Email and information overload

Second lecture discussed information overload and ways of organizing email. For example different kinds of distribution lists, filtering, etc. has been suggested to help to cope with email overload. [1], [2].

Although it is interesting to theorize, I personally don't believe that this “information overload” especially with e-mail is a real problem. At least it is not one for me. My solution for this? 1. I have several addresses for different things. (Not least important the ones I never use after I've created an account, for example in facebook, since I don't want any emails from there...) 2. I pay attention to who and where to tell my email address.

Of course, some sorting methods are handy. With these I'm perfectly satisfied with few features gmail has. Filtering emails by conversations (conversation trees) is great. I don't have need to categorize my mails – it is easy to go through the conversation when the whole of it is visible on the tree. Also, if I need to find some older email, it's enough to search the inbox with word search text-box (by topic or the sender or both) to find an old email.

Of course it can be so, that I actually don't have a vast social circle or not so many interests that require emailing... Maybe the big difference with me and the overload is that I don't have many mailing lists. As mentioned in the study by Wendy E. Mackay et al., 51% of the Information Lens rules were used for mailing lists [3].

I've also experienced the “case email” in working environment, in a modern IT-firm. Even though I received maybe up to 100 emails in the worst days, still I never set up even one filter for the emails. It simply was enough to use, say an hour a day, to go through the mails, delete the ones which had no importance at all, and then categorize the remaining with different color markers indicating the importance and order of my reactions. – I guess that last method is something that could have been more easily done by some automatic filter, and maybe if I had even more things to say focused on I would have adopted some filtering. Anyway, I my case I had no need for one.

Of course, it can be argued at I used perhaps 2 working hours every day to deal with my e-mail, and that was away from my real tasks. Actually, I disagree with that also. As the other hour was spent on examining and answering the important messages, it was in fact doing my job: communicating about different subjects with my colleagues. As the other hour can be seen as redundant organizing of irrelevant e-mails, I might argue, that one needs to have this kind of “breaks” during a working day. For example, when writing some demanding document, at times it is needed that I go take a cup of coffee and have a little break from the document writing by sorting those emails. It's the same thing as writing this text and at some point making a little break by checking facebook (which was not preferable in the work ;)


References:

1. Malone, T.W., Grant, K. R., Turbak, F., Brobst, S., & Michael D. Cohen, Intelligent Information-Sharing Systems. Comm. ACM 30, 5 (May 1987), 390-402.

2. Steve Whittaker, Candace Sidner, Email Overload:Exploring Personal Information Management of Email.Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'96), 276-283.

3. Wendy E. Mackay et al, How Do Experienced Information Lens Users Use Rules? Proc. SIGCHI’89, 211-216.

Spam on e-mail

E-mail spam, also known as junk e-mail. On spam mails you ussualy have some advertisements, that you don't want to recieve on your e-mail box. The most popular topic of spam is about Pharmacy end it takes about 81% of spam's. E-mail spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s end now is a global problem.

If you get 100 e-mails end 80 of them are spam, you realy need to use some e-mail filters end don't write your e-mail everyehere, because if you public your e-mail on internet the spamers find it end start to send spam to you. They use some special software to find new existing e-mails, that they can earn money for comercials. So if you already got a lot of spam, you need to use filters. In every e-mail software are some filters. One of them are better end other are worser, but they are working. With these you can block almost all spam at your e-mail. The filter will delete detected spam automaticaly. But there is some problems, sometimes filter delete a mail from your friend, witch is not spam. So you need to be cearefull, then selecting filter options.

There is some statistic of the spam:

In last yeare was about 200 billion spams per day. So it's realy a lot of. The 97% of e-mails are unwanted. These kind of high numbers in the worldwide productivity cost of spam has been estimated to be $50 billion in 2005.

References:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam

Emoticons :O

In the last lecture there was a mention about emoticons and how they are used to add "emotions" to text-based conversation. This was of course something I had known before and sometimes I use them myself. But the fact that it was mentioned now made me search for more information about them.

It was a bit of surprise that emoticons are not at all offsprings of computer age, but they have been used in text-based conversation for a long time. This made me feel a bit silly, because of course text-based conversation has been there for a long time before computers were ever invented for example in telegrams and morse code[1].

There has been a lot of research about emoticons and agreements have been made to agree which emoticons means what emotion. :-) was for example proposed by Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University in a message on 19th September 1982[2] to sequence for joke markers. Some people have even filed and registered emoticons as trademarks and are selling licenses for the rights to use them, which sounds to me as crazy as the one Spanish woman who claims to own the sun.

But the true meaning of emoticons is to express writer´s mood to the reader or alert the responder to the temper of a statement[4]. I think emoticons have a place in the written text, because sometimes you just have to add that little something to make out your point, whether it is sarcasm or you really wan´t to share true joy with your friend.

But still one thing makes me wonder... Why there are no emoticons in books?

[1]Gajadhar, Joan & Green, John (17 July 2003) (PDF). An Analysis of Nonverbal Communication in an Online Chat Group. The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand. http://www.openpolytechnic.ac.nz/static/pdf/research/res_wp203gajadharj1.pdf.
[2]Fahlman, Scott. Website reconstruction http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm
[3]Tavaramerkkilehti (National Board of Patents and Registration of Finland) (10): 27–28
[4]Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon#cite_note-30. Cited 28.01.2011.

Asynchronus groupware success

Asynchronus groupware is the type of groupware applications in which the user collaborate with each other by accessing the shared collection of objetc any time , from any place. The users do not need to collaborate with each other in real time. Due to this, there has always been a discussion to compare the efficiency of asynchronus and synchronus groupware in terms of different attributes including time consumption, efficiency, quality output and more.

There has been researches conducted and it has been shown that asynchronus groupware is more efficient and saves time, cost and also results in an output that otherwise would not be possible with synchronus groupware strategy.

It has also been said, however, that for some important high-level organizational changes, synchronus groupware needs to be the important part as it brings all the parties on a platform at the same time, and so reduces the chances of future conflicts.

Researchers have also proposed different methodologies to support asynchronus systems.

For further study of the impact of asynchronus groupware and how it can be best used, these papers are a good source.

http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/bmcqueen/WEBDOCS/pubs/msrr9614.pdf

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/360000/358972/p69-preguica.pdf?key1=358972&key2=4064316921&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=6949724&CFTOKEN=39355660

http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/bmcqueen/WEBDOCS/pubs/icis96.pdf

Media Richness Theory and the Strange Case of Mobile Video Calls

According to the media richness theory [1], video conferencing, including mobile video calls, transmits more information and communication cues than voice calls. The theory posits that video calls should be more efficient for ambiguous communication tasks. It also suggests that higher social presence in video calls should imply greater immediacy and warmth of the communication.

Mobile video calls have been around several years now, without gaining the expected popularity. It remains to be seen if this can be changed by reinventing the wheel. However, many of the inherent problems in mobile video calls are now well understood. In the following, I summarize the main problems identified and discussed by O'Hara et al.  [2]:

Social context and privacy issues

• Loud speaker usage, others can hear the conversation
• Users tend to speak louder
• Visibility of display
• Social acceptability - it looks weird to talk to your phone
• Lack of prior knowledge of the recipient context
• Outsiders are unwillingly captured by video or audio

Too much information

• More difficult to withhold information
• Increased self-consciousness - how do I look?
• Strange camera angle showing straight up your nose

Let's forget the privacy issues for now, assuming that both participants are in private contexts. Let's also not concentrate on the Mum effect and delivering bad news (see [3] for discussion). Here are the questions I'm after: Are the benefits of media richness overshadowed by the increased self-consciousness and ugly camera angle? Are there other factors affecting the low popularity of video calls? And finally, which communication medium would you prefer (see the poll)?

Final results of the poll:

Would you prefer video calls over voice calls in the following communication tasks:

Calling your grandma for a casual conversation	5 (55%)
Planning a coursework with a student you don't know	2 (22%)
Calling your phone operator regarding confusion in your phone bills	1 (11%)
Asking a colleague for an advice	3 (33%)
None of the above	4 (44%)

[1] Daft, R.L. & Lengel, R.H. 1986. Organizational information requirements, media richness and structural design. Management Science 32(5), 554-571.

[2] O'Hara, K., Black, A., & Lipson, M. 2006. Everyday practices with mobile video telephony. In Proceedings of CHI '06, 871-880.

[3] Sussman & Sproull. 1999. Straight talk: delivering bad news through electronic communication. Information Systems Research 10:2, 150-166.

Emotion recognition in text-based communication

As it was mentioned in the lecture slides, textual communication is more akin to misunderstandings. I discuss about this in the point of view of expressing and understanding emotions.

Many emotions can be easily expressed and identified in face-to-face communication by nonverbal behavior, like facial expressions [1]. When there is no possibility to see the person you are communicating with, it might be hard to recognize how and in which tone he or she expresses a matter, I think. Some people use lots of emoticons and that gives good clues about their feelings, in my opinion. Some people tend to just give a terse, one-work answers, and that way recognition of the emotion is left to the others in communication situation.

It is stated in the study of Hancock et al., which studied expressing positive and negative emotions in text-based communication, that person who expresses positive affect uses more words and punctuation. I recognize myself here: I tend to think that it is nice and polite if  punctuation is used for example in text messages and emails. In instant messaging on the other hand, it is not that important for me.

In my opinion a huge influencer for misunderstandings is the situation where the textual communication is happening. In instant messaging situations for example, it is more common to give short replys and in email a more precise answers are expected, at least in my opinion. Also it depends to who your message is sent. It was discussed and some opinions were shared at the lecture, that email suited better for official situations and instant messaging for more relaxed situations. Maybe it is more common that you know who you are communicating with in instant messaging situations and that way more relaxed and shorter discussion is ok and nobody takes that offencive.

I understand that it's easier to deliver bad news by email than face-to-face, like Sussman and Sproull's study reveal. But I think that this just shows that how different a matter can feel in text-based communication than in face-to-face. One might feel so sorry and sad when delivering bad news, but in text-based communication this emotion could be easily hidden.

The data in the study of Hancock et al. revealed that participants were able detect the emotions that their partners expressed. I think, that yes it might be easy to think that you recognize how other expresses his/her matter, but sometimes your own imagination distort the words and you get all wrong. So I think I will keep on putting those emoticons and using punctuation in my text-based communication, that I'm more likely to express my true emotions in those situations, understandably.


Reference:

[1] Jeffrey T. Hancock, Christopher Landrigan, Courtney Silver, Expressing emotions in textual conversation. Proceeding CHI '07 Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 2007. Available on the web

[2] Sussman & Sproull, Straight talk: delivering bad news through electronic communication. Information Systems Research 10:2, June 1999, 150-166.

Known and anonymous GW users

Two well-known groupware taxonomies were introduced during our first lecture [1], [2]. Jarmo discussed the taxonomies in his blog post, and pointed out that there's need for more categories or refinement in order to get a better insight to GW. Jarno referred to a new expansion to the original taxonomies by Penichet et al [3].

So, these matrices help us to characterize the nature of groupware by their time, place, function, and also by the aspect of know or unknown. The question I've been wondering is: How about the members of the group? And their identity – or anonimity? How does that affect the use of GW?

Does a persons behaviour change while using groupware anonymously? Surely it does. A quick example of this is the edit wars in Wikipedia (the example was easy to find after reading TuomasH's blog post). Wikipedia also has protected articles which are typically protected because of vandalism. Semi-protected sites are blocked from anonymous users and protection is usually used for articles that have a pattern of heavy sustained vandalism [4].

Grudin's Challenge 3 for groupware is: Disruption of Social Processes [5]. I'd like to point out that groupware can also change the social processes and taboos. Social norms can be different between interaction of know and unknown users. Anonymity gives new freedom and people can, if they want to, take less responsibility for their doings. The only thing that can be done to a malevolent Wikipedia user is to block their ip-address or account. There is no fear of personal embarrassment nor any further sanctions. (Of course, anonymity can also have advantages in other groupware cases.) Consequently maybe a fourth dimension could be added to time-space-function matrix; are the persons using the groupware known or unknown to each other.

References:

1. Clarence A. Ellis, Simon J. Gibbs, Gail L. Rein. Groupware: some issues and experiences. Comm. ACM 34, 1 (Jan. 1991), 38-58.
2. Jonathan Grudin. CSCW: History and Focus, IEEE Computer 27, 5, 19-26.
3. V.M.R. Penichet, I. Marin, J.A. Gallud, M.D. Lozano, R. Tesoriero. A Classification Method for CSCW Systems. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 168 (2007), 237–247.
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy
5. Grudin, J. 1994. Groupware and social dynamics: eight challenges for developers. In CACM vol 37. No. 1

Skype like tool for Groupware

Now Skype is one of the most popular tool to comunicate between people. If we look at Grudin’s Time Space Matrix it will be at different places, know end same tame place. So I think that Skype is real great tool for groupware.

In Skype you can make a group video or telephone conference. I’s very easy to do that. For that you only need internet connection, webcam end handset. If you don’t have webcam you still can join to conference. Then you can saw other people, but others can only hear you, but now every laptop, netbook end even mobile phones has cameras end is ready for using Skype, so in that case Skype can take place on different places, unknown end same tame in Grudin’s Time Space Matrix. Also in Skype you can send or get files during conference.

Skype is safe for your information then sending files or during conversation, because it use really good encryption method end nobody can’t listen you conversation. So in that case is good for business conference.

I think that Skype is really good tool for groupware, because with it you really can do almost everything.

Blogs – what are they?

Because this is my first blog entry ever I thought about familiarizing myself first about what blogs actually are?




















The term blog is shortening from the word weblog, which means a web page where the author publishes content in journal format [1]. Blogs are one of the oldest forms of Social Media and Kaplan and Haelein describe them as “Social Media equivalent of personal web pages” [2].

What makes blogs then so different from personal web pages? As Kaplan and Haelein described before, blogs have that Social Media aspect that personal web pages normally don´t have. Blogs are organized by date, which makes them easy to read and diary like. Usually blogs are dealing with author´s life in general and/or his private interests and they include very personal perspective on the topic discussed. This personal approach captivates readers and creates conversation around the topic discussed – this is the social aspect. Although blogs allow discussion between the author and readers, it´s first mission is to let others see what the author has to say – as in monologue [1].

There are as many different types of blogs as there are people writing them. Blogs can be managed by one person or groups of people and also as the content differs, so does the way that content is delivered or written [3] (for example video blogs or photoblogs).

Now what did I learn about blogs?

1. it´s personal and your personality should be seen in the text.
2. it´s monologue and you don´t have to give a damn about what kind of reactions your text causes.
3. Be creative. If writing is not your thing use photos, videos, music etc.
4. Enjoy expressing yourself!
   

References:
[1] Buss, Anna ja Strauss, Nancy. Online Community Handbook: Building Your Business and Brand on the Web. (2009). 7-8
[2] Kaplan, Andreas ja M, Haenlein. Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons, (2010). 1
[3] Wikipedia. Blog. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog 21.01.2011

Types of Groupware Applications

Computers, since their invention, have been employed to increase human productivity and groupware is an effort towards that goal. The question is not what belongs to groupware solution but rather how people use groupware and why? what are the challenges for human working together in a virtual space?

Based on this, a vriety of groupware applications have come on different definitions of what groupware should do. In different types of groupware applications, important concepts are workflow focus, communication focus, what-you-see-is-what-i-see (WYSIWIS), synchronus (real-time) and asynchronus (content repository). Groupware applications may represent a combination of any or all of these criteria.

Scalia and Sackmary have divided groupware applications in three categories based on their complexity: E-mail and electronic bulletin boards, computer conferences and group decision support systems.

For a successful groupware application, these dimensions should tailor to the task that is to be completed in the CSCW environment.

References:
Scalia, Lynne M., & Sackmary, Benjamin. (1996). Groupware and computer supported cooperative work in the college classroom. Business Communication Quarterly 59(4).

Groupware taxonomies

What is groupware? To answer this question and to provide insight in different types of GW, our first lecture introduced two classical GW taxonomies. While I recognize their significance, I was not completely happy with the proposed taxonomies. So I decided to dig deeper.

Probably the most well-known taxonomy is the time-space matrix proposed by Ellis et al. in 1991 [1]. It divides both temporal and spatial dimensions in two categories: same and different. For example, in face-to-face meeting participants are interacting same time in the same place. This taxonomy was refined by Grudin [2] by dividing the "different" category further in  two parts: predictable and unpredictable. This allowed highlighting the difference for example between e-mail (different places, predictable) and bulletin boards (different places, unpredictable). Simple enough.

Or is it? As Nina discussed in her previous blog post, Google Docs could fit in all time-space categories. Because the categories are often overlapping, the taxonomies are not very useful in identifying different types of GW. Another problem with the taxonomies is inconsistency. The time-space classification of GW tools can change over time, as has happened with e-mail due to modern smart phones. Also, e-mail can be used even in the same physical space. I often send e-mails to co-workers who sit in the same room. This problem highlights an important aspect of e-mail: it serves many functions.

Recently, Penichet et al. proposed a new taxonomy for GW [3]. It expands the original time-space matrix by adding function as a third dimension. The function categories are information sharing, communication and coordination. The third dimension provides an interesting insight to e-mail: communication is typically between different locations, but coordination and information sharing are space independent.

References:

1. Clarence A. Ellis, Simon J. Gibbs, Gail L. Rein. Groupware: some issues and experiences. Comm. ACM 34, 1 (Jan. 1991), 38-58.
   
2. Jonathan Grudin. CSCW: History and Focus, IEEE Computer 27, 5, 19-26.
3. V.M.R. Penichet, I. Marin, J.A. Gallud, M.D. Lozano, R. Tesoriero. A Classification Method for CSCW Systems. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 168 (2007), 237–247.

Google Docs

Google Docs is a free tool for document creating and editing and many more. It supports collaboration with other users and all the document handling can be done online. Documents are saved to Google's own servers and that way the documents are always accessible in the web interface. Documents can be edited and opened by many users at the same time. Besides online, documents can also be saved to users own computer in variety of formats. It is also possible to import documents to Google Docs. There is also a mobile application available.

If we look at Grudin's Time Space Matrix I think that Google Docs would fit in every category. Of course computer or phone and internet access are needed, but using Google Docs isn't dependable on time or place. 

I haven't used Google Docs many times, but in one school project it was very useful since we weren't able to meet with our group so often. We used Google docs in writing different documents and sharing pictures of user interfaces that we had drawn. It was useful that there was no need to send edited documents by email and it was easier to manage different versions. What are your experiences about Google Docs?

References:

Jonathan Grudin, CSCW: History and Focus, IEEE Computer 27, 5, 19-26. DOI

Google 2011. Google Docs Tour. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour1.html

GroupKit

Introduction : Groupkit is a groupware development toolkit extension for Tcl/Tk(Tool command language) to make groupware application and prototypes Quickly and easily.It is helpful for researchers to rapidly develop groupware prototypes and to perform experiments on those.

Working : There are different processes those works in groupkit. The central process is the registrar which keeps track of the happenings. Each user has session manager which connects to the registrar. The session managers are responsible here to create conferences as a separate process. The task of groupkit is to open network connection between processes.

Development facts:

• Session manager is autonomous component and need not to be included in the development process.

• Groupkit environment data structure is open to the developer to get information about conference.

• Synchronization of groupkit conferences is possible through multicast remote procedure calls.

• Widgets has been provided by the groupkit to attach with the application with the tools useful for the end users.

• Event handling mechanisms are available with groupkit.

Reference:

[Rossman and Greenberg,1996]- ”Building real-time groupware with GroupKit, a groupware toolkit”.