Collective Form: An Exploration of Large-Group Writing 1998 (Outstanding Researcher Lecture)    

Whether a collective mind forms in large-group writing in the workplace is the focus of this article originally given as the 1998 ABC Outstanding Researcher Lec ture. This article is based on a five-year ethnographic study that describes and analyzes a three-month group writing process that created a computer service-level agreement, involving a 20-person cross-functional core more than 100 other collab orators at a major corporation. The article discusses "collective form" in two senses: First, a document's evolving form or superstructure produced a collective schema that allowed the group through a process of equilibration (Piaget, 1981) to adapt outsider boilerplate into a more situated general model and then into a sit uated document. Second, architectural forms motivated and molded group activity in several ways. To combat group apathy, the leaders appropriated an in-demand meeting room for the project, positioning the project as high-status in the center of the workflow. Group leaders prominently displayed a task completion check-off chart that, in a downsizing environment, helped both to coordinate group activity and to encourage completion.

Cross, Geoffrey A. JBC (2000). Articles>Collaboration>Ethnographies>Cognitive Psychology

Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter  

The microblogging service Twitter is in the process of being appropriated for conversational interaction and is starting to be used for collaboration, as well. In order to determine how well Twitter supports user-to- user exchanges, what people are using Twitter for, and what usage or design modifications would make it (more) usable as a tool for collaboration, this study analyzes a corpus of naturally-occurring public Twit- ter messages (tweets), focusing on the functions and uses of the @ sign and the coherence of exchanges. The findings reveal a surprising degree of conversa- tionality, facilitated especially by the use of @ as a marker of addressivity, and shed light on the limita- tions of Twitter's current design for collaborative use.

Honeycutt, Courtenay and Susan C. Herring. Semantic WebProceedings of the Forty-Second Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences (2009). Articles>Collaboration>Social Networking>Ethnographies