CIorg-collective-intelligence-parc

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CIorg: Collective Intelligence In OrganizationsTools and Studies

Gregorio Convertino

Palo Alto Research Center

[email protected]

David R Millen

IBM [email protected]

Antonietta Grasso

Xerox Research Center Europe

[email protected]

Ed H. Chi

Palo Alto Research [email protected]

Giorgio De Michelis

University of Milano

[email protected]

ABSTRACT

Web 2.0 tools are penetrating into organizations after their

successful adoption in the consumer domain (e.g., social

networking; sharing of photos, videos, tags, or bookmarks;

wiki-based editing). Some of these new tools and the

collaborative processes that they support on the large scale

are often referred to as Collective Intelligence (CI). Theworkshop brings together leading researchers and designers

who are studying or developing CI tools aimed at workers

in organizations. The goal is to further articulate the

emerging research agenda for this new CSCW area and

define new observed forms of CI in organization. Studies of

communities, CI tools, and new methods are discussed.

Author Keywords

Collective intelligence, CSCW, organization, enterprise2.0

ACM Classification Keywords

H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):

Miscellaneous.

WORKSHOP OVERVIEWThe vision of enabling Collective Intelligence though

technology is not new. Early research on collaborative

computing or groupware during the 70s had already

proposed the possibility of allowing large groups of

dislocated people to carry out complex tasks by

collaborating and coordinating each others activities [9].

Over the last decade, this vision has become a feasible

reality; especially after interactive Web 2.0 tools were

introduced and adopted. Crowds of non-expert users

became able to generate their own content, share it, and

collectively organize it in tools such as Wikis, Blogs, Q&A

forums, del.icio.us, Flickr, and Twitter.

As these Web 2.0 tools became widely adopted, new forms

of collective intelligent behaviors have started to appear.

Systems like Wikipedia have allowed million of people to

collaboratively create and organize content with

mechanisms that do not fix a priori what the final outcome

will look like or by whom or when it should be produced.

Using tools such as del.icio.us or Flickr, large communitiesof users have shared, respectively, their bookmarks or their

photos, and have categorized them with user-defined tags.

As a result, rich corpora of shared annotated resources have

been created for these communities to reuse and augment.

These tools, the large-scale processes that they support, and

the value they produce are examples of what has been

recently referred to as Collective Intelligence (CI) [10]. The

research on these early successful examples of CI in the

wild (i.e., the public web) has started to highlight which

social and technical preconditions need to be in place for

such intelligent behaviors to appear (see research on

Wikipedia). The behaviors are referred to as intelligent

because they enhance peoples abilities to adapt and control

their social, informational, and physical environment.

As a follow up of a first workshop held at ACM CSCW

2010 [4] and the planning of a journal issue on the topic,

this workshop at ACM Group 2010 provides a forum for

discussing novel tools, studies, and methods for supporting

or investigating CI in organizations (e.g., large business

enterprises, government or military institutions, or local

communities). The workshop brings together leading

researchers and designers who are studying or developing

CI tools aimed at workers in organizations. The objective is

to further articulate the research agenda for this new area.

While we keep in the background general research

questions about CI (e.g., What defines the forms of CI thatare enabled by new web 2.0 technologies?) [10], we bring

to the foreground specific questions about CI in the

organization: What distinguishes these forms of CI from

those enabled in the consumer Web? What properties define

them? What conditions facilitate or hinder them? A longer

list of questions for the invited contributions is provided

below.


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Examples of CI Tools in Organizations

Examples of adaptations of web 2.0 tools to the new

context of large organizations include tools such as IBMs

social bookmarking software Dogear [11], wiki platforms

such as Wikispaces (wikispaces.com) or TikiWiki

(tikiwiki.org), and tagging tools for sharing using email

such as Mail2Tag [12].

Emulating the success of social network systems for

consumers such as Facebook or LinkedIn, new tools such as

IBMs Social Blue (or Beehive) [14] or Novells Pulse are

being proposed for the enterprise. Similarly, in

microblogging, the success of Twitter as consumer tool has

motivated the introduction of tools such as Yammer in

enterprises. These tools help managers with project

management and awareness of multiple ongoing activities

in the organization. Moreover, several commercial web

platforms targeted at enterprises have appeared over the

past years, such as IBMs LotusLive, Microsofts

SharePoint, Jives Social Business Software, and SAPs

NewWeaver. These platforms include social functions that

can be considered CI tools. Finally, a few exemplars of CI

tools native to organizations have started to emerge. Theseinclude Idea Management System for supporting grassroots

innovation in large enterprises such as IBM, Dell, Microsoft

or tools for e-democracy or collaborative decision-making

in local communities [7].

The ongoing process of diffusion of Web 2.0 tools from the

consumers space to the organizations space is still lacking

an organized body of research literature, which can orient

design in this new domain. To start filling this gap, this

workshop invites recent contributions aimed at studying or

supporting CI in the organization. In fact, the organization

is likely to pose distinctive requirements and constraints for

intelligent behaviors to emerge. For example, the

experience of the Web has shown that letting behavioremerge is a winning strategy when a large population of

users is in place who can naturally let order, as well as

quality control, materialize from the bottom. Instead,

organizations such as business enterprises, government,

educational, or military institutions have structures that are

different from the web: the scale is different, a top-down

control structure is already in place, and the employees

have specific motivations, skills, and duties.

WORKSHOP THEMES

Known Properties of CI

Two general properties can be observed in socio-technical

systems that exhibited CI in the wild: First, the bottom-up,non-scripted genesis of the community of users, which self-

organizes, and, second, the formation of a common capital

(e.g., re-usable knowledge) via selective accumulation of

shared by-products of individual activities, which may be

motivated initially by personal utility. In fact, individual

consumers adopt CI tools for the specific purpose for which

it was initially designed (e.g., shared editing or

bookmarking), but at the same time the tool enables the

accumulation of critical by-products such as detailed

interaction traces and individual contributions (e.g., a wiki

page, a bookmark). When aggregated, these become a

source of further information that can be then reused by the

community.

Distinctive Properties of Organizations

As a new context for CI, enterprises such as private

organizations or public institutions have unique properties:

People. The people using technology are knowledgeworkers, who perform specific and stable jobs. They

generally know each other (even indirectly), are paid to

work, and are part of a reporting structure. Their

contributions are monitored and evaluated. Moreover, in the

organization, there is an emphasis on utilizing teams, task

forces, and communities as a strategy to improve

performance. Such work units are not formed on the basis

of personal interest, but are assembled by the management,

given the functions needed and the experts available.

Typically, the workers have to coordinate with (and rely on)

others for the organization to be productive as a whole.

Tools and tasks. Both the tasks performed and the tools

used (email, phone, content editing tools, databases) arenon-discretionary. Typically, they are assigned by the

management and not chosen by the workers. Past research

has already pointed to the potential conflicts between who

gets the benefits and who bears the costs of using the tools

(e.g., [8]). Also distinctive is that the tasks are information

intensive. Knowledge workers in global enterprises

increasingly need to make sense of large amounts of

information from multiple channels or information tools.

Goodness criteria. The criteria to evaluate and predict the

goodness of technology are also different. In the consumer

space, these are mainly the utility to the user, quality of user

experience (e.g., simplicity and fun), and social benefits. In

the organizations, the key criteria are also the workers

productivity (e.g., workers output and workload), the

organizations productivity (i.e., ROI), political returns,

security, and compatibility with the legacy infrastructure.

Therefore additional constraints for CI tools in

organizations include the compatibility with prior tools,

security, costs of maintaining new tools, and the fit with the

current management structure, work practices, and

motivational mechanisms.

CI in Task Forces

Task forces represent a tactic that is currently used to

enhance the CI of organizations. A task force is a

cooperative work unit assembled to perform a complex task

or activity. The term indicates a temporary, ad-hoc unit that

works as a committee of professionals on a given project

(e.g., develop a report on climate change, evaluate

opportunities in a new business area). The same

professional typically contributes to multiple task forces at

the same time. In fact, the managers of large organizations

rely on task forces to coordinate expert work around

complex tasks and at the same time make optimal reuse of

highly skilled professionals [e.g., 13]. Task forces tend to


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cross boundaries within the organization (e.g., involving

people from different company departments) [3]. The

recurrent need to find experts [1] and the demanding and

constrained conditions of the experts who work in multiple

task forces makes these workers a good target for CI tools.

CI in Communities of Practice and Learning

Enabling forms of CI in organizations (i.e., new skills and

adaptive behaviors) that persist and improve across

succeeding task forces and individual tasks requires

appropriate social and technological engineering. Future

design of CI tools can build on prior research in areas such

as communities of practice and learning, social networks

and information foraging (e.g., [13]). In fact, according to

Wenger, the communities of practices within the

organizations are key mechanism used for building their

competence and adapting such competence over time (i.e.,

communities for professional development). He defines

organizations as social designs directed at practice [17].

Thus, new collaborative tools that support learning and

development in persistent communities of professionals

can, over time, promote new forms of CI.

Studying and Designing for CI

The design of CI tools for organizations that, for example,

enhance the performance of domain-specific task forces in

the short term and support the development of communities

of practices in the long term is likely to benefit from a

detailed understanding of the attributes, tools, and work

practices that characterize current task forces and

communities in organizations. This understanding can point

the designers toward the needs that CI tools might address

and can help to smoothly integrate the tools with existing

work processes. A deeper understanding of current

practices can help answering foundational questions about

CI tools for organizations such as:

What defines the forms of CI that emerge in specificorganizations? How are they different from other forms

of CI observed in the consumer Web?

What are the organizational processes that are bestsuited to bottom-up organization and what features of

CI tools can capture these?

What is the degree of domain modeling that the toolsneed to support to leverage content created and shared?

What are available traces from previous activities andhow they can be exploited for the current activity and

to organize the dynamic knowledge being created?

What visualizations and abstractions can help tomonitor and make sense of the activities of others?

How do factors such as trust, motivation, attribution,and traceability affect information and activity flows in

organizations? How can these factors be designed in

CI tools?

What mix of research methods, such field studies andlogs analysis, are suitable for CI research and design?

Given the socio-technical nature of these research

questions, we believe that multi-method research agenda

that integrates data from field studies, interviews, surveys,

and computer logs is best suited to inform the design and

evaluation of prototypes and thus build suitable CI tools for

both the workers and their organization.

The workshop organizers have conducted various studies of

computer-supported teams, task forces, and communities in

the industry (e.g., IBM, Xerox) or in public institutions

(e.g., public administration, universities, emergency

management organizations) and have extensive experience

in design of collaborative tools [2, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 16].

WORKSHOP ACTIVITIES, GOALS, AND PAPERS

The workshop is held over a full day. The agenda allocates

maximum time to small group discussion and

brainstorming.

The workshop assembles a diverse set of participants with a

research or an applied interest for CI in organizations.

Contributions pertain to the following categories:

Empirical studies of communities or collaborativepractices in organizations: e.g., case studies illustrating

practices and pointing to specific design requirements.

Designs of new software tools or proof-of-conceptprototypes supporting CI in communities of workers;

or in-depth evaluations of tools already deployed that

support CI in organization.

Theoretical contributions on CI, crowdsourcing, andcommunity-based learning in organizations, which can

directly inform design and research.

Cases of multidisciplinary research showing theinterplay between field studies, analysis of

requirements, and development of CI tools.

Key thematic areas of interest of the workshop include:

1. Feeding CI. Knowledge creation, capture and use:

infrastructures; e.g., Q&A, sharing and lurking in CMS.

2. Exploiting and institutionalizing CI. Knowledge reuse

and community development; e.g., studies of wikis, tools

for communities, business process, organizational memory.

3. Advanced CI functions. Decision-making, voting,

planning, e.g., collective sensemaking; semantic web tools.

4. Methods. Methods for measuring CI key factors; e.g.,

critical mass, incentives, quality, ownership; methods fordeveloping CI tools; e.g., scenarios, personas, storytelling.

Workshop venue and Papers Accepted

The accepted participants prepare a brief summary and read

all the accepted proposals prior to the workshop. The details

about the workshop agenda and the proceedings with the

accepted papers are published on a public website [19].


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Workshop papers accepted

Cabitza F., Simone C. Web-Based Surveys In Medical

Communities As Lightweight Tools To Promote

Collective Awareness On Medical Daily Practices

Chidlovskii B., Faddoul, JB. Sharing the Collective

Intelligence between E-mail Applications

Convertino G., Hanrahan B. Kong N., Weksteen T.,

Bouchard G., Archambeau C., Chi E.H., Mail2Wiki:

Low-Cost Sharing and Organization on Wikis

Damianos L.E., Holtzblatt L.J. Measuring Community

Success: One Size Does Not Fit All

Gartrell M., Beach A. Ramanarayanankrishnaniyer J.,

Xing X., Lv Q., Han R., Mishra S., Seada K. Integrating

Wikipedia, Facebook, and Other Personal

Online Context into Collaborative E-Brainstorming

Hanrahan B., Quintana-Castillo R., Stewart M., Perez-

Quinones, M.A. Wiki Atoms: Contributions to Wikis as

Atomic Units

Huh J., Ackerman M.S. Using Collective Intelligence for

Supporting Diabetes Patients

Klein M. Using Metrics to Enable Large-ScaleDeliberation

Oral T., Shami N.S. Dealing with the Cold Start Problem

when Providing Personalized Enterprise Content

Recommendations

Vivacqua A.S., Expedito C., Galuzzo F., Borges, M.R.S.,

da Silva, S.T.F. Moving from Ideas to Proposals

PROFILE OF ORGANIZERS

Gregorio Convertino is a research scientist at PARC. His

group, Augmented Social Cognition, investigates and

develops new social tools for enterprises or consumers.

Antonietta Grasso is a research manager at the XeroxResearch Centre Europe. Her group, Work Practice

Technology, informs the design of tools in support of cross-

organizational teams through field studies.

Giorgio De Michelis teaches Theoretical Computer

Science and Interaction Design at the University of Milano

- Bicocca. He funded a start up, which built a new operating

system that affords new CI functions: www.itsme.it

Ed H. Chi is a senior research scientist and area manager of

the Augmented Social Cognition team at PARC.

David R Millen is group manager of Social Software

Research at IBM T J Watson Research Center.

REFERENCES

1. Ackerman, Mark S., Christine Halverson. 2004. SharingExpertise: The Next Step for Knowledge Management.

In Social Capital and Information Technology. V. Wulf

and M. Huysman (Editors). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

2. Benedetti, B. Castellani, S., Grasso, A., Martin D.,O'Neill J. (2008). Towards an expanded model of

litigation. In DESI II: 2nd International Workshop on

Supporting Search and Sensemaking for Electronically

Stored Information in Discovery Proceedings.

3. Cleland D.I. Strategic management of teams. Wiley-IEEE, 1996.

4. Convertino G., Grasso A., DiMicco J., De Michelis G.,Chi E.H., Workshop on Collective Intelligence in

Organizations: Towards a Research Agenda, 2010.

ACM CSCW 2010. http://www.parc.com/ciorg5. Convertino G., Hong L., Nelson L., Pirolli P., Chi H.E.

(2009) Activity Awareness & Social Sensemaking 2.0:

Design of a Task Force Workspace. Proc. of HCII 2009.

6. Convertino, G.; Grasso, A.; Kairam, S.; Pirolli, P. L.;Chi, E. H.; Stricker, T. M.; Bascaran, E. Learning

communities in a large enterprise. Workshop on

Collective Intelligence in Organizations. CSCW 2010.

7. Garcia, A.C. Vivacqua, A.S.; Tavares, T.C. mESA: aModel for Collective Decision Making. In Workshop on

Collective Intelligence in Organizations, CSCW 2010.

8. Grudin, J. Groupware and Social Dynamics: EightChallenges for Developers. Communications of theACM, 37, 1, 92-1151505.

9. Johnson-Lenz, P. and T. 1980. Groupware: TheEmerging Art of Orchestrating Collective Intelligence.

First Global Conference on the Future, Toronto, Canada.

10.Malone, T.W., Laubacher, R., and Dellarocas, C.N. TheCollective Intelligence Genome, MIT Sloan

Management Review, Spring, 2010 (http://cci.mit.edu).

11.Millen, D. R., Feinberg, J., and Kerr, B.. Dogear. (2006)Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise. In Proceedings of

CHI '06. ACM, New York, NY, 111-120.

12.Nelson, L., Nairn, L., Chi, E.H. (2010). Mail2Tag:Lightweight Information Sharing Services Integratedwith Email. Software Demonstration. ACM CSCW

2010, February 610, 2010, Savannah, Georgia, USA.

13.Pirolli, P. Information foraging: A theory of adaptiveinteraction with information. Oxford Univ. Press, 2007.

14.Steinfield C., DiMicco J.M., Ellison N.B., Lampe C.Bowling Online: Social Networking and Social Capital

Within the Organization. Proceedings of Communities

&Technologies 2009. State College, PA, USA.

15.Stroh L.K., Northcraft G.B., Neale M.A. OrganizationalBehavior: A Management Challenge. (Eds.) 3rd edition.

Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc: Mahwah, NJ, 2002.

16.Tolmie P. Identification of Real World Issues in theWork of Bid Management, Xerox report, April 2009.17.Wallace P. The Internet in the Workplace: How New

Technology Is Transforming Work. Cambridge Univ.

Press, 2004.

18.Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice. Learning,meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

19.http://www.parc.com/ciorg

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