerão as tarefas substantivas e mais ou menos críticas que lhes são cada vez mais solicitadas neste novo ambiente (electrónico) de trabalho." (p.7)
[my rought translation: "The new knowledge workers will increasingly stop using pen and paper, and start authenticating work and decisions through electronic signatures and working side by side with automated decision making processes by rules and automated computer algorithms. (...) all will recognize the substantive and more or less critical tasks that are increasingly required of them in this new (electronic) environment of work. "]
"To answer these questions and others, an updated and expanded How Much Information? (HMI) research program is underway. The initial report will be the first in a three-year research program, sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and seven companies, AT&T, Cisco, IBM, Intel, LSI, Oracle, and Seagate."
Mar 27, 2009
«Infrastructures» definition by EU Commission
Importance of Research Infrastructures for Europe
- [definition:] “Research Infrastructure” are facilities, resources and related services that are used by the scientific community to conduct top-level research in their respective fields. This definition covers: major scientific equipment or sets of instruments; knowledge based-resources such as collections, archives or structured scientific information; enabling ICT-based infrastructures such as Grid, computing, software and communications. Such Research Infrastructures may be “single-sited” or “distributed” (a network of resources).
- [examples of what constitutes infrastructures:] Examples of Research Infrastructures range from synchrotrons, telescopes, high power lasers, or high performance computers, to research vessels, bio-banks, brain imaging facilities, clean rooms, data archives, etc.
- [contributions of infrastructures to EU Research:] High quality, internationally open Research Infrastructures are necessary tools to carry out top quality research. They contribute to extending the frontiers of knowledge, supporting industrial innovation, exchanging and transmitting knowledge, and training the next generation of top researchers. Therefore, Research Infrastructures are at the core of the “knowledge triangle”, combining Research, Education and Innovation.
Mar 17, 2009
artifacts interconnections with personal life
(*) Jung, H., Stolterman, E., Ryan, W., Thompson, T., and Siegel, M. (2008). Toward a framework for ecologies of artifacts: how are digital artifacts interconnected within a personal life?. In Proceedings of the 5th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer interaction: Building Bridges (Lund, Sweden, October 20 - 22, 2008). NordiCHI '08, vol. 358. ACM, New York, NY, 201-210.
Mar 16, 2009
faster and lighter batteries
Mar 15, 2009
Mar 8, 2009
losses in «information transitions»: time, errors, sync
"Under the old patient tracking system, a team of four healthcare workers would visit more than 100 health care centers and labs twice a week to record patient test results on paper sheets. A couple of times a week, they returned to their main office to transcribe those results onto two sets of forms per patient -- one for the doctors and one for the health care administrators.From start to finish, that process took an average of more than three weeks per patient. There was also greater potential for error because information was copied by hand so many times.With the new system, health care workers enter all of the lab data into their handheld devices, using medical software designed for this purpose. When the workers return to their office, they sync up the PDAs with their computers. " [taken from Harvard-MIT Health Science and Technology News & Events, Researchers use handheld devices to monitor TB patients in Peru]
Mar 6, 2009
mobility concept
"The train and airline infrastructures are highly integrated with ICTs such as electronic reservation systems and traffic control systems. It is therefore important to recognize that the fundamental nature of technological revolution in the late twentieth century is the dynamic and complex interplay between old and new technologies and between the reconfiguration of the technological fabric and its domestication (...).This paper concerns the concept of mobility, which manifests such a transformation of our social lives combining new and old technologies. It is now widely argued that our life styles have become increasingly mobile in the sense that the speed of transportation and hence geographical reach within a given time span is dramatically augmented by modern technological developments and sophistication such as train and airplane systems."
Multiple computer devices
"The number of computing devices that people use is growing. To gain a better understanding of why and how people use multiple devices, we interviewed 27 people from academia and industry. From these interviews we distill four primary findings. First, associating a user's activities with a particular device is problematic for multiple device users because many activities span multiple devices. Second, device use varies by user and circumstance; users assign different roles to devices both by choice and by constraint. Third, users in industry want to separate work and personal activities across work and personal devices, but they have difficulty doing so in practice Finally, users employ a variety of techniques for accessing information across devices, but there is room for improvement: participants reported managing information across their devices as the most challenging aspect of using multiple devices. We suggest opportunities to improve the user experience by focusing on the user rather than the applications and devices; making devices aware of their roles; and providing lighter-weight methods for transferring information, including synchronization services that engender more trust from users."
Mar 3, 2009
(behind the) information made simple
Feb 23, 2009
Distraction(s)...
- open another pdf
- find papers from the same author
- search database for (new concept found, .... ) before finishing the reading
- ... constant switching between reading pdf and other (available/competing) information
Jan 21, 2009
Gender self-perceived differences in digital literacy
"Our data suggest that overall men and women do not differ significantly in their abilities to find various types of information online. However, we do find that women are much more likely to shortchange themselves when it comes to self-perception of their online skills. The gender effects appear to be significant with respect to self-perceived skill levels. Our findings are consistent with Correll’s (2001) work, which found that net of actual skills, young women are less likely to perceive themselves as skilled in these domains, which in turn biases their propensity to pursue math- and science-related careers. Similarly, we find that net of actual skills, women tend to rate their online skills lower than do men. Women’s lower self-assessment vis-a-vis web-use ability may affect significantly the extent of their online behavior and the types of uses to which they put the medium." (p. 444)
Jan 20, 2009
ICT changing the meaning of being «at work»
"Nomadic use of ICT will challenge the meaning of ‘at work’ Nomadicity will make work patterns less fixed in time and space. This will create major challenges for both employers and employees. Making working life and education more sustainable in terms of working and studying from home intensifies the need for realising the nomadicity that ICT can provide."
Dec 17, 2008
On scrapnotes and «technologizing» everything
Dec 14, 2008
scattered data among artifacts
- citeUlike - tool used for biblioghraphic collection. Problems encountered through time concern: a) not having access to some of the publications but able to keep reference; b) duplicated items due to encounters in different databases; c) limited or unavailable internet access interfere with information management practices
- infotransitions - tool for embedding other tools, work-in-progress, active links, communication with supervisor, thoughts, reflextions & draft writings. Problems encountered through time: a) limited or unavailable internet access interfere with information work behaviour & PIM practices; b) private space does not allow for interactions with peers or people exploring/interested in same topics; c) althought meant as a way for «being» in permanent contact with supervisor, allowing him to «observe» recent research concerns, it's barely used as such
- del.icio.us - started to use this tool to allow my «favorites» to be computer independent, and later to help manage team search efforts for project work. Problems limited to unavailable internet access that temper with access and PIM practices.
- flickr - Although my main photos & picture are locally stored (my computer, moveable hard drive .... (...)
- notebooks - one of the most stable practices I have since I made my first research attemps (back in 1999, expatriation cycle, IPL/ESCS. During the changes that occured in this last year in my working infrastructures (uncertain internet access, reduce mobility & communications due to financial constrains and disapeering workplace & homeplace), I used my notebooks and rely on them much more then before (for noting my private research notes I was using this blog, wich I used also to illicite all the other web spaces I use (wrote above). As a tool it's very portable, no need interfaces to access content, no re-charging needs, it's not an intruder, I can carry it with me all the time. On the negative aspects are the finite space available and the inherited need to change notebooks once I use the last page. The transition for a new book brings me the need to carry during some time 2 notebooks with me... and finding past notes is not always quick. Moving the notes to text adds also aditinal work.
- citeseerX (a free scientific database, focusing primarily on the literature in computer and information science)
- myACM (2 years paid subscription, focusing primarely on computer sciences and dessiminating practices)
- Wiley (group publisher, aggregates diverse publishing materials from diferent areas of research)
- LibraryThing (some of my personal books with interface for my Amazon aquisitions & account)
- [stopped using b-on because I could not store my papers in there, only queries, and also because of problems with exporting found results... and because there are other places I can use to accomplish the job]
(antecipating) Place in mobile work
"Mobile workers often need to configure their activies to take account of the different places they find themselves. This can involve considerable ‘juggling’ of their plans, humble office equipment, and their co-workers. In turn mobile workers change places, as they appropriate different sites for their work. Specifically, technology allows for the limited re-appropriation of travel and leisure sites as places for work (such as trains and cafés). Time is also an important practical concern for mobile workers. While mobile work may be seen as relatively flexible, fixed temporal structures allow mobile workers to ‘accomplishment synchronicity ’ with others."
Dec 11, 2008
"(...) a broadened view of how we might undertake personal digital archiving, both broadly (for consumers) and more narrowly (for academics, scholars, researchers, and students); some of these issues may also carry over into the realm of institutional archiving, although that is not my aim."link by email from JAC
The myth of the paperless office
"Contrary to notions of paperless offices floated in the late 80s and early 90s, the consumption of office paper has gone up substantially in the recent years, especially following the move to laser/inkjet printers from dot matrix printers. Paper use in offices has further risen with the increasing speed of laser printing coupled with its decreasing cost. Each year, almost 500 billion copies are produced on copiers in the United States; nearly 15 trillion copies are produced on copiers, printers, and multi-function machines. (Source: XeroxParc)."
Dec 10, 2008
Opportunities in information behaviour research
"Studies explaining how information behaviour is related to varying actions and contexts generating it, or how the use of various tools or services is related to information behaviour are necessary and can build on the categorizations mentioned. Both types of studies are needed."
Sep 26, 2008
infoplace or infospace needs for manipulation
"Individuals need a “place” or a “space” in which to assemble and manipulate information resources for their own purposes, with flexible tools that they can adapt to their practices, skills, habits, and artistry."
Sep 22, 2008
Information overload
"What is information overload? 27 instant messages. 4 text messages. 17 phone calls. 98 work emails. 52 personal emails. 76 email listserv messages. 14 social network messages. 127 social network status updates. 825 RSS feed updates. 30 pages from a book. 5 letters. 11 pieces of junk mail. 1 periodical issue. 3 hours of radio. 1 hour of television. That, my friends, is information overload."
ethics
Sep 15, 2008
the knowledge worker information behaviour
"Knowledge workers do not carry much written information with them when they travel and rarely consult their filed information when working in their offices. Their desks are cluttered and seemingly function as a spatial holding pattern for current inputs and ideas." [186]
"It seems that knowledge workers use physical space, such as desks or floors, as a temporary holding pattern for inputs and ideas which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use (...)" [p. 187]
Sep 12, 2008
IS & ethnographic research
Aug 12, 2008
Information Literate & Logo
"To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information. The information literate individuals are those who have learned how to learn” (ALA, 1998)More details and glossary in Guidelines on Information literacy for Lifelong learning (Final draft by Jesús Lau), namely difference between skills and competencies.
Jul 4, 2008
on the use of «labels» for writing research
"(...) the terms partner and participant, may perhaps be regarded as the most inclusive of all as they construct the individual as a member of the research team and an active player in the research process."When addressing participants in a research, McKechnie et al (2006) suggest to use the words «participants» or «partners» since it acknowledges their active paper in the research process and denotes a more centralized role in the research than the use of words such as «subjects» or «objects» that distance the researched from the research. Also, there was a correlation with the data collection methods used where the participant label was used:
"The important role of the user or research participant was evident in the method section of some of the papers. Some data collection practices reported by authors were designed to bring, and were effective at bringing, researchers closer to users and capturing their perspectives. These included open-ended interviews, face-to-face interviews, close interaction over an extended period of time, audio-recording of interviews, full transcription of audio-recorded interviews and participant checking. Conversely, data collection practices such as transaction log analysis or the use of secondary survey data served to distance the researcher from the researched."The core of the paper is concerned not only with the labels a researcher uses, but how this labels might reflect how the researcher sees the participants. To be avoided, specially if one is using the qualitative paradigm, reports that address participants by numbers, by letters, by pie charts, etc., not giving voice to the participants.
This is one of the differences that might be an issue when presenting my research in an engineers context. They might say that I used a lot of quotations and little aggregated information. Also, it may reflect how I see the world of engineers: my pre-conceptions of what it is expected of my research in the context of the Department I'm going to present my PhD.
Jun 27, 2008
The Petabyte Age
So where is the method? The scientific rigour? If what they state was true, than scientist would be obsolete. Scientific method is not only about finding correlations in data. The scientific method allows for a number of triangulations: data, methods & theory. Scientific method starts from choosing what kind of data to look for, how to collect it, how to analyze, how to interpret the data.
Anyhow, it shows that the perception that having access to large amounts of data can suffice to make science :S
Apr 17, 2008
Infrastructure for interoperability
"Either as individual institutions or a part of consortia, we are all working on improving existing (local) infrastructures and establishing new systems, but moving forward we need to be absolutely certain that these effort are all tightly-linked and easily interoperable (e.g. leveraging community protocols, suites of standards, etc). Infrastructure is used here to include people with appropriate skill sets, systems, standards and protocol suites, and even policy frameworks."
Apr 15, 2008
Homo mobilis
- Nomads at last
- Working from anywhere
- The new oases
- Family ties
- Location, location, location
- A world of witnesses
- Homo mobilis
Apr 3, 2008
Tracking Transition
Mar 16, 2008
memex
Mar 8, 2008
ecotone
Define: ecotone
"A narrow and fairly sharply defined transition zone between two or more different communities. Such edge communities are typically species-rich. (Allaby 1998)" www.oup.com.au/orc/demo_glossary.aspx
Feb 28, 2008
genetics as «pure information»
"RICHARD DAWKINS: What has happened is that genetics has become a branch of information technology. It is pure information. It's digital information. It's precisely the kind of information that can be translated digit for digit, byte for byte, into any other kind of information and then translated back again. This is a major revolution. I suppose it's probably 'the' major revolution in the whole history of our understanding of ourselves."
Feb 25, 2008
PIM - 10 years after first study
"This study revisits managers who were first interviewed more than 10 years ago to identify their personal information management (PIM) behaviors. The purpose of this study was to see how advances in technology and access to the Web may have affected their PIM behaviors. PIM behaviors seem to have changed little over time, suggesting that technological advances are less important in determining how individuals organize and use information than are the tasks that they perform. Managers identified increased volume of e-mail and the frustration with having to access multiple systems with different, unsynchronized passwords as their greatest PIM challenges. Organizational implications are discussed."
Feb 21, 2008
downsizing & (in)communication at work
in Kwon, D.; Oh, W. & Jeon, S. (2007). Broken Ties: The Impact of Organizational Restructuring on the Stability of Information-Processing Networks. Journal of Management Information Systems, vol. 24(1).
Jan 10, 2008
implosion of the world on the individual
"Human extensibility and the implosion of the world on the individual (time-space compression) represent simultaneously opportunity and threat - the opportunity to communicate and engage in dialogue and commerce, and the threat of besiegement and incapacity to absorb or cope with relentless volumes of information calling for attention. Clearly, the temporal aspects of this problem require abilities to engage and disengage in one's connectivity to the world - to network selectively or to broadcast universally, as required."
Jan 9, 2008
Information Scraps
"In this paper we describe information scraps -- a class of personal information whose content is scribbled on Post-it notes, scrawled on corners of random sheets of paper, buried inside the bodies of e-mail messages sent to ourselves, or typed haphazardly into text files. Information scraps hold our great ideas, sketches, notes, reminders, driving directions, and even our poetry."
Jan 4, 2008
Recover list - on campus:
different PIM's for different Workers
"While we recognize that researchers have need for organizing and retrieving information and building archives to support their research, the results of our studies suggest that users in most work environments have different needs and priorities. A greater concern for such workers is the management of the growing volume and variety of ephemeral information that must be managed and utilized."
Dec 15, 2007
crossing organizational spaces
"Editors, email, and instant messaging were first widely used by students who later brought knowledge of their uses and effective practices into workplaces. Weblogs may make such a transition more quickly. We present a study of emergent blogging practices in a corporate setting. We attended meetings, read email, documents, and Weblogs, and interviewed 38 people loggers, infrastructure administrators, attorneys, public relations specialists, and executives. We found an experimental, rapidly-evolving terrain marked by growing sophistication about balancing personal, team, and corporate incentives and issues"
Dec 6, 2007
From Stationary Work Support to Mobile Work Support
"In this paper we propose a theoretical mobile work support framework and use this framework to analyze four fundamental aspects of mobile work: mobile workers, mobile tasks, mobile context, and mobile technology. The key differences between office work support and mobile work are also highlighted."
ANT and Integration of Knowledge
"As we move away from studying laboratories, institutions, and sociotechnical networks to the more loosely coordinated technical exchanges that have begun to seem as important to scientific knowledge production and engineering work, an ecological view of knowledge re-emerges as a powerful metaphor for our discipline."
Dec 5, 2007
Nov 24, 2007
farewell
Jul 29, 2007
[self] information behaviour
Looking for information, or following a lead or a clue, depends on:
- the time/place where one is - different places allow different accesses to different spaces, namely information spaces (ex: if i was working in INETI and not in my house, i could have accessed the papers posted below. Instead, i have to leave a «to do» message to myself, with enough elements to recover it when I am back to INETI, or UMinho, or other place where i am granted access to that piece of information... or buy myself an entrance and have my own almost-independent-place password). What's different about my scenario experience in 2007 and that of someone 10 years ago? The time of access to information, the amount of information available, the tools, the infrastructure... the status of the work (in this case, the PhD work). Information space's time/place dependent.
- the tools one has at the moment (and the supporting infrastructure needed for the tools to work). Information space's tool dependent. Need to explore if this kind of information spaces might configure also opportunistic access to information.
- formato of the information (and the medium required to interpret the information). Information space's format dependent.
- previous information to access information - examples can include: passwords and user IDs, bookmarks, reference lists, memos... since not every information is readily available, sometimes we need other pieces of information to be able to access the information we want. Information space's access dependent.
- passing the information without having access to it - if one of the persons that has access to my blog, happens to be in a place where access is granted, this message might be confusing: here i am saying that i can not see something that i give the link, and yet, if that person clicks the link, might get the complete paper. Information space's mediation dependent.
- interpret and make sense of the information around - this kind of information is best observed when one person moves from one country to another one, with a different language. This was of critical importance in the case of expatriates, when they where assigned to another country [refer to BCP study]. Information space's [code]/language dependent.
- having previous knowledge - «Quem não sabe é como quem não vê». One can read all the words in a book and still not «see» the information contain in the book. Later, when one reads the book again with more knowledge on the book's subject, one can «see» the information while reading the very same words. Information space's knowledge dependent.
- time/place
- tool
- format
- access
- mediation
- [code] language
- knowledge
Gwizdka, J. (2000). Timely reminders: a case study of temporal guidance in PIM and email tools usage. In CHI '00 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (The Hague, The Netherlands, April 01 - 06, 2000). CHI '00. ACM Press, New York, NY, 163-164:
"We describe our research in progress that explores the use of personal information management (PIM) tools in time and attempts to establish temporal attributes of information. We report on a short field study undertaken to examine relations between tools and information life-cycle. We propose four information types: prospective, ephemeral, working and retrospective. We outline relationships between PIM tools, email and different types of information. We use this framework to explain problems observed with handling information."Wang, Y., van de Kar, E., and Meijer, G. (2005). Designing mobile solutions for mobile workers: lessons learned from a case study. In Proceedings of the 7th international Conference on Electronic Commerce (Xi'an, China, August 15 - 17, 2005). ICEC '05, vol. 113. ACM Press, New York, NY, 582-589:
"Based on recent literature of systems engineering, business engineering, information systems design, and project/process management, an analysis framework is presented that assesses the design approach of workforce solutions. An exploratory case based in the Netherlands was studied under the framework. The results indicate a need for a design approach that integrates "soft system thinking", collaborative business engineering activities, and process management strategy. The study provides a basis for further research to design mobile workforce solutions."
Jul 27, 2007
Equiparação a Bolseira
Periodo de equiparada a bolseira, sem vencimento: 01.Jul.2007 a 30.Jun.2010
Jul 26, 2007
mobile professional work
"The results of the fieldwork in Tokyo clearly demonstrate that the conventional understanding of mobility, rigidly confined to geographic aspects, does not suffice for grasping the diverse realities of dynamic work practices of contemporary professional workers, in particular mobile professionals. Their work practices exhibit not only an extensive geographical movement in daily work activities but also intense interaction with a wide range of people through both physical and virtual interaction means. They also show flexible operation as an independent unit of business that can be flexibly mobilized by the firms."
mobility as duality: fluidity & stability
"(...) we proposed setting an integrative approach that sees mobility as a duality and thus facilitate the practice of theorisation on mobility; namely, studying both fluidity and stability in contemporary society and work organizations and understanding their mutual influences. The next step will be to test our arguments in various real-world contexts. We believe that field studies with rich and contextualized data on the actualities of mobile devices’ usage and on the kind of mobility we engage in are essential to fertilize this embryonic research field." Pica, Daniele & Kakihara, Masao (2003). The duality of mobility: understanding fluid organizations and stable interaction. ECIS 2003. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)
emerging work practices of mobile professionals
"This thesis aims to offer a theoretical foundation for the concept of mobility, particularly in contemporary work contexts. With support of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in general and mobile technology in particular, contemporary work activities are increasingly distributed and dynamically conducted in various locations. In such an emerging work environment, maintaining a highly level of ‘mobility’ is becoming critical for contemporary workers, particularly for mobile professionals. Based on the theoretical considerations on the concept of mobility, this thesis empirically explores the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of mobile professionals’ work practices.
(...)
The mode of mobility is characterised not only by extensive geographical movement but also by operational flexibility and intense interaction in mobile professionals’ dynamic work activities. Based on these theoretical and empirical discussions, this thesis aims: 1) to theoretically underpin our understanding of mobility in contemporary work contexts; 2) to offer empirically grounded implications for the post-bureaucratic, fluid organising of work; and finally 3) to advance the ongoing debate on the dynamic interplay of work, organisation, and technology."
Jul 16, 2007
Europe cross-border transitions
In order to solve bureaucratic workers loss of time, the study managed to elicit the needed requirements for civil data information about individuals to «move» between countries. More details on the project in
IDABC - Case Study in the Euregio: Reducing the administrative burden:
"The study examined the administrative processes and requirements which had to be completed by the mobile citizens in these border areas. In doing this, it adopted the customers’ perspective, who wanted to reduce paper work and contacts with administrations. This study prepared the ground for the implementation of the trans-border eGovernment services that were able to improve the life of citizens wishing to move or take up activities in another Member State."(1) "The Mobility Case Study focused on municipalities of the Euregio Maas-Rhine, located at the point where the three countries Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands meet, on an area of nearly 11 000 km² and with a population of 3.7 million"
Jul 1, 2007
Information fragmentation
Defragmenting Information using the Syncables Framework
Jun 25, 2007
Context of Work
"I have been describing the context of work as a highly structured amalgam of informational, physical, and conceptual resources that go beyond the simple facts of who or what is where, when. Some of these resources are shared knowledge between participants, others have to do with the structure of the tasks a user is involved in and the different ways he or she has of coordinating the use of physical, informational and conceptual resources between himself, the work setting, and teammates."
"First, we must understand the factors which bias how people react to rich information spaces, loaded with entry points to more information. Second, we must unravel the complexities of the activity landscapes we interactively construct out of the resources we find and the tasks we have to perform. Finally, we must chart the diverse ways people coordinate their activity with their environment and with others."