netWORK

1. netWORK • Bonnie A. Nardi • AT&T Labs-West • nardi@research.att.com • www.best.com/~nardi/default.html

2. This Talk • the NetWORK Study • ContactMap

3. The usual perspective: “Teams” • Assumptions about workers: • We know who’s on the team, there is stability • Shared culture and understandings: it’s cozy, predictable, familiar.... • Resources for workers reside within well-structured organizations where departments have stable, predictable functions • The “team” is a home base from which resources in other stable teams in the organization are accessed. • Role-based: figure out roles in the organization The Home Team

4. Customers and Clients What the World Really Looks Like:Working Across Organizational Boundaries Contractors Rest of organization Consultants Home Team Colleagues in Other Organizations Venture Capital Funding Agencies Vendors Outsourced service providers

5. Many boundaries to cross, and also: • Constant change in organizations • downsizing, merging, partnering, reorging, outsourcing…. • People’s personal social networks important under these conditions of boundary crossing and change • anchors in people’s worklives, careers • A key task in the new economy is managing one’s own personal social network: “netWORK” • Networking isn’t new (Webster’s 1940) but intensified in today’s economy

7. The netWORK Study: Ethnographic Study of Communication Activity Across Organizational Boundaries • Beyond teams • Customer-vendor relationships • Partnering, alliances across companies • Facilitators between and within organizations, e.g., tech transfer • High level managers • Experts, e.g., patent attorneys, reference librarians, HR • Contractors, consultants

8. Methods • Lengthy open-ended in-depth audiotaped interviews in workplaces • 1000 pages transcript • Questions: • What do you do here? • Who do you do it with? • What technologies do you use? • Observations in workplaces

9. Sample: 22 People in 12 companies • Public relations • Law • Management • Creative media (Web design, commercials) • High tech • Telecommunications • Technically savvy, use lots of different kinds of technology

10. From the Interviews: Four Key netWORK tasks • Task #1: Creating a social network • Task #2: Maintaining a social network • Task # 3: Activating a social network • Task # 4: Managing own presence in a social network • All requires deliberate effort: it’s WORK!

11. Invisible Work • netWORK is a kind of invisible, unaccounted-for work • not in performance evaluations, workflow diagrams, timesheets, social science theories... • But workers have to devote time and energy to it • Publications: • A Web on the Wind: The Structure of Invisible Work. A Special issue of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Bonnie A. Nardi and Yrjö Engeström, guest editors. 1999. • A Networker’s Work is Never Done: Joint Work in Intensional Networks. B. Nardi, S. Whittaker, H. Schwarz. Forthcoming in CSCW. • Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart. Bonnie A. Nardi, Vicki O’Day, MIT Press, 1999.

12. MIT Press, 1999

13. Task #1: Creating a network • Constantly networking

14. Task #2: Maintaining a network, keeping in touch • Properties of Personal Social Networks • Networks always get larger, never smaller (though nodes may lie dormant) • Network as a social resource is a moving target • Who are they? • Where are they? • What are they doing? • (everything changes fast, all the time)

15. Task # 3: Activating a network • Activate specific nodes in the network when joint work must be done • Media choice: not just affordances (e.g., voice on phone, record of messages with email) • Social Factors: • recipient preferences • how well you know someone (given a particular comm task) • special importance of face to face

16. Invest in airline stock, or, Why face to face isn’t going away • High bandwidth (lots of information) but what else: • Social (vs information) factors: • Shared experience in a common space in a meaningful real world event • The inimitable presence of the body • “Bonding” • Showing commitment • Not just information richness, but relationship development (at a primate level?)

18. Task # 4: Managing presence in the network • Because of technology, we are expected to be responsive, available and accountable for work, anytime, anywhere • But: not easy to maintain zones of privacy and uninterrupted time for certain kinds of work, leisure, family. • “Islanding” behaviors • Disconnecting, selectively, for periods of time from the social network

19. Why netWORK? • Personal social networks are interfaces to information and laborunder conditions of rapid change and fewer organizational resources • information gathering (expertise, advice, recommendations, late-breaking news) • task completionin large, changeful organizations (who knows how to expedite a milestones-based contract, backdate dental benefits, find those disappearing stock options?) • labor recruitment: finding exactly the right person for a job (including contractors, consultants, interns,temporary employees...) • Greg: [talking about contractors he used]:Yeah, and half of ‘em have worked here and I know them personally and I know their strengths and weaknesses. And so I say, “Well, this guy can really draw guys in tights, you know, superheroes, and this guy’s really good with, you know, pigs with no pants.” And usually, it’s one or the other.Usually people are specialized.

20. Speaking of Labor Recruitment: The netWORK Study and ContactMap • Work undertaken jointly with • Steve Whittaker - AT&T Labs-Research - Florham Park, NJ • Gary Zamchick - AT& T Labs-Research - New York City • Heinrich Schwarz - Science, Society and Technology, MIT • Erin Bradner - University of California, Irvine • John Hainsworth, Princeton University • Mike Creech, Jeff Johnson, independent consultants in Silicon Valley • Perspectives: psychology, anthropology, computer science, art

21. What can we as designers do to support netWORK? • Recognize the invisible work of netWORK (diminishing of old supports in the role-based team world) • “[The particularism] of social networks is expensive compared with the universalism [of preordained organizational roles] because it requires tracking individualsrather than categories and requires long relationships, extensive record keeping, and the like, all of which are expensive.” Heimer, 1992 • With our ethnographic work, we know exactly what these expensive problems are.

22. ContactMap Addresses these netWORK Problems: • Knowing the network (who people are, their details, current whereabouts and activities) • create, activate • Using multiple communication media easily • maintain, activate • Remembering task status • maintain, activate • Getting awareness information for non-colocated contacts • maintain, activate • Controlling own presence in our social network- fine-grained ways to show availability • no one is always 24/7: need fine-grained availability • control ownpresence

23. Our Solution to these Problems • Redesign the desktop to reflect people in user’s social network rather than machine-centric forms such as lists, hierarchies, folders • (later other devices) • Hang functionality off a visualization of the user’s social network • individuals, groups: people-centric • Have a common interface for communication and information tasks • Once there is a depiction of nodes in the network, communication and information functions can all be organized around those nodes.

26. For Each Node (Individual or Group): • Initiate communications • click to dial • email • instant messaging • fax.... • Nodes have knowledge of themselves: instruct ContactMap to initiate a communication (more agent-like). • See reminders and task status • See availability • track keyboard, mouse, phone activity for “buddies” • See documents associated with individuals or groups • ContactMap seeds itself with an analysis of user’s email • Written in Java 1.1

27. Current User Testing Efforts • Using the prototype, learn more about social networks • How big? • How many clusters? • Semantics of clusters? • How many singletons? • People in multiple clusters? • Try to do some automatic clustering, at least as bootstrapping (e.g., domain names, ad hoc groups)

28. Conclusion • Most desktop redesigns orient to documents • Lifestreams (product from Yale research) • Presto (Xerox PARC) • but cell phones, pagers, pdas, computers are about communication • ContactMap brings together documents and communication via a visualization of the user’s personal social network, to try out people-centric designs for the next generation of user interfaces.

29. Thank you,