Using Collaboration Patterns for Contextualizing Roles in Community Systems Design

CIRN 2010, Prato, Italy, October 28

Aldo de MoorCommunitySense

the Netherlands

WWW.COMMUNITYSENSE.NL

Collaborative fragmentation

� Paradox:� Never before so much need & potential for collaboration

� Never before so much fragmentation of collaboration

� Collaborative fragmentation� Organizations, networks, communities

� Workflows� Workflows

� Technologies

� Pragmatic errors abound� Breakdown of social and contextual components of a

discourse

� Far beyond ICT

� One focus: roles

Plenty of theory/empirics on roles

• Roles have many functions: structuring, coordinating, supporting

• Role development key: shaping of social interaction patterns through role mechanisms– Role taking– Role taking

– Role making

– Role definition

• Many empirical findings from e.g. group dynamics, etnography, cultural anthropology

• But…

Roles are “systems design orphans”

Roles

• Foundation of socio-technical pattern languages

• A “community activation typology”– Domain roles: stakeholders

• Editor, reviewer, author• Editor, reviewer, author

• Reader, contributor, collaborator, leader

– Conversation roles: communicative workflows

• Initiator, executor, evaluator

– Functionality roles: effective use of tools

• Wiki Contributor, Maintainer, Gardener, ZenMaster

Socio-technical conversation context

Enabled collaboration pattern template

Consensus section editing: enabledcollaboration pattern

Consensus section editing: implemented collaboration pattern

How to use collaboration patterns?

• Roles are essential since they are about what people want/should/don’t want to do: agency!

• Collaboration patterns: do not rigidly prescribe role contexts, but circumscribe potential behavioursbehaviours

• Use the patterns for – Capturing/indexing success/failure lessons

learnt/contexts of roles

– Reflection, interpretation, and comparison of role contexts

– Design and configuration of socio-tech systems

What’s next

• Develop collaboration pattern-templates/ontologiesfor role development

• Elicitation processes: – Processes: how to connect to community practices?

– Interfaces: nobody needs to see the graphs, e.g. use Web formsforms

• (Conceptual graphs-based) analysis procedures: emerging queries

• Applications:– Selection, linking, configuring tool systems (RBAC)

– (Semi-)automatically generate targeted documentation