Wk9 ConvoCons r Cool 4 Collaboration

           Article
            In this article the researchers (Oren and Gilbert) examined the ability of ConvoCons (conversational icons) to enhance “social affinity, or convergence of thoughts, actions or ideas”, in distributed groups. ConvoCons are basically small popup windows that serve as intergroup conversation pieces. Similar to reminder icons that would popup from an email server, they show up on top of the working field, but unlike other popups they cannot be closed or ignored and go away after a set period on their own. In this study the researchers had distributed dyads work on a cognitive task together. For the first 1/3-1/2 of the experimental time ConvoCons popped up with a portion of a Laffy-Taffy style joke and were designed to indicate that their partner may have the other half of the riddle. It is important to note that prior research has shown that the reduction in productivity caused by them distracting workers is not statistically significant.

            The researchers found in their experiments that the ConvoCons did serve to create more affinity. The results were front loaded over the task duration; meaning that in the initial working time there was a higher level of interaction, as much as 35%, between participants. It then decreased to about the same level as those w/o ConvoCons and turned back up to about 25% more affinity by the end of the task duration. They did find that the production efficiency cost of this in the group interaction was slightly significant, and suggest that for tasks that need to be completed quickly creating affinity may be bad-but for creative tasks when you want to create affinity they seem to do the trick.

            It was interesting to see how something so seemingly simple as the sharing of jokes between distributed workers improve affinity.  For me this article had significance in explaining how to handle a situation that would arise given a melding of the Hinds and Mortensen paper and the Majchrzak, Jarvenpaa, and Hollingshead paper. Oftentimes disaster relief can come from multiple groups that are distributed globally. I like to use the Mormons as examples of volunteers (they are crazy about helping out…) They have members all over the world, and when a disaster strikes in one area they are quick to mobilize aid groups that comprise of distributed teams. Perhaps there is an earthquake in Chile and basic supplies are needed. American volunteers will meet at local chapels and bring together goods to be shipped. They will package them in family sized allotments and send them on their way to Chile. The supplies arrive and need to be distributed to victims and their needs to be some communication of distribution tactics between the American organizers and the field team (packaging tactics for distribution may not be intuitive to the field volunteers, this would be implicit knowledge for those of you who have read my 540 paper!). To accomplish this it is my assumption that the church relies on its network of lay ministers who have commonalities which should be good for affinity, but this could substantially be improved if a sort of ConvoCon was implemented. Topics could range from historical church trivia to specialized knowledge that only one member of the group has (and perhaps if parties went into the work environment aware of ConvoCons they could even design their own.)

            A lot of local disaster relief agencies will have some sort of hand out for volunteers—like t-shirts for example. An interesting idea to improve group affinity may be to print a ConvoCon on the back of a t-shirt and have an attached tag w/the answer. Field workers would have something positive to talk about during work removing their focus from the negative effects of the disaster and improve affinity (tests would need to be conducted regarding efficiency, but it seems novel and fun if nothing else…) Long story short ConvoCons are intriguing to me, and at the very least practical ways to tackle the ‘where’s the affinity’ problem of distributed groups.

Oren, M. M. & Gilbert, S., (2012). Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on computer supported cooperative work - CSCW '12. Seattle, Washington, USA: ACM

Hinds, P. H., and Mortensen, M. (2005) Understanding Conflict in Geographically Distributed Teams: The Moderating Effects of Shared Identity, Shared Context, and Spontaneous Communication. Organization Science, 16, pp. 290-307

Majcharzak, A., Jarvenpaa, S., and Hollingshead, A. (2007) Coordinating Expertise Among Emergent Groups Responding to Disasters, Organization Science, Vol. 18 No. 1, pp.147-161