live blogging epic 2008session 1: working and playing with visibility

badges at epic 2008, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

Decent coffee finally provided by a charity shop around the corner where hardly anyone knew how to make a cappuccino, so the machine wasn't even on, and the fumbling took ages. First session's started under curator John Sherry (Intel Corporation). Here's a selection of almost-research badges, hoping that I will have something more to learn and something more to report further.

1. The Rise of the Techno-Service Sector: A Study of the Growing Inter-Dependency of Social and Technical Skills in the Work of ERP by Asaf Darr (University of Haifa)

Blurring boundaries among design, product/ development/ implementation, and sales. The need for social skills next to technical ones. There's a book on the matter out there, so go find it.

2. Now You See It And Now You Don't: Consequences of Veiling Relational Work by Lisa Kreeger (IBM Almaden Services Research) and Elizabeth Halloway (Antioch University, Leadership and Change)

Veiling seen as negative in organisations, lack of clarity and accountability, lack of old school work relationships and diminished ability to judge a situation, colleague, project. Veiling seen as positive on some occasions, when it can smooth things up. Definitely a matter of further interest to me.

3. The Invisible Work of Being a Patient and Implications for Health Care by Kenton T. Unruh (Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics, University of Washington) and Wanda Pratt (Information School & Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics, University of Washington)

When something goes wrong medical staff makes the patient feel as if it's the patient's fault. IT systems incorrectly deployed or not communicating among each other. Medical staff taking advantage of (natural!) lack of in-depth knowledge on the patient side. Part of the research: patients given means to document their experiences while going through breast cancer trials.

Patients' work patterns: bursty and reactive, influencing the outcomes of the organisational work, thus requiring a new design of the process.

Side note: this far, much, much better. I'm all ears. Yay!

4. The Secret Life of Medical Records: A Study of Medical Records and the People Who Manage Them by Nathaniel Martin and Patricia Wall (Xerox Innovation Group, Xerox Corporation)

Side note: speaker points out some event organisation difficulties that affected his presentation today, and as a former speaker AND organiser I am on his side. Now to work.

A lot of people invisible in the medical records area. For every medical member of staff there is at least one support member doing something important, though unclear, in the background. Paper cannot be removed from the process just by existence of good EMR (Electronic Medical Records) but rather the transition to EMR will require substantial transformation of paper documents to digital form. The study wins, at least, by reformulating the problem in technical terms.

5. The Translucence of Twitter by Ingrid Erickson (Center for Work, Technology & Organization, Stanford University)

We made some bets early this morning about what will be said about Twitter, so I'm very curious to see whether our expectations, positive and not, are met. Microblogging was one, that weird and incorrect buzz word, and it's just been used in perhaps the first minute. Ouch!

Meanwhile, this paper was referenced at the very beginning of the presentation, Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes*.

Visibility + awareness = accountability. Awareness: indirect OR by incident. Accountability for potential interaction...

It's not going where I'd like it to and, guess what, the balloon is ssshaking! Applause!

6. Contact Lists, Social Drift, and relationships by Matthew Yapchaian and Ken Anderson (Intel Corporation)

Using contact lists to negotiate social visibility. A study on very busy teens (around 14 y.o.) that gravitate among home, school, activities, and home again (no car yet). Email seen as for homework and old people. No surprise to me at high usage of IM, mobile SMS, and Social Apps. I'd love an example.

And here it is: a kid said he had 120 people on his contact list! Sometimes chats are just hey! and cool! but they're about meeting online people from their existing physical spaces (rather than new strangers from anywhere), negotiating face-to-face relationships, and making yourself visible.

7. (In)visible partners: people, algorithms, and business models in online dating by Elizabeth F. Churchill (Yahoo! Research) and Elizabeth S. Goodman (University of California at Berkeley, School of Information)

1 billion dollars industry in the U.S. Most engaging presentation so far with some interesting insights like people wanting to make themselves more visible and make others less visible.


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