Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
research-article
Public Access

Socio-technical Affordances for Stigmergic Coordination Implemented in MIDST, a Tool for Data-Science Teams

Published: 07 November 2019 Publication History

Abstract

We present a conceptual framework for socio-technical affordances for stigmergic coordination, that is, coordination supported by a shared work product. Based on research on free/libre open source software development, we theorize that stigmergic coordination depends on three sets of socio-technical affordances: the visibility and combinability of the work, along with defined genres of work contributions. As a demonstration of the utility of the developed framework, we use it as the basis for the design and implementation of a system, MIDST, that supports these affordances and that we thus expect to support stigmergic coordination. We describe an initial assessment of the impact of the tool on the work of project teams of three to six data-science students that suggests that the tool was useful but also in need of further development. We conclude with plans for future research and an assessment of theory-driven system design.

References

[1]
David J. Anderson. 2010. Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business .Blue Hole Press.
[2]
Oliver Arafat and Dirk Riehle. 2009. The commit size distribution of open source software. In Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-42). 1--8.
[3]
John Langshaw Austin. 1962. How to Do Things with Words .Harvard University, Cambridge.
[4]
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. 1986. The problem of speech genres. In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays: M.M. Bakhtin, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Eds.). University of Texas Press, Austin, 60--102.
[5]
Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark. 1997. Managing in an age of modularity. Harvard Business Review (1997), 84--93. Issue September/October.
[6]
Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark. 2006. Modularity in the design of complex engineering systems. In Complex engineered systems. Springer, 175--205.
[7]
Abraham Bernstein. 2000. How can cooperative work tools support dynamic group process? Bridging the specificity frontier. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '00). ACM, 279--288. https://doi.org/10.1145/358916.358999
[8]
Ethan S Bernstein. 2012. The transparency paradox: A role for privacy in organizational learning and operational control. Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 57, 2 (2012), 181--216.
[9]
Anant Bhardwaj, Souvik Bhattacherjee, Amit Chavan, Amol Deshpande, Aaron Elmore, Samuel Madden, and Aditya Parameswaran. 2015. Datahub: Collaborative data science and dataset version management at scale. Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) (2015).
[10]
Carl Boettiger. 2015. An introduction to Docker for reproducible research. SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Vol. 49, 1 (Jan. 2015), 71--79. https://doi.org/10.1145/2723872.2723882
[11]
Francesco Bolici, James Howison, and Kevin Crowston. 2016. Stigmergic coordination in FLOSS development teams: Integrating explicit and implicit mechanisms. Cognitive Systems Research, Vol. 38 (2016), 14 -- 22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2015.12.003 Special Issue of Cognitive Systems Research -- Human-Human Stigmergy.
[12]
Geoffry C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. 1994. Knowledge and information in international information management: Problems of classification and coding. In Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business, L. Bud-Frierman (Ed.). Routledge, London, 187--213.
[13]
Geoffry C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences .MIT Press, Cambridge.
[14]
Stefano Brusoni, Luigi Marengo, Andrea Prencipe, and Marco Valente. 2007. The value and costs of modularity: A problem-solving perspective. European Management Review, Vol. 4, 2 (2007), 121--132.
[15]
John M. Carroll, Dennis C. Neale, Philip L. Isenhour, Mary Beth Rosson, and D. Scott McCrickard. 2003. Notification and awareness: Synchronizing task-oriented collaborative activity. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Vol. 58, 5 (2003), 605--632. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1071--5819(03)00024--7
[16]
John M. Carroll, Mary Beth Rosson, Gregorio Convertino, and Craig H. Ganoe. 2006. Awareness and teamwork in computer-supported collaborations. Interacting with Computers, Vol. 18, 1 (2006), 21--46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intcom.2005.05.005
[17]
Lars Rune Christensen. 2007. Practices of stigmergy in architectural work. In Proceedings of the 2007 International ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11--20. https://doi.org/10.1145/1316624.1316627
[18]
Lars Rune Christensen. 2013. Stigmergy in human practice: Coordination in construction work. Cognitive Systems Research, Vol. 21 (2013), 40--51.
[19]
Lars Rune Christensen. 2014. Practices of stigmergy in the building process. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Vol. 23, 1 (2014), 1--19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-012--9181--3
[20]
L. Colfer and Carliss Baldwin. 2010. The Mirroring Hypothesis: Theory, Evidence and Exceptions. Report. Harvard Business School.
[21]
Kevin Crowston, Qing Li, Kangning Wei, U. Yeliz Eseryel, and James Howison. 2007. Self-organization of teams for free/libre open source software development. Information and Software Technology, Vol. 49, 6 (2007), 564--575. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2007.02.004
[22]
Kevin Crowston, Kangning Wei, Qing Li, U. Yeliz Eseryel, and James Howison. 2005. Coordination of free/libre open source software development. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). Las Vegas, NV, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/1029997.1030003
[23]
Laura Dabbish, Colleen Stuart, Jason Tsay, and Jim Herbsleb. 2012. Social coding in GitHub: Transparency and collaboration in an open software repository. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1277--1286. https://doi.org/10.1145/2145204.2145396
[24]
Laura Dabbish, Colleen Stuart, Jason Tsay, and Jim Herbsleb. 2013. Leveraging transparency. IEEE Software, Vol. 30, 1 (2013), 37--43. https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2012.172
[25]
Laura Dabbish, Colleen Stuart, Jason Tsay, and James Herbsleb. 2014. Transparency and coordination in peer production. Report. http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.0377
[26]
M. Das, R. Cui, D. R. Campbell, G. Agrawal, and R. Ramnath. 2015. Towards methods for systematic research on big data. In 2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data). 2072--2081. https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData.2015.7363989
[27]
Paul Dourish and Victoria Bellotti. 1992. Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '92). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 107--114. https://doi.org/10.1145/143457.143468
[28]
Mark Elliot. 2006. Stigmergic collaboration: The evolution of group work. m/c journal, Vol. 9, 2 (2006). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php
[29]
Thomas Erickson and Wendy A. Kellogg. 2000. Social translucence: An approach to designing systems that support social processes. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 7, 1 (2000), 59--83. https://doi.org/10.1145/344949.345004
[30]
J. A. Espinosa and F. Armour. 2016. The Big Data analytics gold rush: A research framework for coordination and governance. In Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). 1112--1121. https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2016.141
[31]
Fernando Flores, Michael Graves, Brad Hartfield, and Terry Winograd. 1988. Computer systems and the design of organizational interaction. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, Vol. 6, 2 (1988), 153--172.
[32]
Jing Gao, Andy Koronios, and Sven Selle. 2015. Towards a process view on critical success factors in big data analytics projects. In Proceedings of the Americas Conference on Information Systems .
[33]
N. W. Grady, M. Underwood, A. Roy, and W. L. Chang. 2014. Big Data: Challenges, practices and technologies: NIST Big Data Public Working Group workshop at IEEE Big Data 2014. In 2014 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data). 11--15. https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData.2014.7004470
[34]
Pierre-Paul Grassé. 1959. La reconstrution du nid et les coordinations inter-individuelles chez Bellicositermes natalensis et Cubitermes sp. La théorie de la stigmergie: Essai d'interprétation du comportament de termites constructeurs. Insectes Sociaux, Vol. 6, 1 (1959), 41--80. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02223791
[35]
Carl Gutwin and Saul Greenberg. 2002. A descriptive framework of workspace awareness for real-time groupware. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Vol. 11, 3--4 (2002), 411--446.
[36]
Robert Heckman, Kevin Crowston, U. Yeliz Eseryel, James Howison, Eileen Allen, and Qing Li. 2007. Emergent decision-making practices in free/libre open source software (FLOSS) development teams. In IFIP International Conference on Open Source Systems. Springer, 71--84.
[37]
Robert Heckman, Kevin Crowston, Qing Li, Eileen Allen, U. Yeliz Eseryel, James Howison, and Kangning Wei. 2006. Emergent decision-making practices in technology-supported self-organizing distributed teams. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). 43.
[38]
Francis Heylighen. 2007. Why is open access development so successful? Stigmergic organization and the economics of information. In Open Source Jahrbuch 2007, Bernd Lutterbeck, Matthias Bärwolff, and Robert A. Gehring (Eds.). Lehmanns Media, Berlin.
[39]
James Howison. 2009. Alone Together: A Socio-Technical Theory of Motivation, Coordination and Collaboration Technologies in Organizing for Free and Open Source Software Development. Doctoral Dissertation. Syracuse University.
[40]
James Howison and Kevin Crowston. 2014. Collaboration through open superposition: A theory of the open source way. MIS Quarterly, Vol. 38, 1 (2014), 29--50.
[41]
H V Jagadish, Johannes Gehrke, Alexandros Labrinidis, Yannis Papakonstantinou, Jignesh M. Patel, Raghu Ramakrishnan, and Cyrus Shahabi. 2014. DataHub: Collaborative data science and dataset version management at scale. Commun. ACM, Vol. 57, 7 (2014), 86--94.
[42]
Eirini Kalliamvakou, Daniela Damian, Leif Singer, and Daniel M German. 2014. The code-centric collaboration perspective: Evidence from GitHub. Report. Technical Report DCS-352-IR, University of Victoria. http://thesegalgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/code-centric.pdf
[43]
B. A. Kitchenham, S. L. Pfleeger, L. M. Pickard, P. W. Jones, D. C. Hoaglin, K. El Emam, and J. Rosenberg. 2002. Preliminary guidelines for empirical research in software engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 28, 8 (2002), 721--734. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2002.1027796
[44]
Thomas Kluyver, Benjamin Ragan-Kelley, Fernando Pérez, Brian E. Granger, Matthias Bussonnier, Jonathan Frederic, Kyle Kelley, Jessica Hamrick, Jason Grout, Sylvain Corlay, Paul Ivanov, Damián Avila, Safia Abdalla, Carol Willing, and Jupyter Development Team. 2016. Jupyter Notebooks: A publishing format for reproducible computational workflows. In Positioning and Power in Academic Publishing: Players, Agents and Agendas: Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronic Publishing, F. Loizides and B. Schmidt (Eds.). 87--90.
[45]
Andrew J. Ko, Thomas D. LaToza, and Margaret M. Burnett. 2015. A practical guide to controlled experiments of software engineering tools with human participants. Empirical Software Engineering, Vol. 20, 1 (01 Feb 2015), 110--141. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-013--9279--3
[46]
Richard N. Langlois. 2002. Modularity in technology and organization. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 49, 1 (2002), 19 -- 37. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167--2681(02)00056--2
[47]
Bruno Latour. 1990. Visualisation and cognition: Drawing things together. In Representation in Scientific Practice, M. Lynch and S. Woolgar (Eds.). MIT Press, Cambridge.
[48]
Julia Lowndes, Benjamin Best, Courtney Scarborough, Jamie Afflerbach, Melanie Frazier, Casey O'Hara, Ning Jiang, and Benjamin Halpern. 2017. Our path to better science in less time using open data science tools. Nature Ecology and Evolution, Vol. 1, 6 (2017).
[49]
Juergen Musil, Angelika Musil, and Stefan Biffl. 2014. Towards a coordination-centric architecture metamodel for social web applications. In European Conference on Software Architecture. Springer, 106--113.
[50]
Wanda J. Orlikowski and JoAnne Yates. 1994. Genre repertoire: The structuring of communicative practices in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 33 (1994), 541--574.
[51]
Carsten Østerlund. 2007. Genre combinations: A window into dynamic communication practices. Journal of Management Information Systems, Vol. 23, 4 (2007), 81--108.
[52]
Carsten Østerlund. 2008a. Documents in place: Demarcating places for collaboration in healthcare settings. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Vol. 17, 2--3 (2008), 195--225.
[53]
Carsten Østerlund. 2008b. The materiality of communicative practice: The boundaries and objects of an emergency room genre. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, Vol. 20, 1 (2008), 7--40.
[54]
Carsten Østerlund, Steve Sawyer, and Elizabeth Kazianus. 2010. Documenting work: A methodological window into coordination in action. In 26th Conference of the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) .
[55]
H. V. Parunak. 2006. A survey of environments and mechanisms for human-human stigmergy. In Environments for Multi-Agent Systems II, D. Weyns, H. V. D. Parunak, and F. Michel (Eds.). Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 3830. 163--186. https://doi.org/10.1007/11678809_10
[56]
Amira Rezgui and Kevin Crowston. 2018. Stigmergic coordination in Wikipedia. http://www.opensym.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/OpenSym2018_paper_34.pdf
[57]
Alessandro Ricci, Andrea Omiciniand Mirko Viroli, Luca Gardelli, and Enrico Oliva. 2007. Cognitive stigmergy: Towards a framework based on agents and artifacts. In Environments for Multi-Agent Systems III, Danny Weyns, H. Van Dyke Parunak, and Fabien Michel (Eds.). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 4389. Springer, 124--140. https://doi.org/10.1007/978--3--540--71103--2_7
[58]
Adam Rule, Ian Drosos, Aurélien Tabard, and James Hollan. 2018. Aiding collaborative reuse of computational notebooks with annotated cell folding. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 2(CSCW), 150 (Nov. 2018).
[59]
I. Salman, A. T. Misirli, and N. Juristo. 2015. Are Students Representatives of Professionals in Software Engineering Experiments?. In 2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, Vol. 1. 666--676. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2015.82
[60]
Jeff Saltz, Robert Heckman, Kevin Crowston, Sangseok You, and Yatish Hegde. 2019. Helping data science students develop task modularity. In Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaitextquoterighti International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-52). http://hdl.handle.net/10125/59549
[61]
J. S. Saltz and I. Shamshurin. 2016. Big data team process methodologies: A literature review and the identification of key factors for a project's success. In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data). 2872--2879. https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData.2016.7840936
[62]
Melissa A Schilling. 2000. Toward a general modular systems theory and its application to interfirm product modularity. Academy of Management Review, Vol. 25, 2 (2000), 312--334.
[63]
Kjeld Schmidt and Carla Simonee. 1996. Coordination mechanisms: Towards a conceptual foundation of CSCW systems design. Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing, Vol. 5 (1996), 155--200.
[64]
John R. Searle. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language .Cambridge University, Cambridge.
[65]
D. I. K. Sjoeberg, J. E. Hannay, O. Hansen, V. B. Kampenes, A. Karahasanovic, N. Liborg, and A. C. Rekdal. 2005. A survey of controlled experiments in software engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 31, 9 (Sep. 2005), 733--753. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2005.97
[66]
Dorothy E. Smith. 2005. Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People .AltaMira Press, Oxford.
[67]
Z. Soh, Z. Sharafi, B. Van den Plas, G. C. Porras, Y. Guéhéneuc, and G. Antoniol. 2012. Professional status and expertise for UML class diagram comprehension: An empirical study. In 20th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC). 163--172. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC.2012.6240484
[68]
H. Colleen Stuart, Laura Dabbish, Sara Kiesler, Peter Kinnaird, and Ruogu Kang. 2012. Social transparency in networked information exchange: A theoretical framework. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 451--460. https://doi.org/10.1145/2145204.2145275
[69]
Krishna Subramanian, Johannes Maas, Michael Ellers, Chat Wacharamanotham, Simon Voelker, and Jan Borchers. 2018. StatWire: Visual Flow-based Statistical Programming. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article LBW104, bibinfonumpages6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3188528
[70]
Lucy A. Suchman. 1993. Technologies of accountability: Of lizards and aeroplanes. In Technology in Working Order, G. Button (Ed.). Routledge, London.
[71]
Lucy A. Suchman. 1995. Making work visible. Commun. ACM, Vol. 38, 9 (1995), 56--65.
[72]
Luca Tummolini and Cristiano Castelfranchi. 2007. Trace signals: The meanings of stigmergy. In Environments for multi-agent systems III, Danny Weyns, H. Van Dyke Parunak, and Fabien Michel (Eds.). Springer, 141--156. https://doi.org/10.1007/978--3--540--71103--2_8
[73]
Terry Winograd. 1987. A language/action perspective on the design of cooperative work. Human--Computer Interaction, Vol. 3 (1987), 3--30.
[74]
Joanne Yates and Wanda J. Orlikowski. 1992. Genres of organizational communication: A structurational approach to studying communication and media. Academy of Management Review, Vol. 17, 2 (1992), 299--327.
[75]
Manuel Zacklad. 2006. Documentarisation processes in documents for action (DofA): The status of annotations and associated cooperation technologies. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Vol. 15, 2--3 (2006), 205--228.
[76]
Wei Zhang, Haiyan Zhao, Yi Jiang, and Zhi Jin. 2015. Stigmergy-based construction of internetware artifacts. IEEE Software, Vol. 32, 1 (2015), 58--66. https://doi.org/10.1109/ms.2014.133

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Polyarchy and project performance in open, distributed forms of innovationStrategic Organization10.1177/14761270221145567(147612702211455)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Bridging the Gap in AI-Driven Workflows: The Case for Domain-Specific Generative Bots2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)10.1109/BigData59044.2023.10386894(2421-2430)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2023
  • (2023)Interactive technologies through the lens of team effectiveness: an interdisciplinary systematic literature reviewEuropean Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology10.1080/1359432X.2023.217890433:2(172-187)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 3, Issue CSCW
November 2019
5026 pages
EISSN:2573-0142
DOI:10.1145/3371885
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 November 2019
Published in PACMHCI Volume 3, Issue CSCW

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. awareness
  2. data-science teams
  3. stigmergic coordination
  4. translucency

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Funding Sources

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)119
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)16
Reflects downloads up to 18 Aug 2024

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Polyarchy and project performance in open, distributed forms of innovationStrategic Organization10.1177/14761270221145567(147612702211455)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Bridging the Gap in AI-Driven Workflows: The Case for Domain-Specific Generative Bots2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)10.1109/BigData59044.2023.10386894(2421-2430)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2023
  • (2023)Interactive technologies through the lens of team effectiveness: an interdisciplinary systematic literature reviewEuropean Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology10.1080/1359432X.2023.217890433:2(172-187)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2023
  • (2022)Data Science MethodologyEncyclopedia of Data Science and Machine Learning10.4018/978-1-7998-9220-5.ch070(1201-1214)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Stewarding the Documental Afterlives of Refugee Tech InitiativesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555606:CSCW2(1-23)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2022)Project Artifacts for the Data Science Lifecycle: A Comprehensive Overview2022 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)10.1109/BigData55660.2022.10020291(2645-2654)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2022
  • (2022)The interplay between volunteers and firm’s employees in distributed innovation: emergent architectures and stigmergy in open source softwareIndustrial and Corporate Change10.1093/icc/dtac03731:6(1358-1386)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2022
  • (2021)Transparency and the AmbientVisibilities and Invisibilities in Smart Cities10.4018/978-1-7998-3850-0.ch003(64-90)Online publication date: 2021
  • (2021)Enabling Collaborative Data Science Development with the Ballet FrameworkProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34795755:CSCW2(1-39)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
  • (2021)Evaluating MIDST, A System to Support Stigmergic Team CoordinationProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34491105:CSCW1(1-24)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2021
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Get Access

Login options

Full Access

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media