ECIS 2014 Call for Papers

ECIS is the top European Information Systems conference, run under the auspices of the Association for Information Systems (AIS).

ECIS 2014: Digital Work, Digital Life
The next annual ECIS conference will take place from 9 till 11 June in Tel-Aviv, Israel
(an invitation from Chrisanthi Avgerou and Dov Te’eni, co-chairs...)
This year we invite the following types of submissions:

• Complete research papers
• Research-in-Progress papers
• Panels
• Teaching cases
• Prototypes that will be demonstrated at the conference

ECIS will also host an industry stream, with presentations from IT executives and professionals and visits to innovative Israeli digital firms.
The ECIS 2014 Doctoral Consortium will be held from 6 till 8 June. We encourage institutions from Europe, Middle East and Africa to nominate doctoral candidates who would benefit from participating in a vibrant international academic research development event.
And there is still an opportunity to propose pre-conference workshops and tutorials.

Deadlines
Pre-conference events proposals: 1 November, 2013
Complete papers, Research-in-Progress, Teaching cases and Prototypes: submission begins on 1 November, 2013; Deadline Date: 8 December, 2013
Panel submission deadline: 5 March, 2014

For more information, please visit the ECIS 2014 website at http://ecis2014.eu/

COOP 2014 call for papers

Eleventh International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems
27-30 May , 2014
Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société Sud-Est
Nice, France
http://coop2014.wordpress.com

******* Important dates ********
- 8 November 2013 Deadline for paper submissions
- 1 February 2014 Notification of acceptance/rejection
- 15 February 2014 Camera ready Papers
- 27-30 May 2014 COOP 2014 conference in Nice

****** Introduction ************
COOP is one of the key European conferences on Cooperative Systems, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Collaborative Computing and is affiliated to EUSSET - the European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies.

COOP 2014 will be the eleventh edition of the biennial COOP conference and will take place in Nice, France and hosted by the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société Sud-Est.

Historically, COOP brought together the French tradition in Cognitive Ergonomics and the European tradition of CSCW. However, while this history is important, the focus of COOP has developed over the last few conferences. It now embraces a wider set of research questions on technologies and related issues within social, organisational and societal settings. The conference aims to bring together researchers and practitioners who contribute to the design, assessment and analysis of cooperative systems and their integration in organizations, public venues and other settings. The COOP conferences promote the idea that cooperative systems design ideally requires a deep understanding of collective activities, involving both artifacts and social practices, within a given in context.

In keeping with the conference’s tradition, COOP 2014 will take place in an Intimate setting, facilitating in-depth discussion and feedback in a multi-disciplinary environment. As well as welcoming back experienced researchers, academics and practitioners we are keen to embrace a wider research community. We welcome different perspectives from those doing relevant work who have not been to COOP before and we are paying special attention to encouraging up-and-coming researchers within the community with some specially designed features within the programme.

Contributions are solicited from a wide range of domains contributing to the fields of cooperative systems design and evaluation: CSCW, HCI, Information Systems, social and collaborative media, multi-agent systems, organizational and management sciences, sociology, psychology, anthropology, ergonomics, design, etc.

COOP 2014 will feature a single-track program of high-quality research papers, including a session dedicated to the work of early-career researchers, a workshops and masterclasses track and a Doctoral Colloquium.

For the “Early Career Researchers Track”, we encourage early career researchers who wish to publish their work and receive in depth-feedback (PhD students close to completion, < 3 years post-doc experience, etc.) to submit to the track, which will constitute of a special paper session in the main conference program. The papers will be included in the main conference proceedings.

********* Submissions **********
Accepted papers will be included in a book of proceedings published by Springer, and will be indexed in the ACM digital library

Full papers must be no longer than 16 pages and formatted according to the Springer template: http://www.springer.com/authors/book+authors?SGWID=0-154102-12-417900-0

Papers submissions will take place via Easychair and the submission system will go live in the near future.

*****Other Submission Categories*****
Submission requirements and deadlines to be announced soon for:
Workshops
Masterclasses
Doctoral Colloquium

The Eagle Project and its context

The broader commercial setting was the looming backdrop against which West constructed a mythology for the project; Castro's personality, DEC's VAX, the FHP (Fountainhead Project). Limited resources were made available, a core team of less than 30 engineers, competition for scarce resources within Data General. West carefully established emotional distance between himself and the team, with Rosemarie, Alsing and Rasala working as go-betweens.

The project, like all projects, was subject to various constraints, and it employed and succeeded based on a number of key enabling factors. The Eagle project had to satisfy some key requirements

1. Support old 16 bit software.
2. Be a 32 bit machine.
3. Do 1 & 2 at the same time (no mode bit).
4. Use a limited number of boards

The eventual design also had to be innovative (not a kludge or a bag on an Eclipse) in order that West could entice other engineers to work on it. The architect, Wallach eventually found some elegance in its design, an innovative Ring System for the CPU architecture, even though he had to allow space for EGO's instruction set within his "wonderful - 'super' - instruction set." p82

West's management method, if it was one - that Alsing and Rasala went along with - was wryly referred to as the "Mushroom Method".
The project teams were organised roughly in two, reflecting two differing professional foci and skills: the Hardy Boys and the Micro Kids.

The basement area at Westborough became a kind of territory, the boundaries of which defined who could be an insider and who were outsiders. Even within its own boundaries the Eagle project evinced marked divisions, delineating hierarchy and focus, between the Hardy Boys and the Micro Kids, between new hires and old hands, between people who had worked on other projects in DG and those to whom the Eagle project was their only experience. The basement space itself was divided into open spaces and closed spaces; for example West and Alsing had their own offices, with doors that could shut! The others were spread among sprawling cubicles. The hierarchies and non-hierarchies, some formal, many informal, coexisted somehow. Experience defined membership. Signing-on was a crucial transition between being a DG employee and being a member of the Eagle team. The whole team and the separate sub-teams had their own rites of passage. Membership and status were evident over time as each person underwent tests of strength like playing Adventure through to the end, responding to the "Tube Wars", hacking into Alsing's encrypted file. 

Notes: Have a look at the article on Wired "O, Engineers" (8.12 link).

Getting stuck in a problem

Getting stuck, stuck in a problem, is how creative problem solving occurs. The article by Kendra Shimmell underscores the value of us directly engaging deeply with a problem with all its messy complications, with no certainty even that we will solve it, in order to arrive at our own understanding or solutions.

"Learning by Design: It's Not What You Know, But How You Think" by Kendra Shimmell

The approach Shimmell describes is the complete antithesis of rote learning, or learning off answer 'patterns' to questions and challenges posed in traditional educational settings. Rather than dealing with, indeed training ourselves for, bounded well-known solvable challenges, real design is done amidst the messy uncertainty of possibly evolving contexts, anxiety, doubt and the unknown.

A certain quantum of bravery (and ignorance) is needed, along with hard slog, inspiration and serendipity.

Objects of development

MAKING OUR DIGITAL LIVES
The modern era is increasingly delineated by a ‘digital life’ or form of engagement that entwines complexly with our existence in a physical world. IT and high tech use-production is seen as the enabling force for overcoming immobilities. They are implicated in transforming our social or organizational interactions and generate heightened perceptions of speed, movement, presence, both global and local awareness, and interconnectedness. We introduce the idea of high tech use-production to try to overcome the idea that these transformations result from push processes originating in the development centre.

Furthermore, our capability to successfully create and utilise high tech products is linked with a variety of challenges across a number of diverse domains; organisational theory and sociology for management and societal use patterns; economics and systems theory to understand aggregate behaviour; physiology, psychology and ethnography to understand use factors and design for finished products; maths, materials, and physics, for microprocessor and computational innovation.

Let’s take a closer look at the objects of software, the expressive environment for software engineers. The following illustrations are representations of different aspects of a not untypical digital product (Figure below). In this case a rendered simulation of an apartment, a wireframe model of the same scene, the software services for configuring the simulation, an XML description of objects present in the simulation, the build log for compiling the simulation and some source code for one of the objects. Furthermore there are many more layers of source and representation with their related technologies associated with this particular product.


Figure Images from Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2010

These are all ‘representations of’ and ‘resources for’ an interleaved complexly reinforcing structure that can be un-picked or un-packed right down to single lines of code. The point of this presentation is to illustrate the argument that “developers solve problems at all levels, between the ‘whole project level’ and the ‘one line of code’ level (and everything in between.” (Raccoon, 1995)


Figure Layered perspective of digital production

The many layers of digital production are interleaved and interconnected from the single line of code right through to the whole project as Raccoon (1995) suggests. This may account for both the brittleness of digital systems and their complex resilience. The same work dynamic occurs across large and small teams, across large and small organisations, across the world and is an important aspect of the defining qualities of software development work. Significantly, the practice of high tech production also depends on creative and collaborative processes; software engineering is a designing profession regardless of whether the engineer is working on a version 1.0 project or maintaining an existing product through multiple generations and update releases. Yes crafting and designing software is a kind of individual contribution, a highly cognitive process, however in practice it is also a highly communicative and essentially social process comprised of many various interactions in a team.

MyWhat? Remember MySpace?

These articles address what often happens when a tech startup falls. The people move on and do great things in other companies. The demise of a firm may yet produce fruits in a process that might be labelled innovation recycling. The knowledge and learning produced gets reused as the firm's members enter other ventures.

The fertile soil of silicon fen (FT article - paywall may limit future access)

From Myspace's Ashes, Silicon Start-ups Rise (NYT article - paywall may limit future access)

As modern workplaces go Wordpress is at one end of a spectrum

Scott Berkun's book ``The Year Without Pants'' is an insider account of working in Wordpress, itselft a largely virtual endeavour.

"The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of work" (link) 

Iterative and incremental design/development: a brief history

Iterative and incremental design/development (IID) is often pitched as a radical and transforming change that high-tech development teams should evaluate and adopt. Anecdotally however over half of industrial high-tech systems development is actually done using sequential or waterfall style development.

And yet ``IID concepts have been and are a recommended practice by prominent software-engineering thought leaders of each decade, associated with many successful large projects, and recommended by standards boards.'' (Larman and Basili, 2003).

So why hasn't incremental iterative development become the norm over the last 50 years? Why hasn't sequential or waterfall style development disappeared from the scene in spite of its acknowledged shortcomings? Indeed waterfall style approaches seem to be remarkably resilient, as does the desire for iterative development. Are these different `styles' of management really so opposite? Surely they co-exist in practice and if so how?

References
CA Associates (2010) Balancing Agility with Governance (link)
Weinberg, G (2011) Iterative Development: Some History (link)
Larman, C. & Basili, V. R. (2003) Iterative and Incremental Development:A Brief History. Computer,36, 47-56.

Real Artists Ship!

Attributed to Steve Jobs, apparently as a rallying "threat" during the amazing effort that went into shipping the system and software for the first Apple Macintosh (see anecdotes on Folklore.org).
The quote was used in the script of "Pirates of Silicon Valley".

The Folklore.org website contains a wealth of history and anecdotes recounting the lives, successes, failures, relationships, surroundings and other detail from the earliest days of Apple. Dan Kottke's posts recall the early hardware work on the Apple, Lisa and Mac projects, with photos of some of the early wire-wrapped prototype boards developed. Folklore.org