Based on a literature study we identified different roles and phases that are typically found in the management of scientific events such as conferences, symposia or workshops. ginkgo’s aim is to support all of them in a easy-to-use and socially connected way. We acknowledge the great power of dedicated tools like EasyChair, Twitter or Lanyrd in the context of scientific events but see the need for an integrated solution that combines social networking features and those of classic conference management systems. ginkgo is our approach to overcome the still existing silos in what makes an important part of researchers’ work.

The presentation was received pretty positive with lots of good questions and possible extensions towards recommendations, mobile applications and open science. We know that we still have a long road ahead but we are tensioned where ginkgo will lead us.

Back in 2010 we asked for participation in an online questionnaire that tried to find out the existence of distinguishable roles of knowledge workers and the particular knowledge actions they perform. Today — after a long to-ing and fro-ing with the publisher — the results of the study have been published in the Journal of Knowledge and Process Management operated by Wiley as Knowledge Worker Roles and Actions — Results of Two Empirical Studies.

This paper proposes a typology of knowledge workers and their respective knowledge actions. The extant literature on the definition of knowledge work actions is examined and evaluated. The existing classifications of roles of knowledge workers are evaluated and extended with additional literature and empirical findings on the definition of a typology of knowledge worker roles. The empirical data in this paper comes from two studies. In the Task Execution Study 20, a knowledge worker had to carry out a selection of prepared tasks. The computer system that the participants were using was equipped with sensors, so that the execution steps of the tasks could be traced and analyzed. The data from the second study comes from a questionnaire survey of knowledge workers, which yielded 43 responses. The paper shows that the sampled users take on all identified knowledge worker roles, and that the knowledge work actions can be recognized in the sensor data from the first study. This paper contributes to the literature by proposing a new way of classifying the roles of knowledge workers and the knowledge actions they perform during their daily work. Furthermore, the paper provides a preliminary understanding of the relation between knowledge-intense work tasks, the roles they are executed in, and the tools that are used to accomplish the respective tasks.

In the paper we present 10 roles of knowledge workers and 13 knowledge actions. The knowledge worker roles are:

1. Controller,
2. Helper,
3. Learner,
4. Linker,
5. Networker,
6. Organizer,
7. Retriever,
8. Sharer,
9. Solver, and
10. Tracker

The identified knowledge actions are

1. Acquisition,
2. Analyze,
3. Authoring,
4. Co-authoring,
5. Information search
6. Dissemination,
7. Expert search,
8. Feedback,
9. Formal & Informal Learning,
10. Information organization,
11. Monitoring,
12. Networking and
13. Service search

I hope you find the results presented in the article relevant for your own research. If you are not able to access the article due to paywall restrictions please let me know.

No Dissertation from ticoneva on Vimeo.

We created a spreadsheet on Google that is open for editing – so if you are interested in this topic and would like to contribute tools to our list, just go ahead and enter your suggestion here.

Thanks for your support.

Abstract:

The use of microblogging applications (especially Twitter) is becoming increasingly commonplace in a variety of settings. Today, active conference participants can post messages on microblogging platforms to exchange information quickly and in real-time. Recent research work was based on quantitative analyses in terms of the number of tweets or active Twitter users within a specific time period. In this paper, we examine the content of the contributions and aim to analyze how useful posts are for the “listening” Internet auditorium. It can be shown that only a few microblogs are of interest for non-participants of the specific event and that meaningful usage of a microblogging application requires greater care than previously anticipated.

Final draft:

You can find the final draft of our paper on Scribd.
Getting Granular on Twitter: Tweets from a Conference and their Limited Usefulness for Non-Participants

Wissensarbeit zeichnet sich dadurch aus, dass sie größtenteils aus der Nutzung, Verwaltung und Erzeugung von Information besteht. Die Studie beschäftigt sich mit Wissensarbeitern, den Rollen die sie während der regelmäßigen Arbeit einnehmen und den Aktivitäten die sie zur Durchführung Ihrer Arbeit ausführen. Weiterhin wird versucht typische Tätigkeiten in der Wissensarbeit mit Applikationen zu verknüpfen.

Wir freuen uns über Eure Teilnahme an der Studie, die auf deutsch und englisch verfügbar ist. Insbesondere wollen wir Euch bitten, diesen Aufruf in Euren Communities zu verteilen. Die Umfrage ist selbstverständlich anonym.

In the focus of the study are knowledge workers, the multiple roles they take on during their regular work and the actions they perform during accomplishing their work. A knowledge worker is anyone who develops or uses knowledge in his or her daily working tasks. Furthermore we try to associate application types with the knowledge actions.

We would like to ask you for your participation in the study which will take approximately 25 minutes. Your participation is anonymous and all answers will be treated confidentially.

You can access the survey at http://bit.ly/KWRStudy

Please feel free to forward the link to the survey to your colleagues, retweet or blog about this call for participation.I count on the power of my social network…

We will keep you updated about the results of the study.

Social networks reflect communication, cooperation and loose acquaintances in networked communities. Numerous metrics allow to expose connections, important persons or clusters within these communities. Furthermore, networks can be spanned to connect documents, blog entries or wiki articles. We call such a network an artefact network. In this paper we introduce the approach of Artefact-Actor-Networks that tries to connect social networks and artefact networks in order to make claims on the semantical connections between persons and manifold artefacts. We present practical use cases for Artefact- Actor-Networks and discuss generic and specific semantical requirements and added values through the existence of Artefact-Actor-Networks.

Reference: W. Reinhardt, M. Moi, and T. Varlemann: Artefact-Actor-Networks as tie between social networks and artefact networks. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Collaborative Computing (CollaborateCom’09), November 2009.

Curious about what’s an AAN?

Artefact-Actor-Networks (AANs) are a theoretical model to link social networks and artefact network in order to make claims about the semantic relatedness between users and their respective artefacts. The general goal of AANs is to ease the understanding of how these to knowledge entities (Trier, 2005) are interconnected, how they influence each other and how we can make use of semantic technologies in this field of research

I missed the morning session of the TEL-CoPs workshop but the afternoon session was very interesting and Manolis Tzagarakis gave a really interesting talk about “Practical Lessons Learned while Developing Web 2.0 Collaboration Services for Communities of Practice“. One of the major findings was that you have to develop the UI at first and test this with your users and afterwards focus on the architecture. As we are computer scientists, we tend to do it the other way around. The other thing he pointed out is that the later you introduce features to a tool, the more unlikely it is to be used. There I presented my second paper about how to support CoPs with Twitter. I received mostly positive feedback back there was a heavy discussion about the way we visualize things. I take this critics and will improve future visualizations using visual analytics methods.

You’ll find my slides at slideshare and our tweets here and here.

Abstract:

Classical tools for supporting software engineering teams (collaborative development environment, CDE) are designed to support one team during the development of a product. Often the required data sources or experts reside outside of the internal project team and thus not provided by these CDEs. This paper describes an approach for a community-embedded CDE (CCDE), which is capable of handling multiple projects of several organizations, providing inter-project knowledge sharing and developer awareness. The presented approach uses the mashup pattern to integrate multiple data sources in order to provide software teams with an exactingly development environment.

Reference: W. Reinhardt and S.Rinne: An Architecture to Support Learning, Awareness, and Transparency in Social Software Engineering. In: International Conference on Interactive Computer Aided Learning (ICL 2009).

An Architecture to Support Learning, Awareness, and Transparency in Social Software Engineering

Abstract:

Twitter has gained a lot of attention in the last three years. It is used in various use cases from discussing at conferences, taking personal notes or live coverage of prominent events. Communities in Twitter are forming through the usage of a common tag that is part of the message. This paper presents an application for monitoring and visualising the dynamics in such communities, especially dynamics in the written communication of the community and presents approaches to make this application part of a mashup of services in a Personal Learning Environment.

Reference: W. Reinhardt:Tracking the dynamics of social communities – Visualising altering word clouds of Twitter groups. In: International Conference on Interactive Computer Aided Learning (ICL 2009).

Tracking the dynamics of social communities – Visualising altering word clouds of Twitter groups

Abstract

Agile Softwareentwicklung ist mehr als ein weiteres neues Schlagwort der Softwaretechnik. Bereits in zahlreichen Praxisprojekten konnte die Leistungsfähigkeit des Ansatzes erfolgreich nachgewiesen werden. Die Rückbesinnung auf erfolgreiche und bewährte Planungs-, Arbeits- und Programmiertechniken sowie die aufmerksame Beachtung und Nutzung ihrer gegenseitigen Einflüsse bieten neue Chancen zu einer erfolgreicheren und effektiveren Entwicklung hochwertiger Software. Agile Methoden der Softwareentwicklung eröffnen zusätzliche Möglichkeiten, die Risiken und Kosten von Projekten besser zu steuern und die zukünftige Wartbarkeit zu verbessern. Pair Programming (PP) ist eine zentrale Arbeitstechnik der leichtgewichtigen Methoden und integrale Praktik des Extreme Programming. Die vorliegende Arbeit führt in agile Vorgehensmodelle zur Softwareentwicklung ein, betrachtet diese kritisch und gibt Hinweise für die Integration in die universitäre Realität. Die Betrachtung der internationalen Kompetenzdiskussion führt hin zur Analyse und Bewertung verschiedener empirischer Studien zum Pair Programming. Abschließend gibt die Arbeit Handlungsempfehlungen für den Einsatz von Pair Programming.

You can buy the book at Amazon here.

If you are involved in a project, where software is developed, designed or planned and if you and your team is willingly to participate in the study please let me knoe. It does not matter if you are a large or small team, if you are open or closed source, in India or Germany. If you want to support me in my research just let me know and I will invite your team to the survey.

PS: Please share my call for participation in your network. Thanks.

With the survey we try to find out which means of communication are useful in specific situations of the development process, which means of communication are really used and how they support the problem solving in a team.

If you and your team are interested in taking part in the survey please contact me and I will send you a link to the survey together with a token that identifies your team. Of course we will share the results of the survey as soon as we have them here on the blog.

A note on privacy:
The survey will be an anonymous one. The record kept of your survey responses will not contain any identifying information about you unless a specific question in the survey will ask for this.

I presented the idea of microblogging in software development projects at the SENSE workshop at the Software Engineering 2009 conference and received a lot of good feedback. With the help of Christian Mletzko (Twitter, Website) we developed Microclipse as a lean plugin to any Eclipse-RCP-based platform (including the Eclipse IDE and Flex Builder).

The main requirements to Microclipse were:

• Providing a possibility to update to Twitter or a Laconica instance directly from Eclipse.
• Monitoring a specific tag directly in Eclipse.
• Lean and clear interface.

Installation and Use

Download the plugin and copy it into the plugins folder of your Eclipse-based application (we’re working on an update site). On the next start you should have a new view like this.

Now you can set your preferences for Microclipse. Microclipse can save your connection data for Twitter and one Laconi.ca instance. For each of them you can provide your username, password, the correct server url and the appropriate search base (for Laconi.ca this is where the API can be found). Lastly you can define the monitored tag (only messages containing this tag will show up in the plugin) and how many new messages you would like to see.

After you connected to a Laconi.ca instance and the first refresh your plugin will loke something like this.

When you connect to Twitter the plugin will look like this.

As of today you can download the Microclipse plugin from here. Please provide feedback on the plugin and tell us how you use it. We will use the plugin in some software courses at the University of Paderborn to enrich communication amongst student software developers. If you are interested in a study how the plugin is used in your course, just let me know.

Now enjoy the new Microclipse plugin.